BAE Systems, which has experience in personnel and vehicle armoring, has teamed with Composite Technologies, another company with advanced materials expertise for personnel, vehicle and physical asset protection, to pursue business opportunities in critical infrastructure protection.
The two companies have created the Infratection Solutions line of products and services aimed at protecting physical assets such as buildings, bridges and pipelines.
The technologies the team will bring to the market have multiple purposes in that they can offer customers’ infrastructure protection against terrorist attacks but also accidents and natural disasters, Scott Hartley, director of business development for BAE’s Infratection Solutions business, tells TR2.
The partnership between the two companies was actually launched last fall and they have submitted a bid with BAE as the prime for a potential multi-million dollar infrastructure protection project in North America that is expected to be awarded this summer or fall. BAE has also submitted another bid in the North American market, Hartley says.
For this project, which BAE hasn’t disclosed the end customer, BAE is licensing Composite Technologies’ patented material system which has a metallic component, a high performance ballistics concrete that has high compressive strength and the ability to flex, along with a way to combine these two materials and also design them to fit around infrastructure. Hartley says that even though BAE is licensing the materials Composite Technologies is still involved in the project as a key teammate.
BAE originally sought out Composite Technologies to explore the use of their material system for protecting vehicles and saw the various ways the company was applying the technology to infrastructure protection, Hartley says. The way the armor protection works in countering threats to vehicles is similar for infrastructure protection in terms of thinks like energy dissipation, it just has to be engineered differently for infrastructure, he says.
Moreover, the same principles apply for how something is protected, Hartley says. Body armor is typically used just to protect vital areas, vehicle armor the crew compartment and with physical infrastructure just the most critical components to provide increased resiliency or survivability, he says.
For Composite Technologies, BAE offers it a large organization and a global footprint that can get its technology wider distribution.
As for the market opportunities, Hartley says the international market is larger than the U.S. market for critical infrastructure protection. In the U.S. the bridge protection market is probably larger than overseas whereas international demand for building and pipeline protection is greater, he says.
BAE has not submitted any bids yet for international infrastructure protection projects, Hartley says.
Hartley says that the team has “cutting edge technology” for pipeline security that is first to market, which in itself is a challenge because the market has to be defined. However, there are opportunities, he says, “Just follow the news. Things are getting blown up.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Administration has already done a commercial survey of available technology for infrastructure protection that included testing of selected technologies and the BAE team performed the best, Hartley says. Essentially the point of the testing was to demonstrate to industry that there are technologies that can be used for infrastructure protection, he says.
In addition to the blast protection capabilities, BAE also offers its products and expertise in sensors, communications, video analytics and command and control as part of its infrastructure protection solutions, Hartley says.