By: Charles Romans
Carter County Times
Carter County native Donald P. Malone spent most of his professional career as a chemical engineer, and worked on, among other things, carbon fiber technology. Malone’s son, Donald M. Malone said his father began working on that process nearly twenty years ago while working as a research and development process chemical engineer at Ashland Oil.
When he retired, Malone still had an interest in improving the process, his son said.
“He continued to develop the carbon technologies with his own company with his partners. He continued to develop some ideas he had,” the younger Malone said. “And the various carbon technologies were some of those ideas. He saw a great use for this technology.”
“He didn’t invent the product because it was already being used,” he continued, explaining that “one use was in the tiles of the space shuttle.”
Malone pointed out that one drawback to carbon fiber technology was that it was incredibly expensive, as well as complicated and difficult. His father, he said, was working to refine a process that was much more cost effective.
“Where my father’s mind went was, ‘how do we do this better, faster, and cheaper’,” Malone said.
One of Donald P. Malone’s partners, Andy Tomaselli, went into greater detail on the processes that Malone and his partners were developing.
“The applications of this technology are really only limited by our imagination,” Tomaselli said. “There are thousands of applications for the finished product.”
Recently, the company which Tomaselli is a managing partner for, and of which Malone was a founding member, ACP Technologies, held a groundbreaking ceremony for a new plant that will be built at the Paul Coffey Industrial Park in Boyd County. ACP currently has a pilot plant location in Hitchins that produced four tons of material. The new site will be the first to use a continuous process for making the material Malone was instrumental in developing.
“It’s kind of the material that makes other material,” Tomaselli said. “The technology is catching up to what this product can actually do. It can be used as an insulator. It can be used as a conductor. And that alone is pretty significant.”
Typically, he said, material can be used as either an insulator or a conductor, but not both.
“It (the material) can be spun into carbon fibers and then woven into mats or other structural pieces. It can be made into a carbon foam, and the foam can then be used as an insulator or a conductor. There are all kinds of applications,” Tomaselli said. “Currently some of the applications are nosecones and the skirts for thrusters. Ultimately what it achieves is a very straight flight path because the materials do not warp due to heat. So, it’s a very high temperature application.”
The material, he said, can be used in all sorts of applications in space technology.
“Orbiting devices of all kinds use these products,” he said.
Another application, Tomaselli said, is in battery technology. One of the products the carbon material can be turned into is artificial graphite for batteries.
“But that is only one use of the material,” he said. “There is a global demand for artificial graphite.”
“The beautiful thing about the artificial graphite is that once someone who uses graphite makes the move to artificial graphite, they no longer have to process and treat the graphite,” Tomaselli continued. “So, it’s a cleaner product on their end and there are less steps involved, so ultimately it saves money.”
The process which yields this extremely versatile product with a wide range of potential applications was a team effort of which Donald P. Malone was a pivotal member. Though his son, Donald M. Malone, acknowledges his father’s achievements and refers to his father as nothing short of brilliant, there was much more to the man than the chemical engineer. The younger Malone respects his father’s achievements, but also respects the man his father was as well.
“He had a very fine sense of humor,” Malone said of his father. “He was unusual for an engineer in that he was an absolutely brilliant scientist, but he could relate to the common person. He could tell jokes, he could tell stories, he could speak at conventions, and he could speak at church. He could talk to a group of kids or talk to a group of scientists, and be just as entertaining to all involved.”
Malone said his father taught Sunday School class to high school students, and was an Elder in the Presbyterian Church. His father could do anything such as cook, Malone said, and although it was far from his favorite pursuit, he was also able to work on any automobile. One of Malone’s earliest memories, in fact, was of his father being underneath his 1972 Chevy Impala changing the Bendix on the car’s starter.
Donald P. Malone was a lot of things, a wearer of many hats, and this taught his son a healthy respect for doing the work and figuring things out.
“He insisted on practical as well as theoretical engineering,” Malone said.
That insistence on both gaining and being able to apply knowledge is something that the younger Malone embraced as his father’s legacy. That legacy lives on in both the process he helped refine, and the lives he touched along the way.
Contact the writer at charles@cartercountytimes.com
