Syntactic foam and Pressure–certified Microballoons
The strongest material in compression strength per-unit mass: pressure certified microballoons
I have been fascinated with syntactic foam for many years. I filed a US patent in 1996 on a highly flexible syntactic foam based dive suit. Later I worked on syntactic foam in a polypropylene matrix (used for insulating oil pipelines under the ocean). And I learned all about the syntactic foam used on submarines. I have applied for quite a few SBIR grants based on some aspect of hollow glass microballoons or syntactic foam based on polymers.
One part of fly ash from coal burning power plants are called cenospheres; cenospheres are not manufactured on purpose, and as a byproduct they're potentially very cheap. Their molecular makeup also makes them higher melting than the typical glass microballoons that are in commerce today, so cenospheres can successfully be mixed with molten aluminum for example, whereas typical glass microballoons soften too much to be mixed with molten aluminum. One of my many research proposals was based on this fact. Those kinds of materials are relevant for aerospace applications primarily.
More recently, I have been particularly fascinated by the low priced end of this technology. In particular, magnesium–based cement matrix composite, which contains a a syntactic foam portion (in which about 50% of the volume comprises expanded perlite particles), as well as reinforcing fibers which could be anything from carbon to polymers to glass. Unlike cenospheres or other spherical particles, the “grape clusters” of perlite do not pack very well. As a result one cannot get to as high a volume fraction of glass enclosed voids using perlite as you can get by using hollow glass microballoons. This is an area where I have a relevant patent position. I believe that I can get to a higher volume fraction of total voids within the syntactic foam. There's more than one way to accomplish this in fact. But I'm not going to talk about that in detail here, as I hope to use my inventions in this area to create an income stream for me and my family in the future. (I have had an historical preference for inventions that are really large in scale and which offer the possibility of having a major effect on the ability of humans to continue surviving in harmony with the world around us. That all sounds great, but the net result is I've made very little money from my inventions so far. Now I have a different perspective about that, due to my ALS.)
I may use this blog site to put up quite a few of my inventions in the area of microballoons (also known as hollow glass beads) and their various composites. Alternatively, I may find business partners who are willing to finance my patent applications in this area… I have quite a few canned applications ready to be refiled; these were all originally filed as provisional applications which have never been revealed, and they can be refiled. If no deals are forthcoming however I intend to publicly disclose these things and make them forever not patentable for anyone else.
In this post, I have decided to attach a letter that I wrote to the head of the business unit in 3M that makes and sells the most popular kind of glass microballoons in the world. I never did get a deal with them and I want it to be known that I would make a deal with someone else to pursue this idea now.
Here is a personal note: I have ALS, yet I am committed to continue to pursue my inventions. I believe many of my inventions would be very helpful to the world along the lines of dealing with climate change and/or helping to avert part of climate change. So I'm putting my ideas out there… somewhat without protection, although in some cases I am refiling provisional patents before I post this stuff.
Syntactic composites, especially including cementitious and glass–matrix syntactic composites are particularly interesting to me. I have numerous inventions in this area that could really revolutionize the world. Of course that can only happened if billions of dollars worth of capital are ultimately invested in these ideas. However it will be relatively low cost to demonstrate these concepts.
Out of all my ideas in this general area, I think the two best have to do with the low-cost end of the syntactic composite spectrum. One product would be something that could replace a brick or a cement block, but it would be a glass and/or ceramic composite insulator; in a sense this is similar to the heat resistant tiles that were on the front of the wings of the space shuttle… but dramatically less expensive.
I have already demonstrated a brick material that is less dense than an ordinary brick, with 10 times lower thermal conductivity, and equal compression strength to an ordinary brick. I think I can get a product that would also work to replace the ordinary concrete block. Both of these products would fit exactly into existing construction methods, although the mortar used would have to change. It will be feasible to build an R-50 shell of a home. Of course everyone wants windows, so I'm not saying the whole house will be that well insulated.
Thermal insulation of our homes and buildings is really the low hanging fruit for saving energy. A whole lot of our total energy consumption goes to heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration, and all of these energy consumptions can be reduced by more cost-effective thermal insulation. I see changing construction methods to make the default materials be highly thermal insulating would save a great deal of energy for the world. Also syntactic blocks and bricks would be a lot lighter, and less likely to kill people in an earthquake.
Besides bricks and blocks, another product I envision is a highly insulating completely fireproof roof panel. This is an idea, not something I've got in my back pocket, but I'm convinced it is feasible using materials that I've worked with in my lab before. This roof panel will initially be made for fire survival structures in areas that are very prone to fire. There are lots of those areas in California, and a shed the size of a small garage could allow perhaps 25 people to survive a very serious fire. That would be the launch product for this kind of material, but in the long run replacement of roofs in buildings would be the big market.
I am not talking about something that goes over plywood or some other form of decking; instead I am thinking about a complete replacement for the roofing panels. Syntactic foam panels would be very difficult to trim to size; this is a property of wood that is hard to replicate without adhesives and complex joining methods, so I envision that homes or buildings built with these panels will order exactly the right length (and trim) panels from the factory.
Here is the link to the letter that I wrote to Bob Chad of 3M in 2010. The graphs within this document show the early parts of the pressure survival curves for most of 3M's microballoons; one curve shows the lower density products, and the second curve shows the higher density, higher strength products. The low strength product curves (average density between 0.13–0.25 grams per cubic centimeter) only go up to 2500 psi, whereas the high strength products are tested all the way to 15,000 PSI, which is pretty close to the pressure at the bottom of the challenger deep in the Marianas trench, just to put it into perspective. 15,000 PSI compressive strength would be a respectable strength for a solid metal. and certainly it's way more than any concrete. The truly stunning thing though, is that even the very low density materials shown in the first first graph have some survivors all the way out to 15,000 PSI. This was shown in a US patent assigned to the US government by the energy research and development Authority (ERDA) in 1973 if my memory serves me correctly. I don't want to take the time to look up that patent right now, but I know it's there. In that patent Microballoons from 3M were classified by three different mechanisms. First they were density classified in a dense sulfur Hexafluoride Vapor to obtain a cut of microballoons that were between 0.14 to 0.16 g/cm³ true density. Then they were size classified so that all the micro balloons were close to 100 µ in diameter. Finally a crushing pressure of 18,000 PSI was applied, and amazingly some of these very low density micro balloons survived the treatment. These were subsequently used as laser fusion targets, after being filled with tritium and deuterium. If I remember correctly 99.7% of the microballoons had to be broken or discarded to get to such an incredibly high strength, uniform cut. As a matter of fact, such high strength implies that the microballoons are so perfect that they failed in compression of the wall, rather than the normal mode of failure which is buckling of the wall. All this was described in several of my provisional patents.
Over the years, I have filed numerous research proposals with the US government to pursue my ideas on syntactic foam, but I never got funding. I am now open to taking these ideas to private companies or individuals who want to build an entrepreneurial business.
I have been fascinated with syntactic foam for many years. I filed a US patent in 1996 on a highly flexible syntactic foam based dive suit. Later I worked on syntactic foam in a polypropylene matrix (used for insulating oil pipelines under the ocean). And I learned all about the syntactic foam used on submarines. I have applied for quite a few SBIR grants based on some aspect of hollow glass microballoons or syntactic foam based on polymers.
One part of fly ash from coal burning power plants are called cenospheres; cenospheres are not manufactured on purpose, and as a byproduct they're potentially very cheap. Their molecular makeup also makes them higher melting than the typical glass microballoons that are in commerce today, so cenospheres can successfully be mixed with molten aluminum for example, whereas typical glass microballoons soften too much to be mixed with molten aluminum. One of my many research proposals was based on this fact. Those kinds of materials are relevant for aerospace applications primarily.
More recently, I have been particularly fascinated by the low priced end of this technology. In particular, magnesium–based cement matrix composite, which contains a a syntactic foam portion (in which about 50% of the volume comprises expanded perlite particles), as well as reinforcing fibers which could be anything from carbon to polymers to glass. Unlike cenospheres or other spherical particles, the “grape clusters” of perlite do not pack very well. As a result one cannot get to as high a volume fraction of glass enclosed voids using perlite as you can get by using hollow glass microballoons. This is an area where I have a relevant patent position. I believe that I can get to a higher volume fraction of total voids within the syntactic foam. There's more than one way to accomplish this in fact. But I'm not going to talk about that in detail here, as I hope to use my inventions in this area to create an income stream for me and my family in the future. (I have had an historical preference for inventions that are really large in scale and which offer the possibility of having a major effect on the ability of humans to continue surviving in harmony with the world around us. That all sounds great, but the net result is I've made very little money from my inventions so far. Now I have a different perspective about that, due to my ALS.)
I may use this blog site to put up quite a few of my inventions in the area of microballoons (also known as hollow glass beads) and their various composites. Alternatively, I may find business partners who are willing to finance my patent applications in this area… I have quite a few canned applications ready to be refiled; these were all originally filed as provisional applications which have never been revealed, and they can be refiled. If no deals are forthcoming however I intend to publicly disclose these things and make them forever not patentable for anyone else.
In this post, I have decided to attach a letter that I wrote to the head of the business unit in 3M that makes and sells the most popular kind of glass microballoons in the world. I never did get a deal with them and I want it to be known that I would make a deal with someone else to pursue this idea now.
Here is a personal note: I have ALS, yet I am committed to continue to pursue my inventions. I believe many of my inventions would be very helpful to the world along the lines of dealing with climate change and/or helping to avert part of climate change. So I'm putting my ideas out there… somewhat without protection, although in some cases I am refiling provisional patents before I post this stuff.
Syntactic composites, especially including cementitious and glass–matrix syntactic composites are particularly interesting to me. I have numerous inventions in this area that could really revolutionize the world. Of course that can only happened if billions of dollars worth of capital are ultimately invested in these ideas. However it will be relatively low cost to demonstrate these concepts.
Out of all my ideas in this general area, I think the two best have to do with the low-cost end of the syntactic composite spectrum. One product would be something that could replace a brick or a cement block, but it would be a glass and/or ceramic composite insulator; in a sense this is similar to the heat resistant tiles that were on the front of the wings of the space shuttle… but dramatically less expensive.
I have already demonstrated a brick material that is less dense than an ordinary brick, with 10 times lower thermal conductivity, and equal compression strength to an ordinary brick. I think I can get a product that would also work to replace the ordinary concrete block. Both of these products would fit exactly into existing construction methods, although the mortar used would have to change. It will be feasible to build an R-50 shell of a home. Of course everyone wants windows, so I'm not saying the whole house will be that well insulated.
Thermal insulation of our homes and buildings is really the low hanging fruit for saving energy. A whole lot of our total energy consumption goes to heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration, and all of these energy consumptions can be reduced by more cost-effective thermal insulation. I see changing construction methods to make the default materials be highly thermal insulating would save a great deal of energy for the world. Also syntactic blocks and bricks would be a lot lighter, and less likely to kill people in an earthquake.
Besides bricks and blocks, another product I envision is a highly insulating completely fireproof roof panel. This is an idea, not something I've got in my back pocket, but I'm convinced it is feasible using materials that I've worked with in my lab before. This roof panel will initially be made for fire survival structures in areas that are very prone to fire. There are lots of those areas in California, and a shed the size of a small garage could allow perhaps 25 people to survive a very serious fire. That would be the launch product for this kind of material, but in the long run replacement of roofs in buildings would be the big market.
I am not talking about something that goes over plywood or some other form of decking; instead I am thinking about a complete replacement for the roofing panels. Syntactic foam panels would be very difficult to trim to size; this is a property of wood that is hard to replicate without adhesives and complex joining methods, so I envision that homes or buildings built with these panels will order exactly the right length (and trim) panels from the factory.
Here is the link to the letter that I wrote to Bob Chad of 3M in 2010. The graphs within this document show the early parts of the pressure survival curves for most of 3M's microballoons; one curve shows the lower density products, and the second curve shows the higher density, higher strength products. The low strength product curves (average density between 0.13–0.25 grams per cubic centimeter) only go up to 2500 psi, whereas the high strength products are tested all the way to 15,000 PSI, which is pretty close to the pressure at the bottom of the challenger deep in the Marianas trench, just to put it into perspective. 15,000 PSI compressive strength would be a respectable strength for a solid metal. and certainly it's way more than any concrete. The truly stunning thing though, is that even the very low density materials shown in the first first graph have some survivors all the way out to 15,000 PSI. This was shown in a US patent assigned to the US government by the energy research and development Authority (ERDA) in 1973 if my memory serves me correctly. I don't want to take the time to look up that patent right now, but I know it's there. In that patent Microballoons from 3M were classified by three different mechanisms. First they were density classified in a dense sulfur Hexafluoride Vapor to obtain a cut of microballoons that were between 0.14 to 0.16 g/cm³ true density. Then they were size classified so that all the micro balloons were close to 100 µ in diameter. Finally a crushing pressure of 18,000 PSI was applied, and amazingly some of these very low density micro balloons survived the treatment. These were subsequently used as laser fusion targets, after being filled with tritium and deuterium. If I remember correctly 99.7% of the microballoons had to be broken or discarded to get to such an incredibly high strength, uniform cut. As a matter of fact, such high strength implies that the microballoons are so perfect that they failed in compression of the wall, rather than the normal mode of failure which is buckling of the wall. All this was described in several of my provisional patents.
Over the years, I have filed numerous research proposals with the US government to pursue my ideas on syntactic foam, but I never got funding. I am now open to taking these ideas to private companies or individuals who want to build an entrepreneurial business.
I sure wish somebody else would comment here. The ideas I'm talking about here are really important but I guess funny cat videos are just a lot more popular.
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