Of this stuff almost sounds like science fiction unless you're really in the industry. I mean, I guess in the industry, it is still. Science future. There we go. Welcome everybody to another episode of the podcast. And this time, we're gonna do a little bit of a breakdown of the ASME Turbo Expo. If you didn't get a chance to go, or if you saw so many great things and couldn't really get to everybody you wanted to meet with, we're gonna hear talk with the wonderful experts from Technetics. And the first step we're going to talk to is Elaine Motika. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Thanks. Elaine, tell us what you do at Technetics. I'm the principal materials engineer in the r and d group. And I've been with Technetics for fourteen years and But I've had industry experience more than twenty five years doing product development and applications development. So I really like how we're doing it at Technetics. I've seen a lot of ways to do it, and we're having a lot of fun here. And, of course, joining us as well is Shivani Rudrodot, introduce yourselves and tell us what you do at Technetics as well. Hi. I'm Shibani. I'm the product manager for dynamic seals and materials for North America. And I've been with the company for about ten years. Currently, my role is mainly looking at the markets, future markets to determine where we want to invest and how we wanna move forward with our innovation. Oh, fabulous. And the last person joining us today is Tyler Noise. Walk us through What you do here at Technetics? Yeah. Absolutely. In Columbia, South Carolina, I'm the R and D test engineer, also a PhD student at the University of South Carolina. And what I do here is, I do a lot of, customer testing, whether that's, products that are currently in development or products that, are coming from a customer that we are trying to make work better. As well as some, some of the really fancy forward looking stuff, like some of the research things that I really like, getting into with, Helium mass spectrometry leak testing or some of the, materials work that I do with, Lane and Shibani. Well, this is going to be an exciting conversation because not only are we talking about ASME turbo expo, we're gonna get into some of this. Some of this stuff almost sounds like science fiction unless you're really in the industry. I mean, I guess in the industry, it is still kind of science fiction. Right? Science future. Science future. There we go. There we go. There is a brand register that website now. Elaine, the first questions for you, what exactly is ASME turbo expo for those of us who didn't get to go and really understand this world? Right. Yeah. Turbo Expo is, it's an annual conference that is put on by ASME, which is the leading professional society of mechanical engineers, pro globally. And they hold a lot of conferences. This particular one, as you can guess, by the name is focused on turbo machinery. So turbines that propel aircraft as well as land based turbines that make power for us. They include things like steam turbines as well, wind turbines, fans, blowers, and ancillary technologies like super critical CEO to and now emissions and hydrogen energy, green energy. So That's, it it's a great place to go for cross collaboration among meet academia. And industry like ourselves and policy makers. So the people who who have to write the mandates and the laws, to get this, bring good things to life, I guess. Well, we'll talk about that because that's really interesting because we're talking about things like turbo machinery. So big power plants. Big future tech, hydrogen, new tech new fuel technology. As we all know, we have to find multiple ways to power everything we own. But you specifically mentioned policymakers. Has that evolved from last year? How is that, a big part of turbo expo? Yeah. They, it from the keynote lectures, it, seems to be a drive of the organizers to have equal numbers of academics industry engineers such as ourselves and policy makers. And I I feel that the policy makers, need to be represented better. When you can hear what the engineers are working on, it I think it's better than a lobbyist. I feel that hearing it from the horse's mouth to see the passion that the engineers have to reach carbon neutrality by twenty fifty, globally is amazing. And in fact, from twenty twenty two, last year's conference when I was there, it's the consensus of all the engineers, the tech people there, that it's not a technological problem. It is a cultural and a an infrastructure problem. And that is why we need the policy makers there. That those are the biggest barriers we technologically can get you there. And and it's awesome that Technetics is part of this. What a great story to be part of? Well, that that's that's harrowing news or happy news or how how we wanna look at it that, you know, we've got we have the we have the machinery. We can build the future. Tyler, I wanna ask you first, what were some trends you saw there? I know there's a lot of, work with fluid dynamics and compressor stages that you're really interested in. Walk us through some of those trends you saw. Yeah. Absolutely. So a lot of what, I went to, like you mentioned, were talks about work that's being done in the field of, computational fluid dynamics or CFT. The, a lot of research was focused on the compressor stages, that'll compress the air as, planes are kinda flying through the air that's, primarily for, the aviation industry. A lot of what, was being focused on were things like, turbulent generation and propagation down through the compressor stages. There was a lot, that was looked at as far as, tip losses around the edges of the blade close to the the inside part of the of the engine. And then there was even some, really futuristic sounding stuff where they're actually, having their computer simulation learn from itself using physics and form neural networks, which is, first cousin to using AI to start solving some of these problems. So that's just in its infancy, but it's gonna be fascinating to see where that goes. Elaine and and Shivani. I wanna ask the two of you together because I know you're both you know, the experts in this, we're talking about a lot of these turbo engines being in the aviation world, and that's really kind of game changer because I'm I'm I'm I'm only guessing that they're a major user of this new type of fuel, you know, goes to planes, then it comes to trains, it comes to automobiles, and where we're all living in the future. Talk to us, Elaine about some of these FAA ideas and some of this aviation idea when it comes to hydrogen and turbo and and this world. Yeah. The so the FAA is is, is not involved in in moving it forward per se. What they have contributed to is opening up highways, higher up in the atmosphere. So where there's less air to compress, it ties into what Tyler had spoken about. You need a more efficient compressor to compress enough air to get to the combustor, to get a proper, flame. So these are air breathing engines. This is what engineers column without air, they don't breathe, they don't make flame, they don't fly. So I think that's interesting to us as a seal company and the turbulent flow he spoke about, that's all stuff we can affect with say our abratable seal material or our brush seals. These are things that can help make the compressor more efficient. Which I think is going to be necessary up at those altitudes. And what it'll do, the reason they opened up those highways up there is to alleviate all the congestion that we're feeling down here. Because when when one airport gets clogged up, even if it's you know, for a computer problem, it can take days to sort out because there are just only so many roads to put these planes on if you think of them as highways in the air. So this this is gonna be a great help to consumer the average person and to our company, a great opportunity for our company, I think, in the compressor section. It's funny you mentioned roadmaps. I think anybody that's ever had chance to go up into, like, a little plane or a cessna and you you look down at the thousand foot, this lateral world, like, wow, there's a lot of stuff floating around up here. And I I guess, to that fifty thousand level, that's even more. Shivani, that, of course, means more stuff in the air, more noise, more world, more everything, what are some trends or some things that were interesting to you in that side of the world? There's been a lot of regulations coming out mainly out of Europe over the past few years. Noise redaction. And a lot of the focus that I saw before going into ASME was a long treatment for acute to kind of help with the noise. But one of the things I saw at ASME that was a little bit new, and it's something that there's been research on it, which is new to me at this point in time. There is quite a few companies doing research on how to mitigate the noise at a component level. So instead of adding treatment, they're to design the noise out of the system altogether. And that was a pretty neat trend to see. Well, Lane, that kinda keys into you would you guys are working on something in the world of of this new type of metal or this this sound and vibration. I I you know, you explained it a little bit, but it, you know, explained it again for, you know, the people smarter than me. Oh, gosh. No. But, just it's just fun. Again, I just have fun with all this stuff. But, yeah, with one thing to use an example and to tie in another topic that was very big at Turbo Expo. Is the use of hydrogen fuel. So, Tyler mentioned it before when we were talking, high hydrogen fuel means we're putting a high percentage of hydrogen in say natural gas that we're feeding to a turbine. So, high percentage means fifty percent hydrogen say, well, when you add more hydrogen to the fuel, to a normal fuel or even go to a hundred percent, the frequency, the the velocity of the combustion changes, and the acoustic emissions that come out of the turbine actually increases. So it's a very high pitched sound. It can shake components loose. It is. So sound energy has to go somewhere. No. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes. So this sound then has to change into what mechanical vibration. Or what's neat our material, and Giovanni is a, a co expert in this this material. Acoustic felt metal can mitigate sound by changing the energy into heat. It's very thin. It's not damping material like the like the finger foam behind you, Bobby. That's sort of absorbing and dancing it, but we, it it actually gets trapped in the very tiny pores and changes to heat energy and is dissipated quickly through the all the surface area. So I'm sure I didn't explain that really well, but you get the idea. And if Giovanni is right, perhaps, we our product can help with the component level mitigation of the these emissions, acoustic questions. Well, Tyler, should I run with that a little bit because this felt metal just sounds cool. I mean, it just sounds like a neat thing. It's it's, you know, it's all those things you see in all the all the sci fi movies where it's like, this metal was made from mushrooms. But, you know, you know, you have felt metal and, you know, anybody that's worked with any kind of machinery, you're you're right, you know, it's it's not It's not a far loop to understand on the small level. There's heat. There's noise. There's something happening, but we're talking about turbo engines. It's a million times bigger. Tyler, explain that felt metal a little bit to us. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I believe it got its name actually because of how it looks. And what it looks like is well it's it's what it's made from is basically a bunch of little tiny metal fibers that are centered together. So when you look at it, it looks kinda soft and stuff. They are a little tiny metal fiber, so it's not really soft as it works. If you wanna touch something soft, then just stick with regular felt. But it's it's still metal. Exactly. Still metal. Still metal. So, yeah, right now, we're exploring different applications of it. One of it, Elaine was, referring to the work that, Shwani is looking into is the acoustic, properties that we can benefit for or the the the removing the acoustic stuff from, acoustic absorption, I guess. Then we're also looking at, putting it in the compressor stages to kinda seal around some of the, blade tips as like an abratable, what would you call it? Like an abratable seal around the outside. Here. Right, Tyler? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So we still wanna, be able to seal around the outside of the compressor stages because those tip losses are always gonna be always gonna be an issue anytime you got any kind of airfoil. So yeah, it's it's a it's a fascinating material. There's There's there's a lot a lot of work still still to be done and, coordinating with a lot of the people at, Turbo expo this year using the varied backgrounds that me and Giovanni have. It was it's gonna be neat to pull all this stuff together and and push our research forward and and move a lot of things into the real world. Yeah. We're talking about all the turbo stuff. We're talking about all this new material. We are talking about hydrogen and these new different forms. And you, you know, there's green, brown, and and and Elaine, you would, you know, explain to me early the color spectrum of of hydrogen and how it's made. What is Technetics doing in this world of hydrogen that is really fascinating? People should really pay attention to. One of the, cool projects that we're working on is actually related to the felt metal product line. We're working with a few academic partners, and it was kind of a happy accident where we stumbled into our material that's conventionally used in aerospace applications can be used as a porous transport layer in electrolyzers. And this ties into green hydrogen where we're creating hydrogen molecules from water. So it's quite a neat R and D type I checked that Tyler and Elaine are working on currently. And I think, transfer over to Elaine. She can speak to it a little bit better Well, just to clarify, hydrogen coming from water is amazing. Correct? Yep. Where else does hydrogen come from? It's been a long time since I had biology no one. You know, and I think a lot of people also who are maybe investors and thinking about this and hearing hydrogen is like, I I go to I go to the hydrogen store. Right? But where where do where does hydrogen traditionally? Where is this this source normally coming from that these new ideas and new ways of capturing creating if I'm using the right term are it coming from? A vast source of it is methane, which is CH4, I believe. So that's one carbon to every four hydrogens. So you basically crack off the the carbon portion leaving carbon products, which is not what you want to get the hydrogen. And this would come from natural gas, from biomass, from, a lot of chemical process plants that normally just burn it off. So when you're driving, you know, say down a highway in an industrial state, and you see towers with flames coming out of them, that's what they're doing. They're burning off methane and waste gases that are byproducts of their chemical processing. So, instead of doing that, the plans are infrastructurally build an infrastructure that captures it instead of burning it off into the air, and, using it. And that would be called, I believe, coming off methane. We call that blue hydrogen. Another source is coal. There's a lot of coal in the country. But that is brown hydrogen. It is the the least efficient way to get hydrogen and really a lot of carbon residue comes off. So before going to those extents, we'd really need to beef up our carbon capture technology. So electrolysis, which is the word for taking it out of water, water electrolysis is the greenest. There's no carbon that's coming off of it. And these electrolyzers can be put on-site next to a power generation plant. So they would just be feeding the hydrogen directly to the plant. And, I have an interesting story on that. There was a a paper I went to by a, a utility some owner of a of a gas turbine down south wanted to know how hydrogen would operate in his natural gas turbine. He just bought a lot of tank trucks of hydrogen and fed it slowly into his pipeline of natural gas, and it worked Excellent. Wonderful. No turbine related issues, short term issues, up to forty eight percent hydrogen. His biggest problem was he ran out of hydrogen. So that is, of all the trends that I heard, urgent need for hydrogen production by all methods. But long term, the green method would be best, you know, the the electrolysis method. So to wrap it up, what are the two takeaways we should be thinking about, that Technetics is providing the industry? What Technemix is, providing to the industry are ways to produce and keep their hydrogen where it is. And, we're looking at doing that in ways that are very clean and quiet. Wow. I guess that could not be any better for the environment. Awesome, guys. Thank you so very much. Alane, Giovanni and Tyler, you have been wonderful guests. And, again, if you need more information, just head over to the Technetics website.
