PHILADELPHIA – While making a cup of coffee, Frank Pringle stumbled onto something that he fervently believes could play a role in meeting acute energy demands.
MICHAEL BRYANT / Philadelphia Inquirer
Frank Pringle ends demonstrations of his microwaving techniques with a flourish, flicking a cigar lighter to a torch and burning off the gas he just produced.
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He said his microwaving techniques put him on the way to disposing of discarded tires as well as cleaning material dredged from rivers.
Over the past year, Pringle has gained recognition at the U.S. Department of Energy and other places where oil-supply issues are studied. The potential of his inventions, for which he is seeking patents, has been heralded by Popular Science and Time magazines.
Last month, Dinesh Agrawal, director of Pennsylvania State University's Microwave Processing and Engineering Center, signed a contract with Pringle's company, Global Resource of West Berlin, N.J., to help him get funding and develop large-scale applications.
“It is very, very significant, what he has done,” said Agrawal, a professor who has been studying microwave uses for 20 years and now is a minor stockholder in Pringle's company. “It could benefit entire mankind.”
How Pringle, 64, of Marlton, Pa., got this far is a saga of experimentation, ardor and serendipitous discoveries by a man who had no background in the energy field.
Pringle was trying to rebound from a big disappointment in the early 1990s. He had invented what he called an economically viable way to recycle glass. But a potential customer found a problem he had overlooked: Much discarded glass is broken or gets broken before it gets to the recycling facility, and ceramics that look like glass get mixed in.
If ceramic material finds its way into a recycled beer bottle, with contents under pressure, it could blow up.
While using an ordinary microwave oven to make a cup of coffee, Pringle discovered that glass gets hotter than other cups and dishes.
“I spent the next two days microwaving everything I could find and recording the temperatures,” Pringle said.
He read up on microwave technology and learned that there are more than 10 million frequencies. He figured there must be a frequency that excites ceramics, making it easy to separate them from glass.
Then came a big Philadelphia tire fire at an illegal dump in 1996, and Pringle's fascination quickly turned to microwaving car tires. Working in a North Carolina laboratory, Pringle said, “we dialed and dialed up microwave frequencies until a tire went poof.”
Car tires, of course, have steel belts, and metal – as many home microwave oven users have accidentally discovered – reacts poorly to microwaves.
“The microwave door hit me in the head a few times before I figured out how to deal with that,” Pringle said.
Oxygen causes that bad reaction, so he microwaved tires in a vacuum. After many trials and errors, he, chief engineer Hawk Hogan, researcher George Birch and others found a frequency that turned tires into useful material.
With 50 cents' worth of electricity for the large microwave he has fabricated, Pringle can turn a single 14-inch car tire, one piece at a time, into 1.2 gallons of diesel fuel, 7.5 pounds of carbon black, 50 cubic feet of combustible gas and 2 pounds of high-strength steel.
“I've tested the diesel fuel in my pickup,” Pringle said. “The truck ran fine, but the exhaust smelled like burning rubber. At stoplights, people around me kept checking to see if they'd left their parking brake engaged.”
Pringle later dialed the right frequency to harvest usable fuels from material dredged from river bottoms and said he has microwaved lawn cuttings into a substance that could be refined into alcohol fuel.
In small-scale laboratory experiments, he demonstrates turning oil shale and coal into clean energy. He thinks he's found a way to extract huge amounts of thick oil left in long-abandoned wells and produce fuel that is cheaper than foreign oil. The capped wells alone would add several hundred years to the nation's oil supply, he said with intensity, pointing to charts and scientific papers and journals.
Pringle said he started with about $450,000 – “that's a ballpark estimate” – of his own money. About 2,000 friends, neighbors and acquaintances have invested $3.5 million, said his company's chief financial officer, Jeff Andrews. The company's shares are thinly traded over the counter.
Working in a South Jersey industrial park, Pringle's small company can produce some products on its own. To have any chance at pulling off big projects, “we'll need a big brother,” he said.
Agrawal, the Penn State scientist who has received a “small amount” of Global Resource stock in exchange for his research collaboration, said the next task is to “understand the science behind what Frank does with microwaves. We know what he can do. To do it on a large scale requires understanding why it happens.”
