Entrepreneurs offer automation to reef aquarium enthusiasts

Whether they adorn a doctor's waiting room or a private living room, aquariums offer a portrait of tranquility, a soothing slice of aquatic activity.

But the effort required to sustain an aquarium - especially one that nurtures a coral reef in a saltwater environment - can be daunting.

Tim Marks '04 learned that lesson the hard way when he was 13 years old. After maintaining freshwater aquariums for several years, he set up a 10-gallon reef aquarium. But when the greater demands of the marine environment overwhelmed his eighth-grade education, he dismantled his aquarium and quit his new hobby for three years.

Today, Marks and his business partner, Patrick Clasen '04, aim to make life easier for America's burgeoning population of novice reef aquarists.

"We want to make it easier for people to get into the hobby," says Marks, "particularly beginners who don't have much money or people with some experience who are looking to automate. Having had to leave the hobby once gives me a good idea of what our customers need now."

Marks, an environmental engineering major, is co-owner of EcoTech MarineTM (ETM). Clasen, a materials science and engineering major, is a partner. The company makes and markets equipment that automates the complicated task of feeding a reef aquarium.

The two students recently received grants of $9,000 each through the Pool Prize, one of the top awards given to Lehigh undergraduate students. The prize supports students whose entrepreneurial talents exemplify the life of Leonard Pool, the late chairman of Air Products and Chemicals Inc. in Allentown, who served on Lehigh's board of trustees.

Marks and Clasen also recently won a $2,000 grant from the Invitation to Innovate contest sponsored by Lehigh's Integrated Product Development program. In the 9-year-old IPD program, teams of engineering, arts and business students collaborate for one year to make and market products for industrial sponsors.

Marks and Clasen have set up a lab in IPD's brand-new headquarters in the Wilbur Powerhouse, which gives them access to the latest design software, prototyping equipment, machining instruments and a water-jet cutter. They have recruited six of their friends to their IPD team, giving ETM additional expertise in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, accounting, and product supply chain management.

The ETM team is working with Todd Watkins, associate professor of economics, and Horace Moo-Young, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, to apply for a $20,000 national grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

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Like many new-millennium business ventures, ETM owes its genesis in part to the Internet. As a senior in high school, Marks successfully returned to his reef aquarium hobby under the online mentorship of Rick Dickens, webmaster of Reefs.org.

The following year, as a freshman at Lehigh, Marks met Justin Lawyer, a physics student at Oklahoma State University, in a chat room for reef aquarium enthusiasts. The two students realized they shared a passion for equipment that would automate aquarium maintenance and they traded ideas and 3-D models of potential products over the Internet. Before Marks finished his first year, he and Lawyer launched ETM and developed the ETM Kalkwasser Reactor, a device that automatically replenishes and maintains the levels of the calcium and alkalinity that are vital to the health of coral reefs.

"The goal of a reef aquarium is not just to have a pretty tank but to grow living coral in a saltwater venue by supplying calcium and alkalinity and by using high-intensity lighting," says Marks. "To do that, you need a firm grasp of chemistry and ecology. Justin and I loved the project because it was so complex."

The summer after his freshman year, Marks built the first prototype Kalkwasser reactors, installed one on his own 29-gallon aquarium and sold two at the Marine Aquarium Conference of North America in Baltimore. He also donated a reactor to Sanjay Joshi, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at Penn State University and reef aquarium expert.

By the end of his sophomore year at Lehigh, Marks and Lawyer had sold 20 reactors, and Marks had formed a friendship with Joshi. The summer after his sophomore year, Marks went to Penn State to conduct research with Joshi into reef aquarium lighting. The two collaborators have published three articles in Advanced Aquarist Online Magazine (www.advancedaquarist.com).

Last fall, as he began his junior year, Marks rented an apartment with Clasen, a fellow entrepreneur who quickly caught reef aquarium fever and joined ETM. Clasen brought to the new company two years of experience selling CUTCO Cutlery for Vector Marketing, during which time he had become the top sales representative in his office and earned a promotion to assistant manager.

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Of America's 10 million aquariums, says Marks, nine million are freshwater and one million are saltwater. A small number of the saltwater variety are reef aquariums, in which the goal is to grow live coral, as well as house exotic fish.

Growing healthy live coral depends on complex chemical and environmental factors, Marks says, making the reef aquarium the most demanding variety to maintain.

Inside a reef aquarium, the reef "grows" as corals and other invertebrates deposit skeletons made of calcium carbonate. The growing reef pulls calcium and carbonate ions from the water column, depleting the water's levels of calcium and alkalinity and causing its pH to drop, and requiring the aquarist to replenish calcium and alkalinity.

The salinity of the reef aquarium must also be maintained within a narrow range, says Marks, because it influences other ions and the ratio at which they exist.

"It's all a very complicated game," says Marks, "and everything is very much interconnected."

The first project Marks and Clasen tackled was to redesign ETM's calcium reactor by adding a dosing pump and a float switch to produce a more compact, maintenance-free design. They did much of the prototyping of the new reactor in the basement workshop of Marks's home in Scarsdale, N.Y.

Marks and Clasen are now developing modular products to control other aspects of the reef aquarium, such as water flow, water chemistry and lighting. Two of these products are a USB interface that connects testing equipment to a computer and a switch that measures conductivity to determine salt levels and thus optimize performance of the calcium reactor. ETM has outsourced the production of its reactor and marine lighting system to outside companies. The goal is to fit all of ETM's products into a self-sustaining, automated "turn-key aquarium" that requires no more maintenance than a freshwater aquarium.

The two entrepreneurs are particularly interested in fine-tuning the "nano reef aquarium," which can range in size from a half-gallon to 20 gallons. Although cheaper and more accessible to beginning aquarists, the nano aquarium is a less stable environment and thus more challenging to regulate.

IPD has been a boon to ETM, say Marks and Clasen, because of the new members and expertise it brings and because of the facilities at the new Wilbur Powerhouse.

"We need a big group," says Marks, "and IPD has given us a diverse team of engineers and business majors. That's a company."

"The most valuable education I have gotten at Lehigh has come through IPD," says Clasen. "It gives us access to water-jet cutting instruments, rapid prototyping machines and CNC [computer-numerical control] machines, and teaches us how to use them. It gives us exposure to a variety of other disciplines. It gives us the opportunity to manage a fully functional company as if we owned all the resources.

"Best of all, it gives us total freedom. We can take our ideas as far as we're willing to push ourselves."