Stop America from crumbling.

Pick up any newspaper and you can read about the U.S.'s crumbling infrastructure and about the increasingly threatened environment. Although these issues may seem unrelated, composite materials research is addressing both concerns.

Composites are materials that combine two or more components to yield characteristics superior to any one of the individual constituents. Strong and lightweight, composites offer resistance to corrosion and chemical attack, can be tailored to control heat expansion and vibration, and may be designed with non-magnetic and nonconductive properties. These characteristics make composites useful to civil engineers for construction and infrastructure rehabilitation.

Using concrete and steel to repair a degraded structure such as a bridge deck actually can cause its collapse, and traditional repair methods usually require closing the structure to traffic. Rehabilitation with composites is potentially quick and can be done with the structures kept open.

"I see a great need for new design methodologies that take into account the intricacies of the long-term behavior and performance of composites," says Vistasp Karbhari of the University of California, San Diego. He points out that, while civil engineering applications have brought about a demand for both improved and new materials, the...