Working alongside one part-time employee at his Glastonbury specialty furnace business, Stephen Bates might seem like a typical small business owner. But Bates’ company Thoughtventions Unlimited is anything but typical. They recently received two, $125,000 grants to work on NASA projects that could advance space exploration and aerospace technology.
For Bates, who founded his company in 1993, grants like the ones from NASA help sustain his small niche business, which has run on lean revenues of about $150,000 for the past few years. “Running a small research and development business is a big challenge these days,” he said. “Most companies that do R&D have brought those functions in house.”
Thoughtventions is among a handful of Connecticut companies that benefits each year from NASA R&D funds. Through its Small Business Innovation Research program, NASA is required to allocate a small percentage of its R&D dollars to hire U.S. small businesses for its aerospace needs. Seven Connecticut companies were chosen to participate in the latest $47.6 million funding round.
“The government publishes challenges for which they seek solutions and scientists and engineers submit proposals that hopefully are worth funding,” Bates said, noting his company has received NASA funding in the past.
His latest temperature-related NASA projects are in phase I, or a feasibility phase. “One project is designed to use fiber optics the size of a human hair to capture images of engine turbine blades,” he said. “The turbine blades within a jet engine rotate at over 10,000 [revolutions per minute] and can heat to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and die if they get too hot. Being able to see that blade in its working environment has major implications for engine development and operation.”
Bates’ fiber optic thermal imaging aims to make it easier to diagnose jet engine turbine blade issues like component degradation. “There is a significant commercial market for this imaging technology if I can get it to work,” Bates said. If his phase 1 results are promising, NASA could invest in prototype and testing. Typically, those grants are around $600,000 and last two years, said Bates, who has seen three projects through the second phase.
To supplement that funding and help hire or retain employees, small businesses in Connecticut can apply for additional grants through Connecticut Innovations (CI), which makes state funding available to high-tech companies.
That’s important to Trent Molter, president & CEO of Sustainable Innovations LLC, an East Hartford firm that was also recently awarded NASA phase 1 funding.
“CI funding provides a real advantage to small tech companies,” Molter said. “Grants like NASA’s fund the technical [development] work, but these special state funds will help with market-based activities that larger government grants won’t cover.”
While his company’s specialty — isolating, capturing and recycling hydrogen from chemical mixtures — have broad application and value to industries beyond aerospace, Molter said government-funded projects have largely fueled his company’s growth.
“We have worked on seven or eight NASA projects in the past,” Molter said, noting revenue for his 20-person company has increased about 50 percent annually since its 2007 founding.
Molter estimates the industrial hydrogen market is a $100 billion industry annually and growing at 6 percent per year. Recycled hydrogen can save millions of dollars across a broad spectrum of industries, including aerospace, commercial generator cooling, semiconductors, metals and glass manufacturing, he said.
“In some industries, recycling hydrogen can drop production costs to one-half that of purchased gas,” Molter said.
Currently, he’s looking to attract private equity to grow his company. He says Sustainable Innovations has a variety of hydrogen capture technologies ready for commercial application, with the first product slated to hit the market in 2016. Having NASA funding, he says, helps establish credibility with venture capitalists.
“It sends a message that our work and expertise have been vetted,” he said.
It has also meant some unexpected, but profitable, relationships with other companies. “We tend to receive a lot of phone calls when we’re awarded NASA funding,” Molter explained, “and we’ve been able to make business connections we never would have formed otherwise.”
For East Hartford-based Qualtech Systems, which focuses on system diagnostics and prognostics, NASA projects have helped the company develop its core capabilities and expand its market reach. The company, over the past three years, has received about 55 percent of its funding from government projects, including two new NASA grants.
“We are working on prognostics for complex equipment, like a spacecraft propulsion system,” said Sudipto Ghoshal, Qualtech’s engineering vice president. “We are trying to figure out how close a system or component is to failure, so [NASA] can know when to replace or repair it before it actually fails.”
Ghoshal says he hopes his firm will transition to more of a product company than a pure R&D operation. But he said government projects have been critical in developing solutions for multiple industries.
“Our technology can benefit any mission-critical system where failure or down time is not an option,” he said.n
