Highly Filled Materials Institute, HFMI, was established at Stevens Institute of Technology in 1989 to investigate, both experimentally and theoretically, the rheological behavior, microstructure, processability and ultimate properties of highly filled materials, including suspensions and dispersions.

Highly filled materials, loading levels of which are typically very close to their maximum packing fraction, are encountered in various industries, including solid rocket fuels and explosives, detergents, intermediary and final food products, batteries, polymeric master-batches and compounds, construction products, magnetic, and ceramics. HFMI stays in contact with these industries in order to better define its research goals and to focus its efforts and equip its laboratories to address some of the immediate and long-term concerns. The Institute, activities of which are guided by an industrial advisory board, carries out short- and long-term contract research for the government agencies and corporations.

The facilities of HFMI are furnished with state-of-the-art equipment, including a mini-supercomputer and graphic workstations for numerical simulation, industrial-size continuous and batch processors, computerized data acquisition and process control systems, and equipment for characterization of microstructural distributions, magnetic and electrical properties, rheology, wettability and image analysis. The proprietary technologies of HFMI include magnetic shielding methods, on-line rheometry, disposal method for chemical munitions, x-ray-based quantitative degree of mixedness technique, and three-dimensional FEM-based source codes for 3-D simulation of EMF mitigation, extrusion, molding and die flows.