 Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen with me today in Think Tech Studios, Sumi Othapa and James Andrews, both of Oceanit. We're going to be talking about some very interesting, very likeable science, a product mainly called HeatX. So and this is, what would you call HeatX as a substance? Well it's an omniphobic, low-surface energy, slick surface treatment. Okay, so now let's break that down. A lot of words. Omniphobic, so it doesn't like water and it doesn't like oil. Yeah. It hates everything. It repels both of those substances. Right, which is very unusual. Most things that are hydrophobic tend to bond oil pretty well and vice versa. If they like oil, they drive away water or stay away from water. But this is omniphobic, which is very cool. I think we actually have our first photo actually shows a little of this omniphobic nature of it, right? Yeah, so the first photo is just zoomed in on grains of sand and a droplet of water on the left and oil on the right, just showing those repelling properties of the service treatment. Yeah, both are beaded up instead of sinking into the sand. So that's great. That's great. And this came out of some work that you were doing initially on... For the Navy. For the Navy, on anti-fouling. Yeah, so invasive species are a problem for any ships that travel around the world. But I think the Navy was primarily interested in the drag aspect, burning more fuel and the more growth you have on the bottom of your vessel, the more drag you have and therefore the less efficient you are moving through the water. So I think their primary concern was the low friction properties. But then, correct me if I'm wrong to be able to, there's also an anti-fouling issue kind of globally with shipping where most ships used to use a blade of copper paints that were biocidal, meaning they would heal off the organisms that tried to stick to the hull. Leaching out copper out of the paint. Right, to kill those microorganisms. And in the US and many other countries in the West, it became illegal to use that on a large commercial scale. So there was kind of two ways at which this Navy project kind of originated. I see. So then you developed a substance that doesn't have copper and is non-toxic in any way, but also its surface is extremely smooth, right? Yeah. And that means just much harder for anything to get a grip on it. Right. So we're like Keflon-ish, except even more so, right? Even smoother than Keflon. Yeah, okay. Cool. And that became that became sort of one line of the products for the ships then with a thing you guys call Fowlex if I'm not mistaken, right? Yeah. But then at some point somebody realized that same issue applied to a whole other piece of work or a whole other area of industry, right? Right. So heat exchangers, which are a kind of ubiquitous piece of equipment that not a lot of people know, is out there and everywhere in manufacturing processes, power producing facilities, refineries, food processing, chemical factories, things like that. Even your car has a radiator as a heat exchanger. So if we jump to the third photo here actually, we'll see something of a heat exchanger. Yeah. So these are all these big things are heat exchangers, right? These are industrial heat exchangers. And this is a heat coupling after something or some large, large facility, but yeah. But basically they're designed to just what they say, exchange sheet with the environment, so they're used to cool things down that are very, very hot. Right. Yeah. Generally you'll have a fluid of some kind that is really hot from some sort of industrial process that you're doing at your facility and you need to cool that in order to keep the process cycle going. Right. And refrigerate or whatever. Yeah, sure. And you'll bring in another fluid that's cooler and the unit exchanges the heat. Right. And the video that we have actually sort of shows that in a diagrammatic way, right? A schematic way here. So all of the tubes that you saw in that last picture, you'll see in this video animation that we brought. Basically, if you're using a coolant, often it's ocean water, river water from nearby. It doesn't contact the thing that it's cooling. Right. But it comes in, it's as it moves through this exchange, you'll see that it's designed to cool it. However, if you're using unprocessed water to cool, you start growing biofouling inside there. Right. So this is a zoom in on the tubular surface. And because it's a warm, nice environment for microbes, they start binding to the surface of the tubes and basically clogging it up. So heat X was developed to repel that growth, not let it stick. So not kill it like a biocide, but rather keep it from binding to the surface, repel it, let it move through, not build up. And therefore you preserve the heat exchanger property. So on the top here, you can see if you get a layer of biofouling, heat can't really transfer through the surface. Whereas on the bottom, it's moving freely and the exchanger is serving the purpose it's meant to serve. Yeah. And yeah, heat exchangers, as you were saying, are really used in a lot of different applications on the small scale up to very large scales. And one of your big uses of them are here on the island is at the Hawaii Electric Company, right? Yeah. Who basically is using cold seawater to cool hot fluids, right? Yeah. Yeah. So for the HECO plant, they use seawater as their cooling. And of course, you want to keep the seawater clean. But it's like a like a boat. You know, if you're flowing seawater through tubes, it's going to build up a layer of fouling, barnacles and algae and stuff like that. So heat access is a solution to keep the tubes flowing. Right. Keep everything, yeah. So they don't have to, your pumps work more easily. And then you don't have to shut down as much to clean. Right. Right. So that's a very, very interesting idea. And it clearly has tremendous implications, right? For how much power HECO can produce, how much power they're actually using to produce the power. Right. How much fuel they're burning. Right. Yeah. So I mean, the HECO facility that we went our first trial at is out in Kahi on the Leeward side. I think we brought a picture of it. They basically bring in unprocessed ocean water, run it through a set of heat exchangers and then let it out again. And they're cooling a process fluid on their side that keeps the turbines spinning and creating energy. But the fouling that they encounter because of this kind of rich marine water means that they typically had to take a heat exchanger offline every six months to clean it completely, do a whole maintenance cycle, then put it back into use. Which means really taking the whole thing apart. Taking the whole thing down, spinning up a replacement turbine that is less efficient even, so it needs to burn more fuel to create the same amount of energy. And of course it's man hours that they're spending to do that for every heat exchanger. And they actually have a relatively small facility, but some power plants on the mainland have hundreds if not thousands of heat exchangers running across different processes. So that could be, you begin to see that this is a process or a project that could have significant impact, right? Because the scale once you went to scale it up is, you know, you're saving just a little bit of time, a little bit of energy here. But even here it seemed there was quite a bit of savings because as you said, they had shut down an untreated heat exchanger every six months, and it's about a two or three day process. Something of that nature, yeah. And they would have to do that, of course, across each of the exchangers that they have. And that's basically a constant process that they never are finished doing. You start again from the beginning as soon as you're done with the last one. So using HeatX they were able to keep one of their exchangers in service for 26 months without a full maintenance cycle. So they took it out to inspect it, saw it's clean, put it back into service. And now how many do we have? We have two heat exchangers that have been treated and we're looking at doing maybe another one or two and looking at some other component areas that could use this type of treatment. So they're saying that since you extend the interval between cleanings at least something like five times, so saving a huge amount of downtime for the HECO, a large amount of person hours in terms of cleaning the things out and removing all the biofilm, saving energy because they're not having to run other turbines to replace them, right? Right. Yeah, it's a big cost impact for them but it's also a big ecological impact for everybody else because the pumping power and spinning up a backup turbine to generate that electricity is very inefficient. If we can keep the flow and the heat transfer stable basically we're saving on all that additional burn of fuel and we're preserving the heat transfer capabilities so we're keeping their cycle cooler overall and that helps everything just be more ecologically friendly. It all adds up to less carbon being put into the atmosphere. And it's a non-trivial amount too, right? I mean even just from this one installation that you've done, right, that they've gotten, they're estimating some, I forget what the figures you gave me were but... Yeah, so it will, they're their figures I think over a five-year period on a single exchanger they estimated $1.5 million of savings. That was a number from them. And then looking at if we were to roll that out slowly across all of their facilities what the impact would be for the islands. And I think the materials team came to a number of something like 39,000 cars fewer on our roads. That's the equivalent gasoline burns, something like 20 million gallons of gasoline saved per year in terms of what the emissions saved from this. That's incredible. It's great stuff and it's a really nice example here of looking, taking one of things ocean it does, right? Somebody had this idea and you guys have turned this into a product now. And the big thing is about increasing efficiency and keeping it, keeping equipment running at the best possible output so you maximize the amount of energy you get per unit of fuel that you're burning. And so by making the process completely more efficient, you reduce the amount of total fuel you're burning and reduce the amount of emissions you make. Yeah, and it's something people don't think about so much. You know, people, everyone's talking about let's go to solar and wind power and wave power and all, but we realistically, we're stuck in a carbon-based economy for a while and we're going to continue to use carbon-based fuels. They need to be transitioned out perhaps, but while transition is starting. Right, thankfully. Yeah, but what you've done has gotten a very nice way to drop their use, make everything more efficient while we're doing that. Right, it's something that can help us today and is helping us now. Exactly. It's part of the equation. I mean, you know, when you want to get, as you get more towards renewables, you also want to be more efficient about how you use the resources that you're currently expending. Exactly. We're going to dig into this more deeply, but right now we're going to take a brief break. Sumiel James from OceanIt and I'm your host Ethan Allen and likeable science, we'll be back in one minute. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons, and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up and please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you, keeping you safe. Aloha. And you're back here with likeable science here on ThinkTech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen, talking today with Jay Andrews and Sumail Fappa from Oceanette all about their HeatX, which is a very slick solution, a thin, very slippery coating that they can put on pipes of all sorts, and particularly pipes that you're running seal water through, which tend to get so-called biofouling. And we have a picture, I think, of what biofouling really looks like. People might not be familiar with that concept. And here's a heat exchanger, part of a heat exchanger with barnacles growing on it, and you can see inside it. So this is the actual heat exchanger at the Kahe Power Plant. At six months. After six months. So every six months they do a clean, they scrape all of this off, get it down, and then six months later you see barnacles growing. Sometimes it gets even big enough that it'll completely block the tubes. But even there, you can see, I mean that's going to be reducing the diameter of that tube, slowing down the flow of water. So it's a process that speeds up because once you have the microorganisms form a film, then the macro organisms, the larger things can start adhering as well to that biofilm Once they're in place, that slows water down, gives more things a chance to settle in there, more things can grow. It slows it down and then acts as an insulator to make the heat exchanger less efficient. Right. And then in contrast, the next photo that we had shows this is a similar heat exchanger, but this is after 26 months of service. This is the exact same heat exchanger actually. Right, okay. And this is after 26 months they want to inspect it to see how it's performing. And so this is what it looks like after a quick wipe clean. Wow. So they didn't have to kind of clean it or anything. It's almost five times as long and with just nothing sticking to it really essentially. And going. I think that they've now put this back in service. Yeah, it's back in service. Yeah. So this is with HEDEX. You can see the biofouling just can't really adhere at all. That's stunning. And we were talking before the break about the impacts of this. You had some figures here that improved generation cycles by 2.5% leading to 8.2% reduction in amount of fuels. They're saying that's equivalent to 144 million fewer tons of emissions in the US. 144 million tons of carbon emissions. So I think that those numbers are with condensers. Right. Which we can talk about in a little bit. Okay. But the effect of the heat exchangers part, I think we calculated it for the state of Hawaii just for Hawaiian electric facilities at 182,000 tons. Just still a lot. Right. It's not in the millions. Per year. Per year. Yeah. Carb not per year. Per year. Yeah. For Hawaii. Which is huge for the state. Yeah. Yeah. As you said earlier, that's 2 million cars basically. Right. 2 million gallons. Sorry. 2 million gallons of gasoline. 20 million gallons of gasoline. Sorry. Got the figures wrong. But yeah, still a massive impact for us. And it's a place that we want to preserve. So being our home, we don't want to be polluting the rates that we are. And knowing that we're not going to be switching to renewables in the next few years anyway, it's quite important. Yeah. Yeah. Everything to do to ramp up in efficiency, ramp down the use of fossil fuels is great. And this is a huge step actually towards doing that. So that's again, it's a very impressive thing. So yeah, I didn't really jump ahead to talk about condensers. So let's talk a little bit about condensers. Because again, rather like heat exchangers, I suspect a lot of folks, including me, don't really understand why condensers use, how widely they're used. Yeah. So condensers are similar to heat exchangers in that, at least the ones in Cahed, they'll use sea water to cool. Or they'll use water to cool it. But with condensers, it actually operates as part of the power generation process. So with a typical power cycle, you heat up water, you produce steam, and that steam runs a turbine that's generating power. Right. And once you've passed it through the turbine, it goes from superheated steam to saturated kind of wet, what we call wet steam. And in order to complete the cycle, you need to remove that water to dry that steam so that you can run it through your process again and cycle through to generate power. And so in order to remove that moisture, you need to condense it. And that's why it's called a condenser. And so that condensation, you're basically using energy to cool it down and remove the water. And you want to maximize the efficiency of that unit. Okay. So again, you're sort of like the heat exchange you're running, you're running a seat of cold sea water over this hot pipe snout. Condense the water out. Yeah. It's like leaving a can of coke out on a hot day. Right. You start getting the condensation on the outside of the coke. And you get a similar problem with insulation, but in this case, it's not biofouling, it's the water itself actually ends up forming a sheet along that surface. And the sheet of water is just not as efficient as little droplets at recondensing into water that you can put back into your cycle to turn into steam again. Okay. Okay. So this allows it to... Yeah. So with the omniphobic property, and because it repels water in addition to other materials, it starts this process that we call a drop-wise condensation. So normally with a normal tube, like James was saying, you have a film of water and you're condensing your water onto that film. But with a slick surface that repels the water, instead of having a film, you have little droplets. And those droplets actually increase the surface area that you can have water condensing. And before the droplet gets really big and coalesces into a large film, it actually falls off the tube. And so you expose the metal surface again to collect more water. Oh, okay. Right. I see. Yeah. So what we found in testing is that the omniphobic coating will promote this drop-wise condensation at a much higher rate than just a kind of clean piece of metal would. And so therefore, you're creating less or sorry, more back pressure that makes the cycle, the whole cycle, more efficient. And that's where we get to the numbers that we calculated is that we believe that a 2.5% efficiency savings on the electricity generation process actually equates to well over 8% savings in the fuel you have to burn in order to generate that same exact amount of electricity. That's very impressive again. Very neat to see how the same product can play two different roles in two different ways. Yeah. So in the heat exchanger, we're on the inside of the tube repelling biofiling in the condenser scenario. We're on the outside or what we call the shell side promoting this condensation and preventing a film of water from forming. Oh, very neat. Yeah. Because I know that there's the traditional hydrophobic surfaces cause water to beat up. And for a lot of things, that's one solution. Other solutions for prevent that same kind of beating, though, is to use a superhydrophilic solution, surface, right? Yeah. And pull the droplets flat immediately to get an even layer of water across things instead of droplets forming. Either way, works fine. At the latter, the hydrophilic wouldn't work in your case nearly as well. Right. We're trying to prevent that film of water from insulating the whole tube. Yeah. Very neat. Very neat. And again, it just works because you're putting on a very, very thin layer of this, so it's not impacting what the heat transfer at all. Yeah. And so that's why our heat-ex technology is not what we would consider traditional coating technologies because it can go down as a very thin, ultra-thin coating. Typically, for most coatings, you need to build a certain amount of thickness just to have the structural integrity of that coating so that it doesn't peel or bubble off. But with the heat-ex technology, we lay it on extra thin so that you minimize the impact on the heat transfer while still having that functional surface. It must be quite non-viscous then as a paint, as it were, in its liquid form. Very neat. So where do you see this going? What's sort of the next steps in this? Yeah. So we're trying to expand it. And step by step, part of the thing is when you're looking at new technology, especially in industry, you want to be very careful about how you approach and how quickly you expand. So with HECO, our work was really kind of using testing in low-risk situations to make sure that it works before going into higher risk areas that have higher value and higher impact. And so now we're getting to the point with the condenser work where we're looking, okay, we can make a much bigger impact if we start applying in that area of their facility. And once we can demonstrate that it really makes the impact that we're projecting, then start increasing application to other facilities. So you're in the process of testing the condenser part of this now with HECO? Yeah. Hopefully getting good results? Yeah, we hope so. I mean, the heat exchanger side is already kind of taking off, which is great. I think even though things like coal are being used less and less in the U.S., they're still pretty highly used in the rest of the world. So we're working in multiple countries now to do applications of heat exchangers. And that's kind of our first area that we want to expand beyond Hawaii and beyond the U.S. That's great. You have a global impact to this product. Absolutely. We've done a number of applications for the heat exchanger application around the world now. And then the condenser stuff, you're starting to test. And then you say that really is actually a larger part. So if you combine those two, you get a plant that's running much better. I mean, I think even burning the most efficient fuel that you have to burn, you're still barely getting to 50% efficiency. If we can improve that efficiency so that you're burning 8% less fuel, that's a number that would appeal to I think anybody around the world to know that that much fuel could be saved to still generate the exact same amount of electricity. Absolutely. That's extremely significant for anyone's bottom line. The pollution that's putting out, the waste heat, yeah, all those things are going to be impacted. So that's wonderful. But that's, and this is really, and then there's a whole other end that we talked about at the start, the antifalum, which again is saving ships fuel and allowing faster transport of good and less downtime for the ships also too. So this product really is having sort of multifaceted impact now. It's going in lots of directions. One that we haven't even spoken about is the corrosion aspect. Yeah. That it actually creates a passivating layer that arrests or halts corrosion and can apply on top of corrosion that's already there. To a certain extent, it basically seals it and stops it. So there's tons of applications on that side of things that similes involved in. Yeah. Yeah, I was reading something like that in here. They said, yeah, you could, that is you take a ship that's already starting to rust on its hull and you don't really have to scrape it all totally clean. Yeah. And so that's the nice thing about having, being in ultra-thin coating is that we can repair kind of all infrastructure that's already in use and it has some corrosion damage and extend the lifetime of existing infrastructure. So, you know, take ships that are already in service that are a little bit corroded and clean it up, remove all the loose kind of corrosion that might flake off. And then once we get a decent layer, we can apply. And because we're so thin, we'll cover all the cracks and crevices. Every little nook and cranny is now sealed. Wonderful. Yeah, that's amazing. And it's not just marine, it's also cables, it's also rail cars, it's storage tanks, it's all around. It's all sorts of things that carry fluids that tend to mess things up or are in an environment that tends to be corrosive. And yeah, we're looking at how to fine-tune things for those specific environments. I don't know. This is really interesting to see how a single good idea like this can branch out and have all these great impacts and really be helping the world in so many different ways. Yeah. Ocean is to be commended as are you guys individually. Ah, Sameel, James, thank you so much for being here. This has been really enlightening to me and I'm sure our viewers have all learned a ton too. So thank you all. And best of luck. I'll get you back some time and tell them you're more adventures of Ocean. Thanks for having us on here. Aloha.