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Company puts its energy into saving it

Devices to sanitize air, heat water and save gasoline are the recent focus.

By PAUL SWIDER, Times Staff Writer
Published August 10, 2007

Chief technology officer Bob Depalo retrofitted a 1998 Honda so it consumes 25 percent less gasoline. Below, an electrolyzer in the trunk separates water into hydrogen and oxygen to produce a gas.
	[Martha Rial | Times]

ST. PETERSBURG

After decades toiling in the obscure world of industrial surge protectors, Professional Technical Systems has reinvented itself as an energy company and is touting a handful of products that could be breakthrough devices.

"The company had been fairly small, but it had a beautiful foundation," said Ben Croxton, the chief executive of what is now World Energy Solutions. "In order to expand, we decided that energy conservation was the business to be in."

Since changing names and going public in 2004, World Energy has spent heavily on research and licensed an invention out of the University of Florida. The company is now poised to launch devices to clean the air, heat water and improve your gas mileage.

"We're having a good time with it," said Bob Depalo, the chief technology officer who joined the company three years ago and brought some of his own designs with him, including power-saving controllers. "We're making a lot of headway. Any one of these new products can do wonders for us."

The most promising prospect, Croxton said, is something he calls Pure Air Technology, a device developed by Florida environmental engineering professor Dr. David Mazyck and others. The technology doesn't just filter air but sanitizes it, Croxton said, and saves money by requiring less circulation of air around a home or office.

The technology, Mazyck said, introduces into an airflow chemical radicals that are unstable and want to combine with something. They are designed to do so with volatile organic compounds and bacteria, forming tiny amounts of carbon dioxide but eliminating such toxins almost completely.

"The idea is to take it to the next level" beyond filters, Mazyck said.

Mazyck and his colleagues developed the technology for use in spacecraft, but after the Sept. 11 attacks, research shifted to protection against bioterrorism. The technology is designed to clean the air of things like anthrax, though there has been no practical test because government stocks are tightly controlled, Mazyck said.

Croxton said he has been working on the Pure Air deal since 2005 through UTEK, the Tampa company that helps transfer university research to private-sector applications. World Energy and UTEK now have cross-ownership as part of the transaction on Pure Air, which Croxton expects to begin marketing as early as this year.

Other World Energy products are homegrown, either through Depalo's earlier work or some recent experimentation. World Energy is already selling industrial controllers to save power on lights and machinery, but Depalo has also spent the last year working on a novel approach to electrolyzing water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen. The resulting gas, HHO, is not water vapor but something that can burn fast and hot.

Depalo said he first created a more efficient means of electrolysis and applied the HHO to heating water. In the next 18 months, World Energy aims to create a tankless water heater that uses one-third the energy of existing tankless water heaters, which are already more energy efficient than conventional water heaters.

But once Depalo improved HHO creation, Croxton asked him to see if it could be useful in cars. Depalo bought a 1998 Honda Accord a year ago and has now retrofitted it to burn HHO in the engine so the car consumes 25 percent less gasoline. Because the car's emissions are also cleaner, the company plans in the next few years to test the concept on diesel engines and try to license the product to truck manufacturers.

Others have suggested running cars on something like HHO, also referred to as Brown's gas. Clearwater's Hydrogen Technology Applications has attracted media attention for similar claims. A video of that company's Brown's gas car circulates on the Internet.

There are detractors of Brown's gas as an energy source, calling it junk science.

Depalo said others have not presented proof, but World Energy, as a public company, is subject to greater scrutiny and will have to show that its technology can work. The tests are still evolving.

"We set off on this as a proof of concept," he said. "The idea wasn't for this car to go down the road and burn water."

John Wolan has studied gases like HHO as a chemical engineering professor at the University of South Florida and he says the concept is legitimate.

He said that many companies are coming on line to explore this.

"It's not going to solve all our energy problems," he said, "but it's not quackery. It's the real deal."

Paul Swider can be reached at 892-2271 or pswider@sptimes.com

Fast Facts:

World Energy Solutions

worldenergysolutionsinc.com

3900 31st St. N

525-5552

[Last modified August 9, 2007, 21:12:04]