Local inventor hopes hydrogen process brings success

By LARRY RINGLER Tribune Chronicle

GARRETTSVILLE - The myth of the American inventor goes something like this: The guy next door gets a flash of insight, then spends months, even years, in a dingy garage trying to perfect it.

The next thing they know, newspapers are hailing the guy as the Wizard of Whatnot, and he's driving a Porsche to the bank.

Of course, no one remembers him if he, like the vast majority of Thomas Edison hopefuls, spends his life tilting at creaky windmills that will never make him rich or society better.

Exactly where Leavittsburg resident William Whittenberger and his company, Catacel Corp., will fit into the myth remains unknown. He, however, is hard at work in a large garage-type building outside Garrettsville on technology he believes will play a role in the future hydrogen economy.

The company's Spiral Stackable Reactor made of corrugated stainless steel coated with ceramic impressed the Edison Materials Technology Center in Dayton enough that the group in late January awarded it a $234,352 contract.

Whittenberger's task is to show if the creation can replace less durable ceramic material now used in commercial reformers - large furnaces used by oil refiners, cooking oil makers, fertilizer companies and others to produce the hydrogen they need to make their products.

Oil refiners, for instance, use hydrogen to eliminate sulfur from crude oil, Whittenberger said. Plants that make Wesson and other cooking oil, as well as General Electric in producing tungsten for light bulbs, also need hydrogen.

"If we get this to work and find a niche market, we'll be fat, dumb and happy,'' he said.

If it lives up to expectations, the device could save those companies huge amounts of money by slashing their cost to maintain the reformers, and especially lost production during the maintenance, Whittenberger said.

Commercial reformers can be large-room size structures that sit next to an oil refiner or other plant. Inside the reformer are series of tubes, some 40-feet tall and five or six inches in diameter.

Currently, large quantities of small, loose ceramic material are dumped into each tube. Fired with natural gas, the furnaces then burn at 1,600 to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit to produce hydrogen.

The problem is that over repeated heating and cooling cycles, the ceramic material breaks down, turns to powder and plugs up the tubes, Whittenberger said.

Once that happens, the company has to suck out the ceramic powder and replace it with new material. That process can take three or four days, which cuts the amount of hydrogen the plant can produce, he said.

"It's a tremendous maintenance headache,'' one that can cost millions of dollars a day in lost production, Whittenberger said.

Catacel's solution is to take stainless steel foil, corrugate it, apply a liquid ceramic catalyst to it and package it. The process of making the ceramic "slurry'' is a closely guarded trade secret, said Whittenberger, who said he holds a MBA degree from Pepperdine University and has worked in the field for about 20 years.

The final products, which are about six feet long, are then dropped into each 40-foot tube of the reformer. The new catalyst probably will last two to three times as long as ceramic parts used now, and it may even last the life of the plant, he said.

Besides cutting maintenance, Catacel's product allows the reformer to become a closed system, which increases safety because it doesn't have to be opened to be cleaned like existing systems, he added.

Whittenberger, a native of East Palestine, said he worked seven years in California before returning to the area. He said Ohio has the right business environment for his company.

"There's a very talented work force here. The state is very interested in fuel cells in general,'' he said.

In fact, Catacel's product could be a part of a new energy source for factories to vehicles to houses.

"Homeowners could use this to replace their furnace and hot water tank. They'd have some kind of combined heat device to make heat, hot water and electricity all in one box,'' he said.

In that case, you might just see Whittenberger and coworkers at Catacel driving to the bank in Porsches.

lringler@tribune-chronicle.com