Dr. Howitt’s Plunge into Sewers and Startups

Having taken the plunge into the world of entrepreneurship, Dr. Ivan Howitt is learning to apply his research, understand business, change directions, decrease scale, increase production and live without a steady paycheck, all in the cause of developing a superior sewer rat.

An associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Dr. Howitt is on leave of absence from the university while he works to bring to life his new startup company. The company is InfoSense, and its main product is the Sewer Line Rapid Assessment Tool, affectionately known and branded as the SL-RAT®.

“I went from being an engineer who shunned business,” Dr. Howitt said, “to appreciating its importance and embracing it in order to develop a team to grow InfoSense. It’s been a wild ride, highly risky, but it’s certainly been exciting.”

The journey began back in December of 2005, when Lee College of Engineering faculty members had a meeting with engineers from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department. The purpose of the meeting was to brainstorm ideas for how the groups could work together. One of the subjects that came up was the problem of tree roots and grease buildups causing overflows in sewer lines. Current technology for detecting such blockages is expensive and difficult to use.

“Charlotte-Mecklenburg has over 4,000 miles of pipe and on average they had one overflow every day,” Dr. Howitt said. “Finding a blockage before an overflow is the proverbial needle-in-a-haystack problem.”

With research expertise in wireless communications, Dr. Howitt thought he could develop a radio frequency method for inspecting sewer lines and detecting blockages. “A grad student and I did some testing in 2006, but had limited success with RF waves,” he said. “That’s when we had an ‘ah ha’ moment and realized that sound waves had characteristics much more conducive to moving through pipes than RF waves. Some of the old timers at CMUD actually used to shout down pipes to try and hear whether there was a blockage.”

Dr. Howitt presented his ideas to CMUD engineers in 2007 and they were enthusiastic. He then formed the spinoff company InfoSense, a blending of the words “information” and “sensing,” to develop and commercialize the technology.

“The initial concept we worked on in 2008 was a continuous assessment tool,” Dr. Howitt said. “This work was supported through a grant from CMUD. The concept was to deploy the system throughout the sewer system and provide constant monitoring. This was the original SL-CAT, for sewer line continuous assessment tool.”

A big success for InfoSense as a business came in 2009, when it won a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation and Research grant to fund development of the SL-CAT.

“The SBIR grant helped in developing credibility and in providing much needed money,” Dr. Howitt said. “The project was highly successful technically, but we were running into a lot of problems on the business side. The SL-CAT did not fit the immediate needs of the industry. That’s when we made a major decision to move away from continuous assessment, and instead go to portable in-the-field assessment. That was the start of the SL-RAT, sewer line rapid assessment tool.”

In 2010, Dr. Howitt refined the algorithm for quantifying the sound wave for characterizing blockages, the basic building block for the SL-RAT technology. He presented the SL-RAT to CMUD, who saw a real fit for the product, bought the first Alpha prototype, and sponsored a joint pilot project with InfoSense to assess the technology’s performance.

The way the SL-RAT works is a transmitter is set on one manhole of a pipeline segment and a receiver is set on an adjacent manhole. A series of audible tones is sent, and based on how they are received the system can measure the amount of blockage within the pipe.

“The basic concept for the inspection is that the sound waves travels through the open space above the flow, and objects blocking the sound will also block the flow. This provides a measure of the capacity within the pipe to carry additional flow,” Dr. Howitt said. “Upon completing of the inspection, a straight-forward reading of 0 to 10 is provided to the operator, where 0 means there is no access capacity and the pipe is completely blocked, and 10 means the pipe is completely clear.”

Dr. Howitt’s system provides a screening tool enabling the municipal utilities to implement condition based maintenance programs for their wastewater collection system’s cleaning. The SL-RAT performs pipe inspections 10 times faster and at a 20^th of the cost of both the cleaning operations and other inspection technologies based on robotic cameras, i.e., robots with cameras and cable that are sent down the pipes. The SL-RAT allows utilities to prioritize their maintenance operations and target their higher value and more costly maintenance resources to where they are needed most.

“CMUD cleans approximately 20 percent of their system every year.” Dr. Howitt said. “They were cleaning blind, with 40 to 60 percent of their effort being wasted cleaning pipes that were already clean. The SL-RAT allows the industry to both save money and to improve their performance in preventing overflows.”

With the technology side of InfoSense in place, Dr. Howitt began building the business side of the company in 2011.

Working with Ventureprise, UNC Charlotte’s small business incubator, Dr. Howitt was introduced to Alex Chruchill. “We hit it off,” Dr. Howitt said. “He is an entrepreneur with expertise in operating and growing small businesses. With his help we started to put together a business plan.”

Shortly after, they brought on George Selembo, a Ph.D. chemical engineer and entrepreneur who retired before the age of 40. The InfoSense management team was then set with Selembo as CEO, Churchill as COO and Howitt as CTO.

In 2012, InfoSense had manufacturer sales representatives covering the Carolinas and began marketing the SL-RAT to utilities. By 2013, the company had expanded manufacturer representatives to morethan 40 states and internationally including Canada and India.

“We have sold about 60 units so far,” Dr. Howitt said. “We still have a long way to go, though, and there are a lot potential customers out there.”

UNC Charlotte has been very supportive of Dr. Howitt’s entrepreneurial endeavor, he said. “The university has granted me a leave of absence. The resources of Ventureprise have been tremendously valuable and have helped me with something I knew nothing about. And the Tech Transfer group at UNC Charlotte has been very supportive and helpful in protecting the intellectual property and working with InfoSense on licensing the technology through the university and foundation.”

For the future, Dr. Howitt is working on expanding the sound wave technology to applications in pressurized pipes such as water and natural gas. “It’s phenomenal how many pipes there are out there,” he said. “There are some exciting potential markets.”

The scary plunge into the world of entrepreneurship has been personally fulfilling, Dr. Howitt said. “As a faculty member it has been rewarding to help solve a community-based problem. It’s great to apply one’s research. Wastewater collection is not a very sexy industry, but the problem has been challenging and the people in the industry have been phenomenal to work with. Our product provides a new solution to an old problem.

“The period of uncertainty with a startup company is certainly stressful, but overall it’s been exciting. I’m very happy I got the chance to have this experience.”