Business as Usual: PPG Industries Talks Clean Energy Tech

Transcription: 

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Audrey Russo, President and CEO, the Pittsburgh Technology Council, another day of business as usual, and another day have a great, great guest. We are pretty thrilled about our guests today from PPG. I will introduce him in a moment. And I want to tell you that Jonathan kersting is with us. He's vice president of all media and marketing. And he is going to make sure that if there are questions that they get asked, and we can manage the exchange, which with our guest, I want to thank Huntington bank for their continued support of us over the many, many months that we've done this work as well as the many years that we've had a friendship and partnership with them. And all things small businesses, as well as large size businesses is the work that they do, and they're very civically involved in our community. So today is our 100 and 30th session of business as usual, and we launched it at the beginning of the pandemic. And it looks like we're now entering the third season of the pandemic. So I'm hoping all of you are safe and sound. And if you have ideas that you want to hear about, just shoot us a note and we'll make sure that we're including we're trying to make sure that we're including all the themes that affect the business and tech community. And that's why today we have Callum, I'm going to introduce Callum Monroe in a minute. He is the senior scientist for mobility at PPG. Now, we have muted your microphone, so just remind that we don't want to hear the background and then please use the chat session. So welcome to the program. Callum, before we talk about PPG and some of the exciting work that you actually do there. We tell us a little bit about who Callum is who Callum Monroe is. And a little bit about your journey that took you from the High School of Glasgow to PPG place and how you became excited about working in chemistry. So Callum,

yeah, so Hi, everybody, Audrey great to speak with you again. I don't normally like to talk about myself. But as you indicated, I'm a son of Glasgow. So born brought up in Glasgow educated in Glasgow, exposed to science and technology from a very kind of early age there it was, it was one of those annoying kids that was always asking questions, you know, how does something work? Why does something work? Even more annoying was one of those kids that like to take things apart to really try and understand some of that myself. And that didn't always work out well, in terms of being able to put things back together. But was encouraged from a very early age to continue to kind of ask and probe those types of questions. And realize that science and technology in general was a great way to do that, you know, through life, do it as a living and have a lot of fun with that. So you know, as indicated, started off in Pittsburgh, educated are sorry, start off in Glasgow educated in Glasgow. Don't remember my own story. Now. Journey to Pittsburgh came after I finished graduate school, I was actually trained as a forensic scientist, you might wonder why a forensic scientist is working at PPG. But I think that just talks to the kind of portability of science in general, but trained as a forensic scientist, kind of pivoted a little bit at the end of that early stage of my career into analyzing different materials, looking for ways to monitor and detect very, very small amounts of some very specific things, including it very, very long distances. That got me into some pretty interesting lines of work with some different government agencies. And that's really what brought me to Pittsburgh was some of the specific science that I was doing, I needed to be able to access in my own mind. Anyway, some new laser technology that was being newly developed, that was happening in Pittsburgh, so I came in with the intention of being here for six weeks. And that's almost 30 years ago. So Pittsburgh, obviously worked pretty well for me made the decision to stay. met my wife here. She's also a scientist. So you could say it was the chemistry that brought us together. I know corny. But you know, she was she was studying Pittsburgh at this point. So find myself in Pittsburgh, and again, kind of pivoted, you know, worked for a friend groups associated with the Pittsburgh area, a couple of companies headquartered here. And that's what brought the connection with people PPG and it was, you know, originally an opportunity to help them short term solving a problem. At that point in time, it was a problem that they were trying to solve related to the way they were manufacturing glass. So that's what kind of brought me into PPG. And then move from opportunities and problems associated with glass to a multitude of opportunities and problems associated with paints, very passionate about paint. And I've been a PPG for 24 years now. Wow. You know, I began thinking about all the different ways that paint can solve world problems.

Wow, I can't wait to to dive into that. So we're glad to have you here. We're glad to have just the perspectives. And I love your analogies that you made. So this is going to be fun. So yesterday, let's say your title right now is senior scientists. I just want to remind everyone senior scientists for mobility at PPG. So that that's, that's, that can take a whole bunch of directions, right? So like one day?

Yeah, absolutely. So I, you know, I've been fortunate enough to work in a number of different science and technology roles. Over my time, which has given me the opportunity to interact with a huge number of different end markets that the PPG serves, it started to pull me into some challenges associated with with energy storage, obviously, it's clean energy week, and it's great to be talking about energy this way. It's a topic that I'll come back to because it's something that we're we've been broadly passionate about for a while, but started to take a look at different ways that paint could help with energy storage, specifically around lithium ion batteries. And then, you know, from there, we really recognize that there were a lot of changes that were occurring in the way people and things are moved. You know, it's really kind of evolving, right before our eyes. So we're seeing not only vehicle electrification, general trend, but we're seeing this broad push towards, you know, various different transportation assets being highly connected, so that you can connect with the vehicle in a unique way, the vehicles can kind of talk to each other, they can talk to the infrastructure, they can talk to enterprise, you know, there's a lot of different ways that, that these vehicles are being connected, and a lot of new challenges and problems associated with that. And again, my firm believer that pink unsolvable problems, so. So there's plenty of places where pain can solve those problems. So you know, mobility, we're thinking about it in those terms, some of the challenges associated with autonomous vehicles, and then some new challenges that are really coming about with the the shift in ownership with vehicles. You know, we're obviously seeing shared mobility services kind of blossoming in different forms around the world, whether it be ride sharing, or vehicle sharing, coming through, and that's going to continue to evolve. And I think as that evolves, you know, the vehicle assets are going to be used very differently than they used to be, the ownership is going to be quite different than it used to be. And again, it just presents a whole series of new fun challenges and new fun problems to think about.

So, you know, yesterday, Tesla talked about they hosted, you know, it being, you know, clean energy week, yesterday was battery day, they announced some really ambitious plans, as they always do. And not surprisingly, it relies, obviously, on chemistry and advanced materials, which was obviously near and dear to your heart. So, you know, with Can you talk about some of the challenges that we face in there, in addition to what you just spoke about? What other challenges are we facing right now? I mean, yeah, obviously, storage is big once we can really conquer that. I think the world will change significantly, but what about from your view?

Yeah, if I take a step back, and I'll kind of circle back to the Tesla battery, and you know, how that relates specifically to, to batteries and electric vehicles, but you know, from a, from a kind of very broad perspective, energies, all of a sudden, something that impacts all of us. And, you know, I would say that across pretty much all aspects of industry commerce, there's been, thankfully a lot of ongoing concern about how we just manage energy more effectively. And I absolutely see that and what we do at PPG. It's one of those things that dates back long before my time within PPG. Very, very long time. We've been worried about energy, you know, very much a kind of persistent mega trend that that's caused us to think a lot about some of the challenges that we should try and help address. And those take a lot of different forms. You know, in some cases, it's, it's as simple as making sure that we're very efficient in the way we're, we're using energy. So that we're designing materials that can be manufactured much more cost effectively, much more energy effectively. So that we're conserving an awful lot of what we do is to help our customers conserve energy, you know, again, we we think about giving them a material solution. But very often that material is designed in a way that they can use it at a fraction of the energy use that traditionally that have been able to provide the benefits that they're trying to bring in their products and provide for their end customers. And that conservation piece really sort of pushes out to the end consumers to there's there's many coatings that that we kind of work on develop that, that really add the functionality of some kind of energy capture some kind of energy management, beyond protecting and decorating, which is what we typically think about paints doing, you know, they make things look pretty, and they stop them from being damaged as they're in the in use environment. But, you know, we've got a long, long history of providing coating solutions that help transportation helped the building envelopes that we live in, and that we work in just be much more energy efficient. So we can be capturing sunlight, when we want to do that in a variety of different ways. Or we can be blocking it so that we continue to get all the benefits of visible light, but we're we're kind of not having to deal with all the energy load of some of the invisible wavelengths that cause things to, to heat up. So, you know, there's, there's areas like that, and then we've actually got quite a long history in helping with the production of energy to, and lots of ways that you wouldn't necessarily think about, but you know, we've had programs helping solar programs helping wind be much more efficient and effective. By bringing some coating based solutions to, you know, the, from technologies that we would normally think about, there, you know, things from keeping the front of a solar panel clean, making it much more transmissive, but the energy wavelengths that you want to be able to capture, but also managing heat associated with with some of those those units to, on the wind side, you know, both onshore and offshore assets, some environments that can be particularly offshore, fairly aggressive, you know, you're surrounded by salt, water, tends to be pretty aggressive on some of the materials that would be in play there. So we can protect those structures in a number of different ways. Even down to protecting the leading edge, you know, the the edge of a windmill blade actually moves super fast. And so you want to make sure that as it's being exposed to something as innocuous as rain, that it doesn't get damaged. So you know, we can leverage some of the learnings that we have and protecting the leading edges of aircraft, so that they can fly through all kinds of environments of very high speed. And we've adapted that to make sure that you know, the, the edges of the windmills continue to work, they don't get eroded. And those assets are able to just pump higher energy and put energy into the grid without to manage, too.

So those are very interesting and important pieces of the world that many of us just don't have enough Trump view. That's one of the reasons why I love doing this work and having a chance to talk with people like you. You know, next week, we're going to be hosting Chris Thompson. He's CEO of Aurora, right here in Pittsburgh. And they're one of the leading developers of autonomous vehicles in terms of the technologies. So when most people think of this work in Pittsburgh, they actually think of, you know, a lot of the robots and autonomous companies like Uber, Argo, locomotion, you know, and work, but there's a lot more than simply software and sensors, and I think you've given us a little bit of that, but talk about the role really, like in terms of mobility, and you know, the the advanced coatings and what they're playing I mean locomotion and, and those companies that we've had a chance to sort of understand what they're doing. You play a pivotal role in some design work that they did.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So maybe just to close off on On the Tesla battery dp Salva as the Lincoln ability, you know, an awful lot of what we're doing at the moment is really helping to get that next level of large cost effective lithium ion battery technology towards that tipping point, you know, where the from a cost perspective, it can be broadly accepted. So there's a lot of work that's going on there. And it would really amaze you, I think, if you realize just how many coatings and coating like materials are involved in doing that, you know, within the actual battery itself, you open that up and, and what you'll find in there is, is basically just paint on foil, pretty fancy pain on foil, but it's pain on file. And so pain is literally right in the interior of the battery, as you start to look at these larger battery assemblies that are used for electric vehicles, whether autonomous or not, then again, there's lots of challenges that the paint can help address. So the industry is really focused on on solving some challenges associated with performance with safety and manufacturability. And on the safety side of it, you know, nobody wants to be thinking about the worst case scenarios, but you know, we see, see some cases in the media where electric vehicles catch fire, there's a variety of different ways that you can handle that and and believe it or not, a very effective way of doing it is using paint. So we're able to take, you know, some knowledge that we've been applying and conventional energy industries, like an oil and gas management, to protect assets in the in the case of a fire there and adapt it, make it super lightweight, make it very thin, and put it inside these battery assembly so that if bad things happen, then we're actually able to prevent the propagation of the fire there. So we've got that we've got a lot of materials where we're worried about moving heat, lithium ion batteries really like to operate in a very, very narrow temperature window. The world doesn't operate in a very narrow temperature window. So if you're in a cold climate, or you're in a hot climate, there's some work that needs to be done to make sure that the battery stays, you know, in its little happy spot, irrespective of what's happening outside. And so some thermal management materials really come into play there to help do that. So, you know, I could keep going, there's a whole host of Believe it or not coatings, there's far more coating inside the battery of an electric vehicle than all of the traditional pain that we would normally associate with the the exterior of the vehicle in the interior of the vehicle. So that aspect of mobility, the electrification certainly has is very, very excited, because it's a lot of place that we can, we can come help them solve some problems, to your comments on the autonomous piece. Yeah, it's definitely more than software and sensors. But again, a big part of where we can help play a role is making sure that the sensors can work optimally. So many of the sensors are kind of relying on sending out either a beam of light or a beam of invisible light. So you know, these could be near infrared based, it could be radar based. And so for them to work effectively, you want to make sure that that signal gets out of the vehicle, bounces off the environment and comes back into the vehicle where it can be processed. And, you know, there can actually be some challenges doing that in an easy, effective way. You know, nature likes to happen, there's snow, there's rain, there's ice, there's bugs that are out there in the world. So you know, simple things like filing of materials building up in front of the sensor arrays can really impact the way the sensors work. So that's kind of another just simple example of where coatings can come into play. We can protect either the the face shows that are in front of these sensors, or the lenses that are new sensors and keep them clean, keep them working and make sure that the sensors are actually able to function the way you would hope they would once the cars driving themselves. So a lot of different opportunities there too.

There's a question up here that autonomous vehicles have different reflectivity and transmit tivity requirements. Then vehicles, can you answer that?

Yeah. So it's a great question. So today, where you've got primarily conventional vehicles on the road, and a limited number of autonomous vehicles, a lot of the focuses on making sure that The that that vehicle, the autonomous vehicle itself is able to move light in and I move the energy that's been used for sensing in and out. And so there, there's some specific requirements on those vehicles themselves. Silver is a really popular color, you know, if you kind of look around and silver silver, because there's a bunch of little metallic flakes that actually go within the paint. And, you know, it, that's fantastic for reflecting visible light, it's really challenging for transmitting radar. So, you know, some of the things that are evolving are, you know, the popularity of silver vehicles is not going to shift, people still want to buy silver. In some cases, you know, their their brand colors that are associated with silver, you beyond just the the personal preferences that are there. And so there's, there's really some different requirements on how that silver works in front of a sensor on an autonomous vehicle than the conventional silver that would be out there today. So so that's the kind of an eejit with some of these other sensors that are in use things like LIDAR, they're using to our eyes and visible wavelengths of light, you know, they typically operate in the near infrared. So these laser beams kind of shoot out and then be bounced back from objects. And while they're looking at different wavelengths than we would normally see there, there's some kind of analogous absorption and reflection phenomena that are happening. So if you think about visually, there's a big difference between the reflectance from a white car and from a black car, you know, white cars do a great job of scattering in the reflecting a lot of light back, black cars do a fantastic job of absorbing a lot of light. That actually translates through into the the wavelengths that these vision systems work at with things like LIDAR. And so what we want to try and do is improve the reflectivity of what the LIDAR would normally see as black, you know, by by changing the way that light interacts with the coatings and a variety of other vehicles that are out in the system in general that way. But we also want to make sure that we can deliver all the colors. And so part of what we're trying to do there, and it's not necessarily driven by regulation at this point, it's it's more driven by preference of some of the, the, the brand owners is make sure that we can continue to create, you know, all of the colors, but make them easy to see by an autonomous vehicle, you know, whether that vehicles autonomous or not, and this, this doesn't, this isn't just limited to, you know, passenger cars and things like that. It's actually something that we see being fairly quickly adopted by some other types of Fleet transportation. There's a lot of a lot of ebikes that we're now seeing around the world, there's a lot of East scooters that are around the world. And you know, in themselves, they're actually quite small. So there's not, there's not so much of them to reflect back and be seen. But, you know, some some of the major brand owners there are thinking very hard about creating colors that are very, very apparent and easy to see by some of the autonomous vehicles that are coming along. So all kinds of fun challenges. They're very long answer to the to the question, the short answer is, yes, things are different.

Yeah. So Jonathan, there's a question from Dave dummies.

Great question here. So what

we're up to technical advances accelerated more in recent years coulomb, like general battery products or coatings in the application of energy storage. What do you see happening here in the future?

So there's, there's a lot of advancement that's happened in the energy storage site, a lot of focus around lithium ion batteries, you know, the technology itself is now about 20 years old, there, there abouts. And I would say it's in that typical time type of timeframe where we see a lot of comfort in some more traditional users wanting to adopt the technology. But, you know, with the same set of eyes, we're recognizing that there's some limitations that will need to be addressed. And so there's, there's both a combination of iterations around that comfort zone, and also some more dramatic changes that we're seeing getting pushed forward in parallel here. I love them all, because I continue to see just a whole series of opportunities where, you know, we can come in and play. You know, part of the announcement that we heard yesterday was kind of a shift from traditional wet paints inside of inside the batteries to dry paints inside of batteries, which is really, you know, great for us, because it's actually a shift that we've seen in other industries that dates back 4050 years. So we're going to be very flexible to kind of pivot and move with with a lot of these different things. My crystal ball is not good enough to know what the ultimate winner is going to be. And I would suspect that, that several of these were going to see coming into play in parallel. And I just, again, kind of happy that we're, we're well positioned to be able to help with anything else, whichever one plays on

any potential disruptors to see coming down the line, but any chance anything that may be a little nascent technology that can be blue, all this stuff up?

Yeah, there's, there's always some some interesting things that are out there. There's a range of alternative materials, and they're not necessarily new, we're actually seeing, you know, some revisitation of older ways of doing things that that, you know, were very good reasons that they were not pursued a number of years ago. But you know, again, as advancements are made elsewhere, we're coming up with better ways of managing some of the challenges that said, let's not go down that path. So I see there being a real opportunity to get back to words very, very simple energy sales that actually look a lot like some approaches that were tried and, and for good reason dropped several decades ago. And then in parallel, there's some exciting new materials that are coming through to the that still have quite a bit of proving but

a lot of potential.

Are you hiring now? How big is your team? Are you hiring?

So we're constantly hiring the mobility teams, kind of a fun team, because we're, we're really focused on kind of a new market space and opportunity. And, and part of what we're recognizing is an awful lot of the new challenges for mobility are very similar to old challenges for other parts of PPG. And so some problems that we're seeing emerging for an electric vehicle have been solved and some aerospace some some marine type applications on my electronics applications. And so, you know, I, I would say that my team is huge, because I have the ability to tap into all 45,000 employees globally. And I shamelessly do that with every opportunity that I can. So yeah, we're continuing to hire, you know, we're certainly looking for some folks with some specific areas of expertise that are going to be a nice complement to what we have. But again, if I'm working as part of the the biggest team within ppgs, at least the way that I'm reading the rules,

and I love those rules, that's great. So you're a good influencer. So you get a chance to work on a lot of innovation. And if our we're coming to the end, and I know that there were other questions that I had, that we were crafted for you that we might not get to, but if people want to know more, can they reach out to you? Would you feel comfortable with that? Oh, yeah,

absolutely. Either come directly through my website at PPG comm or reach out to me directly. My emails, very simple to find. It's just one role, and you NRO PPG comm so I'm the only mineral in the system, not Maru. 123871.

No, no, that's the advantage of having a very common Scottish name, but maybe not so common here.

Well, it's really been, I was gonna say illuminating, but that's probably a poor choice of words. But it's certainly been, yeah, fascinating to just spend some time doing a little bit of a deeper dive. And just keeping all of our awareness in terms of all the ways that PPG actually touches the New World, just and I loved the, you know, I loved when you talked about bringing technology that might have been sitting on the shelves and then repurposing them from the old world into the new world. And I and I think that really epitomizes the legacy of PPG and for the future, and we're gonna we're pretty proud just to be to be a part of just a little bit of PPG you're involved in autonomy. stay connected with us, we'll stay connected with you. We're proud to have you as a member of our community. And I just wonder how many times do you change the paint colors in your house? Do you paint

Oh, You know, I think about the fact that I obviously get some painted walls behind me here more more often than I may want to admit, as I love paint and paint, I do love. I love paint and painting, in fact that the painting hanging on the wall is one that was created in the house too. But, but yeah, I have no issue with changing my wall columns all the time. There's There's nothing like changing with your moods. And it's it's a super effective way to refresh everything and brighten everything often. So yeah, I would encourage everybody to run out to your PPG paint store today by by a couple of gallons and try a different color. If you don't like it, change it next week.

Callum Monroe, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you for being accessible, and thanking and being thankful that you allowed us to do a little bit of a dive into your world and all those matters

that affect you so much. I love to talk about my world. So thank you.

It's great. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Stay tuned tomorrow. Who do we have on tomorrow?

Tomorrow, we have not bio sciences hanging out with us.

I'm really excited about this one for sure.

That's great. Well, thank you Calvin Munroe. Thank you everyone for joining. Appreciate it and stay safe. We'll see you tomorrow.

Thank you again. Bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai