Wichita ? Eager for new challenges, the world’s leading experts on composite aircraft materials hope to put their skills to use in building a better replacement for the human hip.

Wichita State University is home to the National Institute for Aviation Research, where students work with scientists and engineers testing and improving composites – the strong, lightweight materials that have revolutionized aviation as they replace riveted aluminum.

If composite materials are good enough for stealth aircraft and the Boeing 787, why not for artificial hips?

“What NIAR is really good at is in testing advanced materials,” said John Tomblin, NIAR’s executive director.

“Is a hip device durable? Does it have fatigue resistance? Can it stand the test of time and whatever environment it’s operating in? That’s what you want out of any aircraft component, and that’s what you’d want in a hip made to last; it’s all engineering. So in doing this we’re not deviating from our mission, and we might end up doing a lot of good.”

It’s an exciting prospect, said Francis Cooke, research director for Wichita’s Orthopaedic Research Institute, which engineers and tests orthopedic devices for Via Christi Regional Medical Center.

“When you talk about research and science with this stuff, we’ve got the smartest people in the world right here in town,” Cooke said.

On Thursday, officials of Wichita State asked the Kansas Bioscience Authority for $4 million in startup money over the next five years.

The money would be spent to establish half a dozen laboratories in a building at the city’s proposed 70-acre industrial park near Wichita Mid-Continent Airport.

Half the labs would be devoted to medical composite research, the other half to aviation. NIAR scientists, while sticking to their mission of research in aviation, would contribute brains, advice and testing to orthopedic medicine.

If the NIAR engineers succeed with artificial hips and move on to other human implants, Cooke said, the potential for healing the afflicted, creating a new industry with new jobs and helping the Wichita economy could be huge.

“There are 500,000 hips implanted in the U.S. every year,” he said. “The implants cost $5,000 to $10,000 apiece, so you can see what kind of potential this would have.”

Cooke said today’s hip replacements are useful for years but have some problems. The metal implants are more rigid than bone, and that rigidity eventually prompts the bone around the implant to atrophy and deteriorate, meaning the hip has to be replaced again.

Composites, however, can be engineered to be spongier, more flexible, more able to bend with the natural torque that a human hip employs to provide natural movement. A more flexible hip replacement would not damage surrounding bone.

Scientists and engineers elsewhere have tried for years to invent hip replacements and other orthopedic devices using composites, Cooke said.

But the scientists at NIAR think they might be able to solve those problems.

“Testing to see how a composite will perform in a human body is actually easier than what we test for in aviation,” Tomblin said. “For example, the temperature would be a steady 98.6. We wouldn’t have to test it in a range all the way down to 65 degrees below zero.”