Canadian Business

What sound barrier?

By Bennett

Thomas. Canadian Business 73.19 (Oct 16, 2000): 88-92.

Paradise, Nfld., (population: 10,000) is a long way from outer space. Along its rocky shoreline dotted with fishing boats, there's little to distinguish it from any other town in the province. But a small research company, overlooking the still water of Conception Bay, is bringing the other world a little closer to Earth. Inside the small clapboard town house that is the headquarters of Guigne International Ltd., something pretty amazing is happening.

A lit candle sits beside a long, thin object that resembles a metal cigar tube. As the flame is extinguished, you can almost feel a small gust of wind waft by, as if someone had blown out the candle. But there's no movement of any kind, and no noise at all to break the silence of this small room. Guigne deals in sound waves. Its technology produces inaudible acoustic beams so precise that when aimed at five candles in a row, the mysterious metal tube can snuff out only the third, leaving the remaining four lit. It can cause a piece of paper to flutter and create a wave in a glass of water. It has the power to levitate objects and to move them without touching them. It's a power oft ascribed to witches and warlocks and, yes, even to little green men. But Jacques Guigne, president and founder of Guigne International, has harnessed this acoustic energy for human use.

For the layperson, he describes the technology as "fingers of sound"; for everybody else, it's known as DRUMS-short for dynamically responding ultrasonic matrix system.

That's a mouthful. But DRUMS is set to take Guigne a long way. Next year, he'll be sending his gravity-defying technology aboard the International Space Station, the largest and most complex structure ever placed in orbit. DRUMS will be the first commercial installation aboard the space station, and it will be allotted more area than almost any other Canadian space agency. It's a small step for Newfoundland's technology sector, but it may prove to be a giant leap for privately owned Guigne International, as it joins forces with NASA and leaves its footprint abroad.

Space is just one destination of DRUMS, and the trip will involve the decidedly earthly application of manufacturing. Now, if you're picturing grimy workmen floating upside down and twisting bolts into place, you're missing the point of Guigne's technology. The process removes not only the operator, but also anything else that could touch and

contaminate the material-molds, for instance, or any type of container. Removing contaminants makes glass, ceramics and metals both stronger and more flexible (perfect for the aerospace industry) and medically pure (ideal for makers of human implants). Manipulating the materials in a reduced-gravity environment magnifies the effect.

On the space station, Guigne International will use 20 independently aimed, selfadjusting fingers of sound to control materials within a containerless environment in zero gravity. "Small parcels of energy travel and hit the object," explains Guigne. "Our acoustics do to sound what a laser does to light, with a much larger bandwidth." The focused sound waves of Space-DRUMS, as the application is called, create a physical force on the material, using "acoustic pressure" instead of physical touch, explains chief engineer Dave Millan. No heat is lost through the container wall, there is no chemical contamination, and there are no unwanted chemical or structural changes in the product. If the space tests are successful, Guigne's materials will rival anything available on the market today.

Jacques Guigne was just a St. Boniface, Man., boy at heart when he got his PhD in underwater acoustics from the School of Physics at the University of Bath in England in 1986. But he knew Newfoundland was the place to be. Because of the island's proximity to Europe and the US-home to pioneers in space research-the Rock was the ideal spot to set up mission control for his space exploration ambitions. He arrived in 1989 and started Guigne International shortly thereafter. In the early 1990s, several fibre optics researchers were experimenting with new materials and playing with the idea of defying gravity. It was pure imagination, until they met Guigne. "They wanted to use microgravity conditions to create exotic new glasses and ceramics," he recalls. "They wanted to understand how to suspend the material without direct contact to walls, and I told them that acoustics would give them the effect they desired."

Space-DRUMS soon caught the attention of the Canadian Space Agency, which funded ground-based tests to levitate very light objects starting with small glass beads and graduating to a plain white table-tennis ball. Sure, the ball floated, but the more important part of the test was control. Guigne engineers were able to move the ball straight up and down on command. After that early success, the CSA funded the development of a system for NASA's reduced-gravity aircraft, a standard plane that flies at severe angles to simulate the conditions aboard the space station, though only for a

moment. Between 1994 and 1996, Guigne International took its levitation device on four such flights, during which engineers were able to position and manipulate larger objects, from the original ping-pong ball to baseball-sized objects. "At that point we had proven our original theory and discovered the potential of acoustics," Guigne recalls.

Two years after the last NASA test flight in 1996, Guigne acquired another influential partner and fan of its new technology: the NASA/Industry Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space (CCACS) at the Colorado School of Mines.

DRUMS is "the only containerless processing system that could handle the large samples we needed for commercial research," says Frank Schowengerdt, director of the CCACS. "It offers a truly microgravity environment and isolates the samples from vibrations in the space station." The CCACS was just the customer Guigne needed.

"We use glass-ceramic materials for high-temperature structural applications in the aerospace industry. Porous ceramics are particularly suited for use in bone implants because natural bone will grow into the material, making a more secure and permanent repair," says Schowengerdt.

Those materials give new meaning to the term "space age," but some of them are already a reality, thanks in part to Guigne International. To date, the company's technology has been on six high-altitude flights aboard NASA's DC-9 and KC-135 aircraft. Material created in those reduced-gravity environments is being used in bone implants made by the CCACS, which are currently in the preliminary stages of testing.

When he's not gazing up at the sky, Jacques Guigne casts his eyes over the water that surrounds this tip of Newfoundland on three sides. Space is not his company's main focus either. Guigne International's acoustic technology is possibly most at home in the water, where sonar is an essential tool of navigation and discovery. But the company's precision beams take underwater mapping to new depths. In Croatia, for instance, Guigne's fingers of sound are plunging into uncharted waters to help remove unexploded land mines that have been dumped in the war-ravaged country's Danube River basin. "When you hear about humanitarian demining, you only hear of land clearance because most technology that exists today can't tackle water. Most mine clearance projects stop at the water's edge," Guigne explains. "We take care of the water, which means that land in flooded areas can finally be reclaimed."

NDT-DRUMS (short for nondestructive testing) was developed in 1996 to locate objects buried underwater, like pipelines. Last year, it was adapted for humanitarian missions. It essentially peers through shallow water to separate what is natural from what is manmade, and even classifies the man-made objects it finds-for instance, it can tell a piece of metal from a piece of wood. For mine detection, that level of detail is vital, because on rough terrain such as agricultural grounds, mines tend to shift and move around, which makes them nearly impossible to find using traditional methods. "Humanitarian demining in shallow water is a huge market," says chief engineer Millan. "It's an area that's not being addressed." Though it's not being paid right now, the company is in need of a sponsor, Guigne says, so that the project can continue and even expand into Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. "We're unique because we're the only group that has a solution," he says.

Doing good work hasn't exactly translated into big bucks for Guigne International-its consolidated revenue last year was a mere $5.9 million but, incredibly, it has turned a profit in each of its 11 years. If you think of Guigne as a tech start-up company-which typically have huge burn rates with no revenue while they're developing their technology-then Guigne isn't that bad off. "Most R&D firms really struggle to finance their research," he says. "It's a necessary stage, but your profitability comes when you manufacture. In our case, we're profitable doing the research itself." The company's revenue is expected to grow to $14.8 million by 2001, when the space cargo takes off.

And when that happens, Guigne will have to move from glitz to business. "There'll be a lot of activity on the International Space Station and Guigne will get a lot of publicity out of it," says Schowengerdt. "It's a really exciting time we're entering," says Guigne. Now that he's conquered at least a small part of earth, space and sea, there seems little that Jacques Guigne can't do in the realm of R&D. But his next step is to fully commercialize his company's ideas. The business world may prove to be more treacherous than the minefields of Croatia or the undiscovered reaches of space.

Copyright Rogers Publishing Limited Oct 16, 2000