The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : PLOWSHARES : Technology Could Greatly Improve Oil Spill Cleanups
The same technology that sends lightweight combat jets soaring vertically into the sky may someday allow oil spills on oceans and rivers to be cleaned up quickly and cheaply.
The new method, developed by Cosby M. Newsom, a veteran aerospace entrepreneur and owner of Bondline Products, uses lightweight aerospace honeycomb structures to trap oil. Rotating drums of honeycomb structures mounted on a boat would pull oil off the water and then purge it under steam pressure into a holding tank.
Newsom says he stumbled onto the invention when a worker at his Norwalk shop accidentally contaminated a test beaker of water with a layer of oil.
It turned out that a sample of the aluminum honeycomb material used in the jets removed all of the oil without absorbing any of the water.
Newsom has a pretty good track record as an inventor. He holds four key patents on cost-saving tools used in the production of lightweight composite parts, and his systems have been installed at Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, Bell Helicopters, Pratt & Whitney and other big defense contractors.
With a reported 16,000 oil spills every year in the United States, new technology is badly needed, said Edgar Berkey, president of the nonprofit National Environmental Technology Center in Pittsburgh.
Newsom’s tests suggest that his system could pick up hundreds of pounds of oil per minute--far better than what can be achieved with the floating booms, skimmers and mops now used in oil cleanups.
According to Berkey, current methods recover just 15% to 20% of the spilled oil. Newsom believes his honeycomb method, called a dynamic rotary oil spill recovery system, will absorb virtually 100% of the oil in its path.
Newsom estimates that a full-scale system will cost about $200,000. The U.S. Patent Office has “allowed” a patent on the invention, the last step before a patent is issued.
Many small manufacturing businesses--especially in the reeling aerospace industry--are engaged in a desperate effort to find new markets, and environmental technologies such as oil spill cleanup are popular targets.
But Bondline is as healthy as ever, thanks to the increasing pressure on prime contractors to use the firm’s cost-saving tools.
Newsom, 69, never made it to college, but he learned the plastics business in 1950 from Glen Havens, the late Southern California physicist who pioneered aerospace plastics technology and whose Anaheim firm is now owned by Cytec Industries. Newsom founded his own company in 1977.
