A Smarter Recipe for Composite Manufacturing
OATMEAL could reshape how large structures like airplane wings are built.
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the 2026 Texas Mechanical Engineer magazine.
Joseph Kirchhoff’s path to advanced manufacturing started long before he set foot in a university clean room or a NASA lab. It began in a small town in North Carolina, where a long bus ride to school and an early opportunity to work in a research lab sparked a fascination with composite materials that has stayed with him ever since.
Now a Ph.D. candidate in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kirchhoff has received $200,000 in combined Center Innovation Fund (CIF) and Internal Research and Development (IRAD) support from NASA to continue developing OATMEAL, a new composite manufacturing technology with the potential to reshape how large structures are built.
OATMEAL, short for Out of Autoclave Amorphous and Semi Crystalline Thermoplastic Materials for Energy Efficient Aerospace Grade Laminates, is designed to address one of the biggest limitations in modern manufacturing. Producing large composite parts such as airplane wings typically requires massive ovens and slow heating and cooling cycles, which limit production rates and consume enormous amounts of energy.
“With current methods, you end up waiting on the material instead of making parts,” Kirchhoff said. “That slows everything down.”
The core idea behind OATMEAL is deceptively simple. Instead of forcing the entire material to melt and recrystallize during processing, the approach controls where crystallinity is needed and where it is not. This allows composite layers to bond together efficiently without needing slow cooling.
In practice, that means manufacturers can keep producing parts with fewer interruptions, increasing throughput while reducing energy use.
Kirchhoff’s interest in composites began in high school, when a professor at North Carolina State University invited him to work in a research lab and held him to the same standards as graduate students. That early experience built both technical skills and confidence, and it set the foundation for his future work.
He went on to study aerospace engineering at Purdue University, where he deepened his focus on composite materials and mechanics. Internships at Boeing followed, giving Kirchhoff a firsthand look at aircraft production lines and the practical challenges of manufacturing at scale.
“Seeing how airplanes are actually built really changes how you think about materials,” he said. “You start asking how we can make this faster, cheaper, and more efficient without compromising safety.”
That question ultimately led him to UT Austin, where he was drawn to the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and the opportunity to combine experimental research with advanced modeling. He is co-advised by Mehran Tehrani, now at the University of California San Diego, and Omar Ghattas in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Kirchhoff’s collaboration with NASA began through the Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities fellowship, where he partnered with Tyler Hudson at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Over the past two years, the team has refined OATMEAL, secured patents through UT Austin and NASA, and shared early results with the research community.
The new CIF-IRAD funding allows the project to move beyond lab-scale experiments toward real-world testing. The team aims to reach Technology Readiness Level 5 by demonstrating OATMEAL in manufacturing environments that closely resemble actual production settings.
While aerospace manufacturing is the immediate focus, OATMEAL has potential applications well beyond airplanes. The technology could support in-space assembly of large structures, automotive manufacturing, and more recyclable composite systems for wind energy.
“At its heart, oatmeal is about efficiency,” Kirchhoff said. “If we can make things faster and use less energy, that impact can scale across a lot of industries.”
For Kirchhoff, a path that began with early curiosity in composites has grown into a NASA-supported effort poised to influence how large, high-performance structures are manufactured on Earth and beyond.