Buildin, ,,,ommunity

JEWISH
WOMEN'S

FOUNDATION

OF METROPOLITAN DETROIT

Enhancing the Lives of Jewish Women

Announcing the Jewish Women's Foundation's

2011 GRANT CYCLE

The Jewish Women's Foundation of Metropolitan Detroit
is pleased to announce that it is now accepting requests for
funding in 2011.

LTU's Dr. Nabil Grace explains that the fire chamber for testing new

materials can reach 2300 degrees.

Innovation Station

Letters of Intent are due no later than noon on
February 15, 2011.

Lawrence Tech's engineering lab
earns an international reputation.

For a grant application timeline, guidelines, instructions and
forms, please visit our website: www.jewishdetroit.org/jwf and
click on 2011 Grant Guidelines and Instructions; or contact
Helen Katz, Director, at katz@jfmd.org , or 248.203.1483.

Keri Guten Cohen
Story Development Editor

The Jewish Women's Foundation of Metropolitan Detroit is dedicated to
expanding opportunities and enriching the lives of Jewish women and girls
through strategic grant making and education. The Foundation empowers
its Trustees as philanthropists, social advocates and leaders.

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16

January 6 • 2011

iN

tour of Dr. Nabil Grace's
Center for Innovative
Materials Research (CIMR)
lat Lawrence Technological University
in Southfield is a lesson in what sci-
ence can do to increase our safety, to
increase the strength and structural
materials of buildings and to foster
innovation worldwide.
The high-ceilinged space is filled
with mammoth state-of-the-art test-
ing equipment that does everything
from simulating highway traffic across
a full-scale test bridge made with no
conventional steel reinforcements, to
recreating test conditions that mimic
a Siberian winter, to administering
strength tests on lightwweight cables
made from new materials.
Grace, who is dean of LTU's College
of Engineering, showed off his lab last
month to about 20 members of the
Jewish community prior to a year-end
event celebrating Building Community,
an effort by the Jewish News and the
Chaldean News to bridge the Jewish
and Chaldean communities. LTU
hosted the social event.
Of particular interest to the group
was a U.S.-Israel workshop last July on
building sustainability co-organized
by Grace, two American researchers
and two research professors from the
Technion-Israel Institute of Science in
Haifa. Funded by a National Science
Foundation (NSF) grant, the workshop
at the Technion drew 50 researchers,
including some from Israel's Ben-
Gurion and Hebrew universities.
In his lab, Grace stood before a large
slab of concrete reinforced with a new
material and proclaimed that bridges
in the future will contain no steel and
be able to last for 100 years.

"We are the only university to build
the first highway bridge with no steel;
we anticipate you can build the bridge
once and walk away for 100 years:'
said Grace, a native of Egypt. "People
are coming from all over to look at it."
The bridge, called the Bridge Street
Bridge, was opened to the public in
2001. It is off Eight Mile Road, west
of Telegraph. The carbon-fiber bridge
contains $750,000 of sensors that will
collect data continuously every two
hours through 2015. A conventional
bridge was built next to it to provide
a comparison of wear and tear from
traffic and the elements.
Grace said in 2011 a bridge will be
built on Pembroke Avenue over the
Southfield Freeway in Detroit; in 2012,
two bridges will be built on Eight Mile
Road over Plum Creek, just east of
Telegraph in Detroit and Southfield.
Other research includes a massive
chamber able to hold a Humvee that
can simulate any climate, especially
freezing/thawing and blowing rain.
A huge fire chamber tests other
new materials, including an incred-
ibly strong, light carbon/glass-fiber
braided fabric developed at CIMR
and funded by the NSF that will help
buildings maintain structural strength
despite extremely high temperatures
that normally melt steel. The testing
simulates conditions that occurred
when the World Trade Center towers
were struck by airplanes during 9-11.
LTU researchers also are testing a
spray that can be applied to critical
building components to give people up
to six hours to exit a burning building.
As Grace made an impression on
his visitors with the high-tech innova-
tions, it was clear he relished working
with his students and fostering an
international reputation for innovation
for Detroit and Lawrence Tech. I

