TRIBUTE STORY

Jon DeVault
By Byron Pipes

Editor’s Note:  R. Byron Pipes was Director of CCM from 1978 to 1985.  A member of the National Academy of Engineering, he is currently the John Leighton Bray Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Purdue University.

Jon DeVault is “Mr. Carbon Fiber.”  No doubt the field of carbon fiber composites owes much of its current success to Jon DeVault, an untiring proponent for the development and commercialization of carbon fiber composites.

I first met him when he was the Hercules (Wilmington, Delaware) technical salesman for carbon fiber in 1971 and I was an engineer in the composites structures group at General Dynamics (Fort Worth, Texas). In the intervening 35 years, our paths have frequently crossed.



R. Byron Pipes
John Leighton Bray Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Purdue University

Jon hired one of my first composites students at Drexel University because the student had accomplished something unusual for the time by completing a composites course and fabricating a fiberglass beam element.  Hercules Inc. developed a carbon fiber facility in Magna, Utah, and Jon moved there to supervise that work.  When I moved to UD, Jon began to pay close attention to the development of CCM because his boss at the time was a University of Delaware graduate and because Hercules was located close to UD.

As the carbon fiber business at Hercules grew, Jon DeVault played an enormous role in the business success by meeting the growing needs of commercial and defense applications for carbon-fiber composites.  The Hercules carbon fiber at that time was a licensed product of Sumitomo Chemical of Japan, and soon, at Jon’s direction, Japanese researchers and students were joining CCM to learn more about the field.  We later discovered that Jon had moved the Japanese researchers to CCM because the DOD restrictions did not allow their participation within the Hercules facilities.

By the mid-1980’s, the carbon fiber business within Hercules played a major role in the corporate bottom line, and Jon was rewarded with more responsibility. Like all businesses, carbon fiber demand was cyclical in this early period, and the demand within DOD waned.  Jon was instrumental in providing technology and fiber to the emerging leisure product industry – namely, the golf shaft application.  Again, this application led to capacity expansions and ultimately Jon left Hercules to follow this new area of growth by joining Aldila. 

Next, he turned to the prepreg manufacturer Fiberite and served in a leadership capacity there until its acquisition by Cytec. It was at this time that Jon returned to Delaware and worked with CCM to develop new programs for advanced composites manufacturing under the sponsorship of DARPA. No doubt, CCM’s current level of expertise in defense systems application of composite materials received an enormous boost from the efforts of Jon DeVault.

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