S E A T T L E, Sept. 14 ? Like Superman using his supercool breath to freeze villains, the partners at Universal Ice Blast swing a frosty sword to combat industrial grime.
With nothing more than a blast of ice, the company?s Green Cleaning technology fights the perils of grease, grime, radioactive decontamination, lead-based paint and asbestos.
Universal Ice Blast has cleaned everything from barnacle-clad boats to bridges and schools to transformers. The list of applications is long, but the process is as simple as H20.
Ice Blast?s Past
?The technology was conceived in Canada,? says company chairman Rory Clarke. ?The Canadian Navy requested a cleaning tool that was dustless, had little residual waste and could be used in the inside of holds of ships.?
The idea of cleaning with blasted ice isn?t new, Clarke says, but the company?s process of moving ice?to fluidize it?was only worked out in the late 1980s.
Ice expert Dr. Sam Visaisouk perfected ice blasting and, in 1996, he and his team founded Universal Ice Blast. Their initial goal was to create an ice blast machine capable of working for days at a time and that was affordable to industrial customers.
?Universal Ice Blast applied for a methods patent in 1996, which was a breakthrough in every sense of the word,? Clarke says. ?We were able to reduce the price of a machine from $130,000 to $69,900, in addition to making it smaller, lighter and more effective.?
The company went public in February 1998, selling 4 million shares at 15 cents per share. The stock now trades around 70 cents per share.
Patents, Profits and Futures
Why would anyone want to clean with ice? For one, ice blasting is a tidier industrial cleaning process than either sand blasting?which leaves sand everywhere?or cleaning with chemicals?which can produce toxic waste. Ice blasting uses only water, and is therefore cheaper and environmentally safer, Universal Ice Blast says, than other methods.
Straight from the tap, the ice blast machine turns water into ice crystals instantly and continuously. The ice shoots through a hose, via compressed air, onto the surface to be cleaned.
Visaisouk, the company?s president, explains that this blast of ice causes grime, paint and contaminants to expand and release their grimy hold on the surface before the ice melts and flushes away the debris.
Ice Faults
Ice blasting has its skeptics, among them Dick O?Connell, president of Abrasives Northwest, a Seattle-area industrial equipment supply house. He says ice ?will never become a major competitor of sand blasting?.
A sandblasting veteran, O?Connell says that ice won?t works as well with delicate surfaces as sand. And using ice to remove rust from steel only rewets a surface that?s already been damaged by the effects of water.
Positive Reviews
The five main markets where ice blasting is used?hazardous material abatement, industrial cleaning, aerospace, precision parts cleaning and nuclear decontamination?represent potential sales of upwards of $30 billion in the next five years for Universal Ice Blast, Clarke says. Removing lead-based paint from bridges in the United States alone is a $21 billion industry.
Among Universal Ice Blast?s clients is the Ford Motor Company, which sought a way to clean grime and remove burrs from newly minted auto parts.
Ford engineers experimented with many processes, until they discovered Ice Blast. The technique provides ?the best result with the least effort. It reduced our manual cleaning and deburring time to about 20 minutes per case,? according to a Ford publication printed in February.
Other clients include General Motors, Boeing and the Energy Department.
?We are proud that we have stayed the course with Ice Blast,? Clarke says, whose customers now branch into Canada, the United Kingdom and China. ?We kept Ice Blast alive through the darkest of days amid despair and inadequate financing. We are survivors.? |
