Port Alberni company makes cleaning a real blast
Wins major award for innovation
A Port Alberni company has blasted its way into the top ranks of global innovation and technology with a new industrial cleaning machine heralded as one of the 100 most innovative technologies of 2017.
Coulson Ice Blast’s IceStorm90 received an R&D 100 Award in Orlando, Florida last Friday.
“We’re the only one in the world to do this, and we have good, strong intellectual property to protect it,” said the firm’s vice-president, Foster Coulson. “There hasn’t been any innovation in the industrial-cleaning industry since the invention of dry-ice blasting [in 1947]. We think that’s one of the reasons we are seeing overwhelming success. There has been nothing else since then.”
Most machines are abrasive-blasting, using sand, grit or glass as the media. Other machines use dry ice or pressurized water. The IceStorm90 uses ice you can get out of your freezer or from the grocery store and is the most environmentally friendly machine out there, said Coulson.
“Dry ice and sandblasting create airborne contaminants, which are very dangerous for breathing in. We are a safer technology to use in confined spaces,” he said.
The IceStorm90 doesn’t use chemicals and doesn’t release dangerous contaminants into the air, he said. It also uses 95-percent less water than pressure-washers and is less expensive than dry-ice pellets.
Coulson got the idea for the ice-blaster in 2012 when his family’s business, the Coulson Group, wanted to remove the paint on one of its Martin Mars water bombers, and couldn’t find existing technology that would allow them to remove paint from the large plane on its site near the lake.
Then, one of their engineers suggested building a machine using technology he learned at a previous job at an American company that had developed ice-blasting equipment in the early 1990s, but went bankrupt in 2001.
The Coulson Group purchased that technology to remove the paint on the water bomber, but didn’t hit on a commercially viable use for the technology until 2015. Coulson started working on the R&D side in 2016 and launched Coulson ice blast in early 2017.
For now, the machines are sold to manufacturing companies or firms contracted to clean industrial sites and machines. The next step: Developing an ice-blaster consumers can use.
“It’s an honour to be acknowledged by the R&D awards,” said Coulson, especially considering other awardees include IBM, HP and General Motors. “It really is an acknowledgment that shows it’s not the size of the company or where it is located that matters, but being able to dream big.”