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Welcome to another episode of Heat Treat Radio, a periodic podcast where Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, discusses cutting-edge topics with industry-leading personalities. Below, you can either listen to the podcast by clicking on the audio play button, or you can read an edited version of the transcript. To see a complete list of other Heat Treat Radio episodes, click here.

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Audio: Heat Treating and Coal with Brian Joseph, CEO Touchstone Research

In this conversation, Heat Treat Radio host, Doug Glenn, interviews Brian Joseph, the founder, CEO, and president of Touchstone Research Laboratories, about the emerging part that coal is playing in the heat treat world. Listen to find out more about the surprising uses of coal in heat treating, the development of the world's strongest aluminum, and some tips for how to make your organization run at its best.

Click the play button below to listen.

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Transcript: Heat Treating and Coal with Brian Joseph, CEO Touchstone Research

The following transcript has been edited for your reading enjoyment.

We are headed to coal country, just outside Wheeling, West Virginia, to talk to Brian Joseph, founder, CEO, and president of Touchstone Research Laboratories as well as several other companies pertinent to the heat treat industry.  If you thought coal was a commodity of the past, I suggest you buckle up for one of the most interesting Heat Treat Radio episodes that will widely expand your appreciation for coal and its future uses in the heat treat industry.

I was introduced to Brian Joseph by Heat Treat Today's lead editor, Karen Gantzer, who just happens to be a relative of Brandon Robinson, a young, very sharp engineer working for one of Brian Joseph's companies, Touchstone Advanced Composites.  Brian and Brandon hosted both Karen and I at their campus in Triadelphia, WV, earlier this year, and were gracious enough to spend an entire afternoon showing us around and talking with us about some of the exceptionally fascinating esoteric work they're doing for all sorts of world leading companies in aerospace, defense, and energy as well as a host of other government agencies and national labs.  I think you'll find this episode fascinating, and I bet you're going to learn something new about coal.

Brian Joseph is the president, CEO, and founder of Touchstone Research Laboratory, as well as Touchstone Advanced Composites, Touchstone Testing Laboratory, and CFOAM Limited.

BJ:  I grew up in the panhandle of West Virginia and went to a local university, West Liberty University, and did a little bit of graduate work at Ohio State.  I then started my own business.  I never had a "job."  I've only owned my own business, and that is Touchstone Research Laboratory.  At Touchstone, we invent all kinds of things.  We put out, sometimes, a patent a month, and then we spin businesses out.  We've spun out three businesses in the last three years, and we have probably three more in the works today.

DG:  If I remember correctly, you're doing stuff for the aerospace industry and the automotive industry.  What other major markets are you hitting on?

BJ:  As you can envision, an innovative company like Touchstone Research Laboratory is far ranging.  We do a lot of work in aerospace, we do work in automotive, we do work in general manufacturing; we're inventing all kinds of things all the time.  And then there are our spin-out companies.  Touchstone Laboratory has three locations.  We do a lot of aerospace testing for virtually every aerospace company at those facilities. We test all kinds of materials at Touchstone Testing.

Then we spun out CFOAM, which is probably what we'll talk mostly about today.  This is a foam we make from coal.  In the research lab, we do a lot of coal-to-products research.  This is a foam that is extremely strong and can withstand really high temperature.  CFOAM is a publicly traded company today on the Australian stock exchange.  The applications for that are in numerous markets, one of which is in heat treating.

The third business is called Touchstone Advanced Composites.  Touchstone Advanced Composites takes the foam that CFOAM makes and builds the molds for next generation carbon fiber airplanes, rockets, etc.  Many of these are companies that you would recognize--all of the big aerospace companies, all of the commercial launches to space; we work with virtually everyone to build the molds to make their carbon fiber parts, and we do that on coal, which I think is sort of surprising to people.

DG:  I get excited about this.  This is what I want to tease our audience about a little bit, if you will, is coal.  The place of coal in heat treat.  Where might we find it currently, if at all?  And, in your mind, because I know you're very much a forward thinker, where do you see coal being used in the heat treat market, or even outside the heat treat market in the future?

BJ:  Today, the big uses for coal are electricity, to make electricity to run kilns and things.  In steel making, the coke for steel making and in cement production, we often burn coal to heat the cement.  These are current uses.

Many years ago when I was a kid, there was this basketball player that was named Lou Alcindor, and he was dunking the basketball at will and just dominating college basketball.  So they outlawed it.  They said nobody's allowed to dunk anymore.  In general, you would think that would be devastating.  But no, he just invents a special hook shot called the “sky hook” and now, all of a sudden, he can score from 20' out at will.  He became one of the highest scorers in basketball.  To me, that's what is going on in coal right now.  The things that it is dominating today, that is its primary markets, are under a lot of pressure.  But when I look out, what do I think is going to happen, is a huge number of products.

Let me tell you what we're doing right now.  We take the coal in the CFOAM business, we grind it into powder, we heat it under pressure, and we blow it up into beautiful black foam.  (Think Styrofoam only a thousand times stronger and good to enormously high temperatures, like probably up to 3000°C.)

Over at Touchstone Advanced Composites, they're building the molds to make carbon fiber airplane parts because the foam is high temperature so it will go in the autoclave.  It's very strong. It also does not expand and contract hardly at all with changes in temperature, and that's what you want in the best mold-making material.  What I get a kick out of is, you take coal out of the ground and all of a sudden we're making parts for the James Webb space telescope.

Where else will it be used?  Wow, anywhere you could think of a really high temperature.  Just imagine Styrofoam a thousand times stronger and fireproof.  Where would you use it? Everywhere.  When I think heat treatment, where do I think the obvious applications are? Kiln furniture--the strength of this stuff compresses strength of the low density material is over a thousand pounds per square inch.  Kiln insulation because it is very insulating--especially kiln floors.  Now all of a sudden, you've got a carbon floor you could walk on that is an insulator.  And, by the way, the higher density material that we make has a compressive strength so high you could set a car on one square inch and it wouldn't crush, so we're talking really high strength.

You can pass electricity through it and use it as a heating element, and we've done that at times.  I could envision someone building some kilns where you lay it up like you do refractory brick today, only a carbon version of refractory brick.  One of the other ones that we don't typically think about, and is this in the heat treatment area?  I don't know, but it's sort of interesting.  CFOAM has a program with Argon National Laboratories.  Argon is working on concentrated solar power. This is the thousands of mirrors in the desert that reflect light up to a single point, and then that heats a fluid and it goes underground and it melts like a salt (like sodium chloride, like the stuff you eat) or magnesium chloride.  You're over 1400°F, so the salt is great material to hold the heat, but it's a really bad material to conduct the heat.  So we're taking the salt, putting it in the pores of the foam, and then using the ligaments of the coal foam to conduct the heat to store the energy in the salt.  Again, what I like about that is we're going to store solar power in coal, which is, again, counterintuitive.

DG:  And a bit of an irony, right?

BJ:  Yes!  I think you're going to see these carbon foams everywhere.

DG:  When we think of the heat treat industry, we certainly don't think about using coal; but in some of these new applications, like you say, being pressed in their major markets, whether it's energy production and things of that sort, there are new applications, and Touchstone Research Labs is developing some of these things.  That to me is what is interesting.

Let's talk outside of heat treat for just a minute.  I want to prime you on one of them, and then if you think of others, feel free to run with them.  You and I spoke previously about the use of coal as architectural structures in the future in place of concrete structures.  Can you hit on that a bit, and if there is anything else outside of the thermal part of coal being used outside the heat treat industry, just go ahead and roll right into those?

BJ:  We're working with a gentleman named Mark Goulthorpe.  He is an architect at MIT.  He has a program called Carbon House with the Department of Energy.  Specifically, it's an ARPA-E program, that's their real advanced technology area, and he presents this story.  He says the world population has been increasing at a very high rate of speed, but the wealth didn't spread around the world for a long time, so people didn't have much money, they didn't make much, and they didn't buy much, so we didn't notice them so much.  But what's happened in the last 20 years, maybe the greatest accomplishment of man in the last 20 years, is we've reduced that extreme poverty 80% worldwide, which is just extraordinary.  So now, all of a sudden, the complex part of this is that these people are moving to cities at a rate of a million people a week.  That means, inside 30 years, we will need to double the number of houses and buildings on the surface of the earth inside 30 years.  The construction boom has already started.  Imagine you've got to build a million, I'll say apartments, and office buildings and things every week until after the year 2050.  He points out, what are we going to build all of this out of?  There is not enough wood on this planet.  You can't use concrete.  If we're concerned about global climate change and that puts out more carbon dioxide than burning coal, so what are our options?  He points out that the answer is probably buried in our hydrocarbons.  Things like methane to carbon nanotubes where we take the carbons and the methane and we make carbon nanotubes.  That will be part of the structure.  Take the hydrogen and make that the fuel.

And at MIT, that's what they're thinking the future is.  And CFOAM will probably play a major role in these kinds of structures because at the end of the day, the coal that we make the foam from is very inexpensive, available in extraordinarily large quantity, and can make fireproof structures that are inexpensive and with a pretty low carbon footprint.  The production of the foam is a very small carbon footprint production.  It does not produce much pollution or production of much CO2 and that kind of thing.  So it's fairly green.  It's funny to talk about coal in a green way, but it really is a pretty green product.  And that may be the thing that gets us there.

DG:  Yes. And compared to the manufacturing of concrete, it's a lot greener manufacturing the CFOAM panels, let's say, as opposed to concrete.

BJ:  Yes, absolutely.  Some fun things to talk about for just a minute:  Over at Touchstone Advanced Composites, we've made the molds to make parts for the James Webb space telescope.  This will be the greatest telescope, I think, the world has ever produced.  I think it's 8 times bigger than Hubble, it will be located a million miles from earth, just so everyone can have a little yardstick, that's four times the distance to the moon, and it will see back in time till to the creation of some of the first galaxies.  We've made all of these parts on molds made from coal.

We just finished building the molds to make the communications dish antenna for the NASA wide field infrared telescope, which is the size of Hubble, and that is going up soon.  We just finished the structures that will be on a solar sail for NASA.  Let me tell you what a solar sail is:  Imagine a kite, only square.  So you have two sticks on a kite.  We're going to make those out of carbon fiber, but we're going to make them in a special way that collapse, so that they go into a box 2' x 2', but when you get up into space, you open this box up and this rolls out 54 ½ ' in all directions.  You end up with this 110' solar sail that is up in space.  What's going to happen is, the light from the sun moves this thing.  Just the light, no propellant.  It will go 240 thousand miles an hour.  And we've built all the molds from CFOAM that we make from coal.

We do work with virtually every one of the commercial launches to space.  We just did the front end of a supersonic aircraft and dozens of other new aircraft that are being built.  All of that is being done on CFOAM.  That's a whole group of fun things we do.

DG:  Can you tell us about MetPreg?

BJ:  At Touchstone Research Laboratory, we're developing the world's strongest aluminum.  This is aluminum with fibers in it.  It's aluminum oxide fibers in aluminum.  What's really interesting about it is it's the highest temperature aluminum that exists, so this will be useful at temperatures up to 1000°F.  It will keep 80% of its strength.  It's 3 times stronger than the world's strongest aluminum alloy.  This is not made from coal.  This is aluminum with fibers.  We either make it in a tape form or pultruded form, or we make it into cylinders by film winding it, like you do polymer composites.  It is a whole new class of materials, and our plan is to spin that out into a separate company, probably within the next year or so.  Right now we're developing the business plan.

We are doing this on-scale already.  It's already been put on a ship.  One of the applications, by the way, is repairing the structures in large ships, especially aluminum hold ships, for fatigue in particular.  Some of these ships are tracking hundreds of fatigue cracks in the structural component, and we can use this as a patch to repair the ships while at sea and have a permanent repair.  This is an application, by the way, that I wouldn't have even come up with.  This is one that the navy came to us and said, is this something you guys could do? So we've been working in a development program with the navy.  It about a million dollar program.  While in the program, we're already on our first ship and we're really excited about that.  That application is ready to go but many of the other applications are still in development.

DG:  You've already run down a list of some of your customers, but maybe just give us a sense of the breadth and depth of your customer base, as many as you're comfortable telling us about.

BJ:  On the aerospace side, it's virtually everyone in aerospace, from your Boeing and Airbuses, Embraer, to some of your smaller ones that are suppliers to that industry.  We have hundreds and hundreds of people, especially using the CFOAM.  In terms of MetPreg, we're not there yet with flying on airplanes, but I'm really confident we will get there.  We can probably mention the work we do with Virgin. I love Richard Branson, by the way. He is a hero of mine; I think the world of him.  We've done work with some of his companies--Virgin Orbital, Virgin Galactic. They are two separate companies. Virgin Galactic is the one that's going to take people into space.

I want to spin back around and talk about what that means, taking people to space.  The thing we think about is rich people going for joy rides, which is good, and there is a market.  But don't think of it like that.  I think he's building this next generation aircraft that, for example, we'd take off from LA.  Well, it's just as easy to drop you in Chicago as it would be back to LA, in fact I think it's easier.  So I see this is as the beginning of a new way to fly around the world.

I'll give you another one--SpaceX.  They have a similar vision. SpaceX rockets are very different.  They're going to land vertical.  Richard Branson's is going to look like an airplane.  It's going to be more normal looking, but they won't go that fast; they'll go a couple thousand miles/hour maybe, whereas SpaceX is going to go like 18,000 mph.  I saw the president of SpaceX give a talk.  (In fact, by the way, one of our people got to meet Elon Musk just a few weeks ago, and he came back with the biggest grin on his face.)  So the president of SpaceX, says, "I do a lot of business in Riyadh, and I can't wait for the day that I take off from here in California, fly to Riyadh, (it will take about 40 minutes and most of that is landing), and then we'll fly back home in time to fix dinner for the family." It just made me smile. Gwynne Shotwell is awesome in every way.

Now Virgin Orbital is different.  Virgin Orbital shoots rockets up in the air.  They come off of a Boeing 747 that they've named 'Cosmic Girl,' and then it goes into orbit.  That does go fast.  It is not to carry humans, it's to put satellites in orbit.  It's an inexpensive way to put satellites in orbit.  You fly the 747 as high as you can, you tilt it a little bit upwards and you shoot your rocket right into orbit.  It's a lot less expensive than launching from the ground.  That's another one of Richard Branson's businesses and they have a great team of people working there.  I'm really optimistic about it.

For your heat treatment people, think about the temperatures we're dealing with.  The rocket motors are all super high temperature, just through the atmosphere.  It takes you up into the thousands of degrees.  So all the things your client base works with is what the outside of all of these vehicles is.  It's just interesting.  And yet, I don't know that they think in that world right now.  When you look at the number of launches going into space right now, we in the United States don't track what's going on around the world so much, so I'll give you just one example.  Rocket Lab has what they call the Electron rocket.  It will be launched from New Zealand.  Now, I was unaware that New Zealand ever launched a rocket, it's just not something I was aware of.  They're planning to launch 300 launches a year--in New Zealand!  So, what do you think the worldwide going in and out of space is going to be here in the next decade or two? I think it's going to be really large.  And markets for things like thermal protection systems or high temperature components is going to be much bigger than anyone realizes.

DG:  Shifting just a little bit.  Obviously, the organization that you've developed, Touchstone Research Laboratory, etc., your whole organization, all of them, have been very innovative.  Can you speak to the, let's say, culture there and the method by which you push the innovation?  How do you make such an innovative organization?

BJ:  You may have picked up on something with that question.  You've been here, you've walked through, and you have a feel for how we sort of work.  I went to Dearborn, Michigan, once and I went to the Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village.  (If anyone has never been there, you've got to go, especially if you like technical things.)  And there, Henry Ford bought Edison's first research laboratory and rebuilt it there.  It's four buildings, so you walk through the world's first industrial research laboratory.  I went there one day about 4 years ago, and I was not necessarily a big Edison fan.  I knew who he was and everything, but when I walked into this building, it was like something was overly familiar.  So I said to my wife, “I have to go back there and spend a day by myself just in the buildings and just look around.”

Here's what I figured out:  As you know, I never "got a job." I went to graduate school, came out, and started my own research laboratory from scratch.  I didn't know all of the modern processes to manage a laboratory.  So I'm sort of figuring out from scratch as a kid in my twenties and trying to work my way through.  And what I ran into was a process that ends up being almost identical to what Edison did.  I'm not saying I'm smart like Edison, I'm just saying that my invention process ended up remarkably similar.  Here's how it goes: In R&D, you need some well educated people, they've got their PhD from Berkeley or MIT or wherever, for example.  But then there is this other group that fabricates stuff.  This person, maybe from MIT, says, “Hey, what if we make this vacuum chamber and heat in this way with microwaves and then we put UV light in?” and that's my idea on Monday morning.  Now it's about how fast can we turn that into something real, run our experiments, and get to the next thing.  In R&D, the thinking part is seconds, minutes, or hours, but the doing part is usually days, weeks, and months.  So if you want to collapse your time of invention, you work on that second side, and you get the best technicians you can.  And they make the people with the high degrees look really smart.  So it's how you blend those together that I think can create this really unique environment, and I think that's sort of money that tricks behind what we do.

In addition to that, we're a real flat organization and things like that. There are a lot of things that people don't know about Edison's management approach, but he dressed down for work. He didn't want to be seen as the boss at work. He just blended in and went from person to person. When investors would show up, people would be running around, saying, “Get him cleaned up!” At work, he didn't have any airs about him, which is the right answer. The more central control you have, the less your organization has that ability to just run. You've got to handle your organization very gently. He was the first guy to ever build an industrial research facility. He did amazingly well with it, but he was less than perfect. In recent years, there's been a lot of complaints about the details of what he did, but he was the guy out there blazing the trail, so I give him a lot of credit for that.

DG:  Let's circle back around to CFOAM for just a moment.  CFOAM, current and future, especially where it hits on the heat treat market.  Where would we see CFOAM?  You mentioned the fact that the mechanical properties are very strong, it could be used for floors and furnaces, it could be used for hearth piers, hearth rails, could be used for the sides of furnaces.  One of the issues in the heat treat market that we have to be careful about is, you know, the guys on the forklifts who smash the trays into the sides of the furnace during loading and unloading.  I assume there is some strength here in the CFOAM that you might not have another especially ceramic materials, but also maybe some of your metal walls, if you will.

BJ: The foam can be made in a wide range of densities too.  When you were here, I think I showed you two densities that we predominantly manufacture today. One is 20 pounds/cubic foot and the other is 30 pounds/cubic foot. But you can make it up to 90 pounds/cubic foot, which at that point it is massively strong and very high temperature, but not as insulating.  There is a trade-off between insulation and strength.  So what we can do for some of those applications is dial in "what is the appropriate mechanical properties versus thermal properties for an application?" because the technology is really robust that way. In fact, one of the challenges to new materials like this is deciding what is the thing I want to make this week.  Because you can offer all kinds of things, so you have to figure out what are the things you think your customers want.  If customers look at our properties and they're not exactly what they need, there is a good chance we could make some adjustments and make something with either more conductivity, less conductivity; in fact, there is a whole group of things we haven't talked about, which is the other end of the spectrum--very high thermal conductivity foams.  We have some foams that we can make with the thermal conductivity of aluminum at one-fifth the weight.  To me, is there a market?  Does this relate to heat treaters?  It's not obvious to me, and I'm not down on the details of that business, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if someone listening doesn't say, “You know, that's exactly what we need! A carbon that's very thermally conductive.”  So that's the other end of the spectrum.

DG:  So you can make the foam either thermally insulative or conductive, either way?

BJ:  That's right.  And we can bury the electrical properties through ten orders of magnitude, from 10 million ohm centimeters to .1 ohm centimeters.

DG:  The question that jumps into my mind, and this may not be a fair question to ask you, but let me ask it anyhow: The commercial viability of these CFOAM products in the heat treat market.  You can use them as heating elements, I assume.  I don't think we see much.  We see a lot of graphite heating elements, but heating elements, I assume for structural parts, perhaps.  The one that jumps to my mind, and I think I mentioned it to you when I was there, was radiant tubes, which are the metal tubes are somewhat, they have a life cycle, let's put it that way.  Because of thermal cycling, they do tend to, at some point in time, crack or whatever.  We have some companies that are making radiant tubes out of ceramic-type material, but there are sometimes issues with breakage.  My thinking is, is it possible that perhaps we could get coal based radiant tubes even, that are very strong yet very thermally conductive?

BJ:  Yes, I think such a thing would be possible.  I can't tell you that I could give it to you tomorrow afternoon, but absolutely.  I think the material can do it.  I think we can figure out how to actually make that on volume. I think that's very doable.

Another thing: the foam is porous.  Are there situations where you want to bring nitrogen in through the wall at really, really low speeds for some reason, while heating to very high temperature? I don't know; or any other gas--hydrogen or whatever.  I haven't had that need, but I'm not in that particular marketplace that might have that need.

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