Garage Band: Lessons learned for Cedar Rapids tube cleaning manufacturer

CORALVILLE - A Coralville company is helping businesses save money and prevent unexpected failures of heat exchangers with technology manufactured in Eastern Iowa.

Innovas Technologies was formed in 2014 after Chuck Dirks experienced financial ruin trying to import technology from abroad.

'It ended up breaking me, which was a good lesson to learn. I call it ‘tuition,'” recalled Dirks, president of Innovas Technologies.

'My engineering director and I looked at it and said, ‘Why aren't we doing this ourselves?' We can do it 10 times better, and not only that, there's about 16 avenues for innovation that would make it a lot more applicable in the marketplace.

'So we traded in our baseball card collections and started a manufacturing company.”

Heat exchangers are devices that transfer hot fluid that flows through one part of the exchanger and transfers its heat either to a cool fluid - water or air, for example - in another part or to the outside air. The fluid moves through metal tubes.

'The fluid fouls the tubes as it moves through them and it acts like a big insulator,” Dirks said. 'It costs more and more to achieve the heat exchange needed for whatever process is involved.”

Heat exchanger condensers usually are cleaned once a year by shutting down the system and using high pressure water and sometimes chemicals to remove the build up in the tubes.

Innovas Technologies's Helios automatic tube cleaning system injects foam cleaning balls at set intervals into the cooling water flow. The balls rub the tubes clean and are trapped at the outlet of the heat exchanger, where they are prepared for the next cleaning cycle.

'With the tubes clean, the heat transfer efficiency is optimal all the time,” Dirks said. 'When the tubes are cleaned once a year, the system is back to being inefficient within two or three weeks.”

Innovas Technologies, which is debt free, has sold Helios cleaning systems to clients in the oil and gas, power generation, industrial manufacturing and commercial cooling industries. Customers include Archer Daniels Midland, Chevron, Dominion Power, Shell Oil, the University of Notre Dame and the University of Virginia.

Dirks said Innovas Technologies, which employs three people, contracts with Modern Piping in Cedar Rapids to fabricate components of the Helios tube cleaning system.

Van Meter in Cedar Rapids supplies heating, ventilation and air-conditioning controls, and ESCO Group in Marion provides services for large industrial applications.

'One of our strategies is that we're really aggressive in keeping low overhead,” Dirks said. 'We have money in the bank and we are trying to stay philosophically in that mode.”

With sales expected to grow about 400 percent this year, Dirks said Innovas Technologies will need to hire additional employees.

Last month, the company was awarded a $225,000 National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant to conduct research and develop a mobile submersible micro-sensor system.

'These 10- to 14-millimeter drones will continuously detect tube failure, capture unusual vibration signatures and provide speed and temperature readings inside a heat exchanger,” Dirks said. 'It will enable businesses to fix things in advance.”

When it awarded the grant, the National Science Foundation said the company's research 'will lead to products designed to eliminate more than $40 billion in unnecessary waste attributed to damaged or fouled heat exchangers.”

'We booked more business in January than we did in all of 2016,” Dirks said.

l 'Garage Band” is a new twice-a-month feature about the entrepreneurial process - somewhere between the inspiration and the startup. Send your suggestions to michaelchevy.castranova@thegazette.com.