|
By DON DODSON Copyright 2001 The News-Gazette CHAMPAIGN – Cyrus Herring believes so much in gas-discharge technology that he's willing to pin his career on it. The 34-year-old Urbana man, who did master's, doctoral and postdoctoral work at the University of Illinois, decided three years ago to build a company based on the technology. His company, Caviton Inc., is developing a device to continuously monitor emissions from smokestacks and power plants. Herring thinks he can devise one that can do the job for less than one-tenth the cost companies now pay. "This technology is a good fit for analyzing gas samples," Herring said. "It's cheaper and can do things other instrumentation can't, because it's lightweight and uses very little power." For now, Caviton is a small enterprise. Herring is the president and chief technical officer, and he's making money by doing consulting work for another firm, VISX Inc. But he's applying for grant money that could help him refine the technology and get him to the point where he can seek venture capital and start expanding. Herring, who received physics degrees from North Carolina and Illinois, switched to electrical engineering for his doctoral degree. His adviser was J. Gary Eden, who had done basic research on gas-discharge technology. Herring was impressed with that field. "It's a unique technology that hasn't been around, and applications of it hadn't been exploited," Herring said. "You could go in any direction you wanted." The technology involves provoking an electrical discharge in a gas by applying voltage across a very small space – less than a millimeter, or a few thousandths of an inch. "The discharges cause the gas to light up, much like a neon sign would," he said. That light can be used in many ways, including monitoring smokestack emissions. "Using the light coming out, we can determine the type and concentration of gas," he said. Herring identified 15 different product areas – ranging from medical instrumentation to gas chromatography – that could benefit from gas-discharge technology. He finally decided to pursue sensor applications, figuring they wouldn't take as much money to develop as others. He figures it will take about $1 million to develop a prototype and get the first product to market. Herring said that when he first launched Caviton, "I thought I could make money off the idea quickly. I've found it's a much slower process." Herring has surveyed the market for his product. He cites data indicating that 20,000 industrial firms in the United States have smokestacks for kilns, furnaces, boilers, pumping stations, chemical processing plants and incinerators. Currently, it costs about $700,000 for instrumentation to do continuous emissions monitoring for each stack, but Herring thinks he can develop devices that can do the same thing for $15,000 to $50,000. "We'll develop an alpha prototype in the next year, go to power companies and work with them to refine the prototype and then come up with a commercial product," he said. The monitors will measure concentrations of sulfur- and nitrogen-containing compounds and mercury from coal-burning plants. When analysts combine the concentration data with emissions flow data, they can figure the actual tonnage of emissions being produced. That's an advantage for companies that have to pay pollution taxes, which are based on the amount of pollutants coming from the stacks. Sometimes, those amounts are estimates that don't take in downtime, so companies pay for emitting more pollution than they actually do. "Currently, they are taxed 100 percent of their potential discharge, even though they're not running at full power," Herring said. Among current technologies used for monitoring smokestacks is one that involves shining infrared light across a smokestack. Analysts can look at how much light has been absorbed by the gas and deduce what kinds of gas are present. But the technique requires the use of costly equipment, including mirrors, detectors and blowers that create an air shield around the mirrors. Gas-discharge technology requires a detector within the stack, a fiber-optic cable connected to a spectrometer, and an interface cable connected to a computer. With that technology, the light emitted from the discharge gives a chemical fingerprint of the gases present in the smokestack. "The gas run through our device emits light, and we use that light coming out to determine the gas present," Herring said. Herring said the same technology can be used for engine performance monitoring. It can also be used to develop instrumentation for liquid analysis – for example, detecting trace metals in engine oil. The presence of those can indicate imminent engine failure. Caviton has applied for a $300,000 Technology Challenge Grant from the state and is hoping to get funding for a project from the federal Office of Naval Research. That project would involve developing a battery-powered sensor that would fit on an unmanned air vehicle. The vehicle would monitor the air around naval ships, with the aim of detecting any indication of human activity – diesel fumes, cigarette smoke, even explosive devices. The sensor would weigh less than 2 pounds, be smaller than 200 cubic inches and could operate on battery power for 12 hours. With the grants, Herring hopes to employ two full-time workers soon and five a year from now. Caviton is based at Herring's home, but he spends much of his time at the UI's Optical Physics and Engineering Lab, having contracted with the university for lab time there. "Cy, in my view, is an extraordinary individual," said Eden, Herring's former faculty adviser. "He has that rare combination of having a theoretical grasp of the physics underlying a wide range of phenomena, and the great ability to make something with his own hands. "He has the engineering skill to make something that's a gleam in one's eye to something that works. That's an ability I don't often see in the lab – to make things happen." |
|
|