10/1/2024
WT Staff
updated October 2 343 pm EDT
Blazing the innovation trail, Part 2: From Norway to Green Bay, fighting fire without forever chemicals
Interview with Mark Siem, Chemist/Business Development Manager, Perimeter Solutions
WT: Hi Mark, thanks for being here. We are interested in the hearing about the path to developing PFAS-free foam for firefighting. I understand a Norwegian company, Solberg was one of the first in the world to develop an alternative to the "forever chemicals" AFFF aqueous film forming foam. You earlier explained Perimeter Solutions purchased Solberg in 2018 and moved the headquarters to Green Bay, Wisconsin. What is your role in all of this?
Mark Siem My title is currently Business Development Industrial Sector / Chemist at Perimeter Solutions. In the next few weeks I will just be Business Development Manager, I will lead the business development team, that's coming up in a little bit but not right now.
WT: Your technical training and background is chemistry?
Siem: Yes, I've done about 15 years in research and development, developing firefighting foam products both fluorinated and fluorine free. Up until two years ago that's all I knew. So, that's kind of what gives me the background to talk about firefighting foams and their uses, development and all of that.
WT: The first question, I just wanted to clarify, are you the same chemist that Deputy Fire Chief Mark Smith at Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport was referencing when he said he worked directly with the chemist at Solberg (Perimeter)?
Siem: Yes, I was one of two, myself and Mitch Hubert.
See Blazing the trail to PFAS-free firefighting, Interview with Mark Smith, Emergency Planning and Operations Deputy Fire Chief, PortsToronto, here.
WT: Getting away from "forever chemicals" in fire fighting, how did the development of the alternative foam product begin? What prompted the R & D investment for the fluorine-free version?
Siem: Solberg was the original group I worked with. Regulations in Norway came in before the PFAS regulations in the US. They saw this coming a bunch of years ago, probably in the early to mid 2000's they started to have some regulations put in place to limit the use of PFAS-containing materials, especially foam. Solberg said, "We need a new product for the fire industry", and started developing fluorine-free foams from there.
WT: Did they share technology with chemists in the United States?
Siem: A little more background, I will go all the way back then you will get the full picture. There were a few people at Johnson Controls (formerly Tyco/Ansul) that wanted to do something on their own. So, they left and started a foam company in Green Bay, an hour south of Johnson Controls' location. They were looking for some investors, and the Amerex Group based out of Alabama came in. Probably within the year they were able to talk to Solberg, and, as it turned out, Solberg was willing to be bought out. Amerex ended up buying Solberg and moved the corporate headquarters to Green Bay, Wisconsin. We got a brand-new facility, a new lab, a new fire-test building and moved a lot of the operations from Norway to the United States.
WT: About the testing, can you tell us about the process of developing the fluorine-free product and how much testing goes into that?
Siem: I would say there are about eight fire test standards out there. So, it depends what sector you are in, but we will focus on the airport sector. So, I like to look at the airport as kind of a three-pronged approach where you've got the ARF (Airport Rescue Firefighting) trucks, hangar protection and bulk fuel storage. Those are the three main locations where you're going to have flammable liquids. Each one of those has a slightly different fire test standard associated with it. For the crash truck, you are going to look at a US Mil (Military) specification, US Mil-PRF-32725, that's for land-based, freshwater applications. This comes from the US Department of Defense. The US came out with this new fire test standard because the standard for the PFAS-containing products was a little too difficult for fluorine-free foam to meet. So, they developed a standard for the new technology, which makes sense, because the physical and chemical properties of fluorinated and fluorine-free products are pretty different. We developed a product for the new Mil Spec, passed nine different fire tests and a whole bunch of physical properties it had to meet.
WT: Was this adopted in Canada as well or did Transport Canada do something similar to develop a spec?
Siem Transport Canada is working on something similar, and I've been in close communication with them.
WT: We have been in contact with Transport Canada, they mentioned the different properties of these products. Compared to AFFF, how does the new foam perform? Can you speak to some of the differences?
Siem The differences are mainly with the bubble structure. With a fluorinated product you have fluorosurfactant, a fluoropolymer in there that creates a very thin film over the fuel surface, that suppresses the formation of vapor. With the fluorine-free products, you don't have that film, so you need a dense, very stable foam blanket to suppress the vapor. Both foams are doing the same thing, just doing it in different ways.
WT: Can you talk about burn-back?
Siem: With AFFF you have that thin film, so you don't need a dense, really stable foam, you actually want that foam to break down, though not quickly. You don't want the foam to be very stable because you want the fluorosurfactant to spread out on top of the fuel surface area. So, you will have a very small, very thin foam blanket where you are able to suppress the vapors, no problem. With the fluorine-free foams you cannot have a thin foam blanket because there is no film. You need a dense foam blanket to suppress the vapor. The burn back from fluorine-free product, if you don't have that dense foam blanket, the foam will break down too fast and you will potentially go to fire. The heat from the structure and around, whether it's hot metal or concrete, it's going to break down the foam blanket and without the film you would have open fuel.
WT: You've got the fire beat down just to the point that rescue personnel are going in to get passengers out, then you have a sudden breakdown of product, and the burn back starts?
Siem: This question is a really good segue to introduce the training group at Dallas-Fort Worth. They have very good training on fluorine-free foam and how to apply it. Mitch Iles and his team have been working with fluorine-free foam for about eight years, and have developed the tactics and techniques to use fluorine-free foam effectively. If you had an AFFF, you would bring the crash vehicles in and put some foam down, everything is fine. With fluorine-free foam they teach different application methods. They address the need for a foam blanket management team. As there is no film, the foam is going to break down and you're going to have vapors coming up, so there needs to be a foam blanket management team to maintain that dense layer of foam over the fuel surface.
WT: Was Billy Bishop Toronto City the first airport you worked with to roll out the new foam?
Siem: Yes, Billy Bishop was the first. It's kind of interesting, Canada had an exemption in place where you could use fluorine-free foams if they met the ICAO Fire Test Standard. This was back in 2019. Solberg had the product with the best ICAO rating, Level C. So, Billy Bishop chose to switch over to that product. At that time, there was no fluorine-free US Mil Spec. The United States is pushing a little harder on the transition to fluorine-free foam now, but Canada started.
The United States has caught up and developed a new standard, and new products have been developed to meet the standard. As a fire protection company, that is basically what we are doing at Perimeter Solutions. We are developing products to meet fire test standards. Every fire is different. If you look at the refinery side, for example, we don't have the luxury of having a fuel storage tank, lighting it on fire and then developing products to put it out because that's a really expensive development cycle. Instead, we rely heavily on the fire test standards.
WT: So you do your own fire testing on site, this isn't something done by an independent certification body?
Siem: Actually it's both. I will walk you through the process of developing a fire fighting foam. You'll have an idea through research, and you'll go into the lab, potentially order some different chemicals and build up a formulation. You'll do some physical properties in the lab, generate some foam quality data. Foam quality is a combination of expansion ratio and drain time. Those are important for fire fighting foams. With an AFFF you could have an expansion of 4 to 6 and a drain time of 2 to 3 minutes and that was fine but we were finding with fluorine-free foams you need to be in the 5 to 8 times expansion range for best performance, and a drain time as long as you can get. If you can get a drain time of an hour, that's fantastic.
WT: What does drain time mean in this context?
Siem: Drain time is the amount of time it takes for 25% of the volume to drain out of the foam generated. So, for example, we have 100 ml of foam solution, that is 3% foam concentrate with 97% water, you mix those really well and generate foam volume of 900 ml. That's an expansion ratio of 9:1. The drain time is when 25% of that initial 100 ml drains out.
WT: Has the development continued, or have you found the magic formula and sticking with that?
Siem: We are continuing to work forward. Probably in the mid 2000's, that's kind of when the development of fluorine-free foam started. Those products were sometimes good enough to pass fire tests. So, the technology was not very good and not very well known. There was maybe one company, and with that maybe one or two chemists working on it, so there wasn't a lot of work in the world to develop fluorine-free products back then. As the need moved on, we have been able to invest a lot more money and a lot more time into the fluorine-free technology.
WT: Will there be new products coming out?
Siem: Yes, there is a bit more. We had some early formulations that just barely passed, and the formulators, the chemists would take those back to the lab. Because they know the physical properties of each of the chemicals in there, they knew which materials to tweak. Increase this one by a half percent and decrease that one by a quarter of a percent to get the performance they needed. Over time the general trend is upwards to better performance with the occasional "A-ha!" moment where they will take a big jump forward. The products are much more robust now and the foam quality is really good. The products are meeting some of the tougher fire test standards that are out there.
WT: Are you supplying globally or is your focus North America?
Siem: We are a global company, we have manufacturing facilities in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in Asturias, Spain, and St Mary’s, Australia. So we are all over the world but the development of the foam concentrates and the formulation of the work happens in Green Bay and Spain.
WT: Can we go back to the focus on the airport side of things? What are the key components of the performance needed for airport fire-rescue?
Siem: The first property you need is a fast-spreading foam so you are able to suppress vapors as quickly as possible. With this, you need a balance: there are some materials in the formulation that cause the foam to spread really fast, but those same materials also break down the bubbles, so you won't get the long drain time you need. It's a fine balance, getting quick knock-down of the fire, and keeping the foam intact. The first thing you want to do is reduce the heat load on the aircraft to preserve the structural integrity, especially now because they are building some planes with carbon fiber which burns a lot differently than aluminum melts. With that, we are finding we have less time, so we need to have a very quick knock-down to reduce the heat, and then put out all the spot fires, also have a long enough drain time so we don't have to continuously apply foam while everyone is rescued from the plane.
WT: Did you get involved directly with the crash truck manufacturer, or were you working through Mark Smith at Billy Bishop, while he worked with the truck company?
Siem: We worked with Oshkosh Airport Products directly. Oshkosh is located 50 miles south of Green Bay. So, they actually drove a truck up and we tested some products, adjusted some of the hardware, tested again, adjusted and tested again. At the end of the day, they said based on the testing we've done, we don't see that there needs to be any changes made to the hardware. This is with the new generation of Mil Spec products, the US Mil Spec 32725. The product that Billy Bishop switched to was different, there wasn't a spec at the time for Canada. The viscosity was a little higher, which means that it doesn't flow like water. We had to make some adjustments to the truck. We worked at Billy Bishop Airport with one of the engineers from Oshkosh. Oshkosh has crash trucks worldwide, so they need to have the answer when asked about converting to fluorine-free foam, what needs to be done. They sent an engineer up with hardware modifications, we were able to spend one day testing at Billy Bishop and then the next day Transport Canada brought a few people out and witnessed some of the testing to verify that the proportions were correct. We were getting the 3% proportioning, 3% concentrate and 97% water. That was what they wanted to see.
WT: What would you say to the 50% of the airports that are still to make this adjustment in Canada?
Siem: I would say that there are products out now that perform very well. To NOT switch over to fluorine-free foam could potentially cause some environmental release hazards. We are seeing cost to remediate go way up, so the initial investment into fluorine-free foam could save quite a bit of money later on if there were to be a discharge of the AFFF.
WT: That's a good point, I should ask, is there a cost difference for the airports to acquire the fluorine-free foam, what is the price differential?
Siem: Prices are very similar because the fluorosurfactant in the AFFF products accounted for about 80% of the cost. We have had to buy some different chemicals, the cost of those new specialty chemicals are a little higher. As chemistry gets better and we learn a little more we expect the performance to go up and the cost to come down, similar to AFFF over the 65 years that product was developed. We are only ten years in to fluorine-free foam development, so pretty new, in the infancy stage. We have come a long way in a short period of time.
WT: Where would you say you are at in terms of all of the other chemistry businesses that are coming out with similar products? Is Perimeter a leader?
Siem: Yes, the Solberg company in Norway was first, they started the development with a guy named Ted Schaefer, who used to work with 3M. He wanted to develop fluorine-free products, but 3M wanted to get out of the firefighting business. So, he started working with Solberg, I think there is a paper out there that calls him the Godfather of fluorine-free foam.
WT: Interesting, 3M didn’t want to go that way?
Siem: They got out of the foam business altogether so that left Schaefer a “free agent” to go wherever. Perimeter Solutions has been the forefront of this development since. We were the first to come out with one of the Mil Spec fluorine-free products for the US. We were the first to come out with a sprinkler product for airport hangars, we are the first to come out with a system for bulk fuel storage. So, we were the first to develop a lot of the new generation of fluorine-free products. I know I work for Perimeter Solutions, but we are an industry leader, we were the first to do these big product kick-offs.
WT: It was a pleasure to speak with you, thanks so much.
Editor's note: A previous version of this article omitted to mention Mitch Iles as the lead for the training group at Dallas-Fort Worth.
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