Five Questions With: Neal Fine

NEAL FINE, founder of Aquanis, is using "breakthrough" technology to make wind energy turbines more efficient, bringing down the cost of that form of renewable energy. / COURTESY NEAL FINE
NEAL FINE, founder of Aquanis, is using "breakthrough" technology to make wind energy turbines more efficient, bringing down the cost of that form of renewable energy. / COURTESY NEAL FINE

Neal Fine, CEO of Aquanis LLC in North Kingstown, talks about the company that he founded last year and how he became involved in the wind energy research business, focusing on making wind turbines “smarter.”

PBN: How long has Aquanis been in business? How many employees do you have? How did the company get started? Where are you located?

FINE: I founded Aquanis a little over a year ago, and I feel fortunate to have been joined recently by two very talented and experienced co-workers.

Our origin story begins with my long-standing interest in renewable energy, clean technology and sustainability. Having come of age during the 1970s oil crisis, these topics captured my attention in high school and college. Since attending graduate school at MIT, my primary engineering training and experience has surrounded the discipline of fluid mechanics, and my Ph.D. topic concerned the design and analysis of marine propellers. With my deep interest in clean tech, it was probably no surprise to many of those closest to me that my interest in propellers would eventually migrate to wind turbines. The two systems share many similarities – both use rotating lifting surfaces, one to move a fluid to propel a boat, the other to extract energy from a moving fluid. There are of course differences associated with the liquid versus gas phase of the fluid and other surrounding details, but the physics of lifting surfaces – where all of the interesting things are happening – are largely the same.

- Advertisement -

So over the last five years, my research activities were directed at reducing the cost of wind energy by making wind turbines smarter. The research, which was funded by the U.S. Navy, was not going too well until a technology breakthrough convinced me that the time was right to move the technology from the lab to the marketplace. That’s when I made the decision to start Aquanis.

PBN: Where did the company’s name come from?

FINE: It’s a combination of the word aqua, meaning water, and ignis, meaning fire. The phrase “water fire” has two meanings for me. First, it represents two major themes of my career: my marine hydrodynamics roots, and my recent interest in plasma physics and chemistry. Plasma, which is an ionized gas, is similar in some regards to fire. Second, Rhode Islanders will recognize WaterFire as a distinctly local cultural event that we, as Rhode Islanders, love to celebrate.

PBN: What sort of products/technology do you make?

FINE: Our technology will help to reduce the cost of wind energy. In order to build larger, more efficient and durable wind turbines, designers must find a way to mitigate fatigue loads in the turbine blades. All of the remedies tried to date have moving parts, which are costly and complex. Aquanis is developing a new technology that can address the problem with no blade modifications and no moving parts. The Aquanis system features a blade-mounted plasma flow control actuator, which is a software controlled solid-state electrical device with no moving parts. The device requires no blade modifications, and is simple and inexpensive to implement.

PBN: Tell me about how the company licensed a “plasma actuator” patent portfolio through Notre Dame’s Office of Technology Transfer and how that will be used on wind turbines.

FINE: It probably would not have happened had I not had a professional relationship with Notre Dame Aeronautical Engineering Professor Thomas Corke. Professor Corke has performed seminal research on plasma flow control. We met for the first time in 2010 when we both attended a workshop on the topic. At that meeting, we discovered that we both had an interest in applying the technology to help reduce the cost of wind energy. Last July, when he told me about a technological breakthrough that improved the efficiency of the underlying device by two orders of magnitude, I asked him if the intellectual property was available to license. He put me in touch with the university’s technology licensing office. That started the negotiation process, which ended with a license signing ceremony in April.

PBN: Why did you decide to base your company in Rhode Island?

FINE: Rhode Island is building a new economy focused on advanced industries, including clean technology and renewable energy. The state is home to Deepwater Wind, which is in the process of constructing the first offshore domestic wind farm off the coast of the Rhode Island. The state is also home to excellent universities, including two very strong research universities – which I believe is a key to growing a high-tech economy. The proximity to the Boston/Cambridge hub also provides many great resources for startups. On a more personal note, my wife and I have strong family ties to R.I., having been Rhode Island residents since 1993, and having raised our three children here.

No posts to display