In May, Badenoch received a second $700,000 allocation for a total of $1.4 million to date from the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to develop a method of testing vehicle resistance to blast forces at lower cost.

“Typically it’s very expensive to do blast testing, because every time you get your results, you’ve blown up a multi-million dollar vehicle,” said Scott Badenoch, president-CEO of Badenoch LLC. “Our process is doing a lot of modeling and simulation, and surrogates, without using full vehicles. Because you don’t need an engine and full set of tires sitting out on the blast test facility to make sure no shockwave goes through the vehicle.”

The company has been collaborating with General Dynamics Land Systems and the U.S. Army on developing a blast test vehicle “surrogate” or model that allows testing of blast resistance for a version of the proposed Ground Combat Vehicle, currently in development for production by 2020.

The new $50,000 matching award could make one blast test model available for testing as soon as next month, rather than early next year as Badenoch originally expected under the DARPA contract.

Larry Herriman, director of the Michigan DARPA Matching Funds Program at the Macomb-OU Incubator, said the incubator expects to announce two other matching funds awards in Michigan soon and will award the rest of the $350,000 funds on a “first-come first-serve basis,” before the two-year matching program expires in December 2014.