Oceanit was in Houston during early May for the Offshore Technology Conference 2019 and to host our own Mind to Market Technology Showcase at Oceanit’s Houston offices.
Ten of Oceanit’s Ohana traveled to Houston to welcome almost 100 partners, customers, journalists, and scientists to our offices on May 7th. There, the team showed off products that ranged from advanced nanocomposite surface treatments to artificial intelligence, laser communications, and more. This is the third iteration of Oceanit’s Houston Technology Showcase, with the event being held biannually since 2015. Nanotechnologies and advanced materials being developed by Oceanit were found to potentially have profound impacts for energy sector in terms of safety, cleanliness, and efficiency. In 2019, Oceanit welcomed guests from across the spectrum of the global energy sector.
The centerpiece of our technology showcase was a live demo of Oceanit’s Underwater Laser Telemetry and Remote Access (ULTRA). ULTRA is a revolutionary laser communication system for high band-width, subsea IoT – think underwater fiber-optics, but without the fiber. ULTRA was developed in partnership with Shell under their ‘Shell GameChanger programme’. The umbilical-free communication system makes subsea big data transfer easy using point-to-point, tight-beam lasers. ULTRA has a much higher band-width than current laser and acoustic systems and is unaffected by noisy environments. It is a true breakthrough in underwater wireless data transfer.
Oceanit Electro-Optic Engineer, Ishan Mons, demonstrated ULTRA by transmitting three simultaneous video files through a large, custom-built water tank. ULTRA can transmit and receive in full duplex, and Ishan demonstrated how the lasers can adapt and buffer data when something obstructs the point-to-point laser beams. This demo came one day after Ishan presented a paper on ULTRA at the 2019 Offshore Technology Conference, during a session on Robotic Technology Enabling Future Offshore Operations.
The Oceanit Materials team were also on hand to demonstrate Energy sector surface treatments that have already been deployed in the field, such as DragX, HeatX, and SCIN. Oceanit surface treatments have now been deployed by customers in offshore, midstream, and downtream segments of the energy sector and in eight countries around the world. The core technologies behind these advanced nanocomposites were developed in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Energy Technology Laboratory. HeatX in particular is making a profound impact on carbon emissions and energy savings in power plant deployments across the globe.
Representatives from several airlines and aerospace industry partners were on hand to check out AeroPel, Oceanit’s icephobic and corrosion-preventing coating. Tests conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) showed AeroPel to reduce ice adhesion strength several orders of magnitude below any other commercially available coating. In tests at the Air Force Research Lab, AFRL called the technology the best icephobic coating they had ever tested.
Oceanit also demonstrated a new innovation: ‘InSITE Intelligent Pipeline Surveillance’. A major issue plaguing the safety of long, overland pipelines is the ability to monitor for pipe integrity issues that can lead to environmental crises. Oceanit has been developing InSITE as a system to make monitoring of huge stretches of pipeline easy and cost-efficient in an effort to help avert potential failures. InSITE is a combination of an acoustically-responsive coating, low-power monitoring nodes, and remote vehicle data capture. The three work in combination to monitor the health of pipe over hundreds of miles and automate the data reporting of the pipe. You can view the video below to see the scale model that was created for the OTC2019 and our technology showcase.
Despite heavy rains, lightning, and flash floods in Houston on May 7th, the event was a great success. We looks forward to working with the many new relationships developed last week. The future of our planet is closely tied to the decisions and innovations that happen in the energy sector, and Oceanit is excited to be increasingly involved in moving gamechanging technologies into the market.
