Air Force Patent Holiday Offers Businesses Inventions For Free 

The Air Force Research Laboratory is offering free licenses for dozens of its patents, including some for secure microchips, 3D-printable “energetic compounds” for use as propellants or explosives, and powerful magnets that are less reliant on rare earth metals.

The Defense Department-wide “patent holiday” aims to encourage companies, especially startups and non-traditional defense suppliers, to leverage tax-payer funded research and turn it into useful products for warfighters.

Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Technology, Engineering and Product Support Janet Wolfson said the two-year “holiday” “is designed to … help you turn our R&D into your next big success, which in turn helps us solve our national security problems.”

AFRL pre-screened 25 featured patents for “known encumbrances,” such as existing license agreements or government uses, she said Jan 22. Another 89 patents “are on our standby list,” still requiring further review. All 114 patents represent technologies that the Air Force and Space Force need.

Among the available patents for license are: 

A patent family in secure logic devices, or microchips, guarded against “hardware Trojans… malicious modifications made to the hardware circuit during the manufacturing process that can get triggered remotely.” Hardware Trojans are very difficult to detect because they don’t impact the functionality or power usage of the chip. The patent randomizes and encodes some data operations on the chip. “By generating unpredictable logic states and strategically encoding data, this new approach creates an adaptive defense mechanism that disrupts potential attacks,” according to a DOD database.
A family of advanced materials patents for “energetic composites”—alloys that can be used as propellent or explosives. Uniquely, the ARFL-developed alloy is stable enough to be 3D printed, meaning shaped or other special explosive charges can be made easily and safely. 
The third patent is for powerful permanent magnets (PMs) for use in converting electricity into mechanical movement, or vice versa, for motors and related applications. AFRL developed a method for making these magnets that requires much less of the scarce minerals known as rare earth metals.

“To win the global technology race, we must accelerate the transition of these new technologies from our labs to the marketplace,” Wolfson said. “And the patent holiday is how we dismantle barriers to that and move at the speed of relevance.”

AFRL also had staff teams available to support licensing of the 25 featured patents, and to help companies develop prototypes and plan production, she told Air & Space Forces Magazine in a brief interview after her remarks. “They’re all there. They’re useful. The laboratory has enough manpower to support the licensing. No one else has rights to it. It’s free and open for those that want it.”

In addition to the work of the researchers on the technology itself, the Air & Space Forces—in common with the other military services—offers a range of services to assist technology companies trying to commercialize government patents.

“We are the government, and we are here to help,” she jokingly remarked. “The Department of the Air Force actually has a support structure already in place, … experts to help you,” she told the audience of defense technology executives and industry specialists at the launch.  

The starting point would be to partner with one of the nonprofit groups the Air Force works with around the country by signing a “Primary Intermediary Agreement,” or PIA. These groups, many based at universities or tech incubators, “are your no cost nonprofit guides—your easy button—to get started,” Wolfson said. The agreement also allows the companies to be screened to ensure they’re not a security risk.

TechLink, a nonprofit that does similar work partnering with the private sector at the Department of Defense level, is building a database of all the patents owned by the U.S. government, starting with the Departments of Defense, Energy and Veterans Affairs, explained Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, in whose office the TechLink program is based.

In some ways, he said, the patent holiday is a “door-buster,” to get industry’s attention focused on the real prize, which is the TechLink patent database. Michael was recently made the DOD chief technology officer in addition to his undersecretary for research and engineering role. A long series of departmental innovation efforts, including the Defense Innovation Unit, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), were recently brought under his purview, to accelerate and coordinate their work.

DOD spends $3.3 billion annually on research and development at the 216 laboratories run by the military services, Michael told a press roundtable. But getting industry interested in exploiting the fruits of that research is often difficult, because there’s no central repository for that vast treasury of intellectual property.

It was “frustrating,” he said, that “these innovations—and we have thousands of them in the labs, billions of dollars worth of IP that’s been created by the great minds in the labs,” will effectively moulder on the shelf. “In part, it’s because you don’t know where to go to find them. They’re all over the place. They’re not categorized, they’re not available.”

By offering non-exclusive commercial evaluation licenses for free, the patent holiday program will let companies experiment with the technologies in their own labs and fabs, opening up new potential military and commercial uses, added Scott Aughenbaugh, director of the Department of the Air Force Technology Transfer and Transition Program Office (DAF-T3) at the AFRL.

Sometimes the teams that developed the original technology have split up or moved on, Aughenbaugh told Air & Space Forces Magazine, “And so sometimes it requires industry to come in and re-look, rethink about how this could be used.”

Another barrier was that each of the services had their own technology transfer programs, operating in different ways, explained Stephen Luckowski, director of the Technology Transfer, Transition, and Commercial Partnerships Program (T3CP) in Michael’s CTO office. 

“We’re trying to harmonize a lot of different approaches that exist across the department,” he said in a brief interview, giving as an example the fact that not every lab has traditionally offered commercial evaluation licenses. CELs are “non-standard across the department. Not everybody does CELs. So we’re going to need to work through some of these issues on the fly, right?”