Miami-based Abakan Inc. announced that the Wall Street Journal has given its global 2012 Technology Innovation Awards for Manufacturing Technology to MesoCoat Inc. and its CermaClad technology. Abakan Inc. is the parent company of MesoCoat Inc, and invests in additional companies that have developed transformational technologies on the cusp of commercialization.
MesoCoat's CermaClad technology was selected because it sets a new, hard-to-meet benchmark in productivity, performance, and cost in the metal coating and cladding industry, offering up to two orders of magnitude improvement over current state-of-the-art cladding technologies.
The primary application of Abakan's CermaClad technology is cladding pipes used in extreme applications such as the production and transportation of corrosive oil; transportation of highly abrasive oil sand and mining slurries; transportation of other corrosive and abrasive oil, gas, chemicals, and acids; pressure vessels, reactors, and tanks used in nuclear, desalination, oil and gas, chemical, and other industries; as well as several other applications where the operating environments are extreme and challenging.
Abakan intends to establish large four-line clad pipe manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, the Middle East, and Asia that can each produce approximately 100 kilometers of corrosion- and wear-resistant clad pipes. The company is currently completing the construction and installation of its first clad pipe manufacturing facility in Ohio, which, once operational in the first quarter of 2013, is anticipated to be the largest such facility in the U.S., with an annual production capacity of 25-30 kilometers of clad pipe.
"We are very pleased to be recognized by The Wall Street Journal as the top global innovator in manufacturing for 2012. This, of course, follows our being ranked by Forbes as the number-one most promising material science company in the U.S. in 2011," stated Robert Miller, CEO of Abakan. "Our CermaClad technology provides a faster, better, and more cost-effective way to apply protective coatings on metals that enable the metal assets to last up to 10 times longer than their current design life."
"Our CermaClad, high-speed, large-area metal cladding technology has the potential to cause a paradigm shift in the industry," continued Mr. Miller. "Our goal is to make metal assets last up to 10 times longer, reducing the huge environmental footprint that is left behind when these metals do not last their design life. There are 2.4 tonnes of CO2 emission for every tonne of steel that is manufactured; imagine the positive environmental impact we can make by making this steel last up to 10 times longer."
Abakan- www.abakaninc.com
