Tuf-Strand is Euclid Chemical's No. 1 product worldwide, selling out as quickly as it's manufactured, to customers as far away as Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica, said Michael Mahoney, director of admixture and fiber marketing for Euclid Chemical.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When the Euclid Chemical Co. bought Tuf-Strand, a patented plastic used to reinforce and strengthen concrete without steel, the company also acquired Michael Mahoney, the gregarious and whip-smart Canadian civil engineer who helped create it.
Mike Mahoney, director of Admixture and Fiber Marketing at Euclid Chemical Co. Mahoney was a graduate student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, when a professor asked him to help research a new product he hoped would make concrete stronger and more durable. "A year into the project, I know this was different than anything else we'd ever done," he said. Tuf-Strand worked, but its original distributor didn't quite know how to market it.
In 2002, the Cleveland-based Euclid Chemical Co. bought the exclusive distribution license for Tuf-Strand throughout North America, and the next year, Mahoney followed Tuf-Strand to Northeast Ohio. Euclid Chemical is wholly owned by RPM International Inc., the Medina County-based parent company of high-performance coatings, sealants and specialty chemicals such as Rust-Oleum.
Tuf-Strand now ranks as Euclid Chemical's No. 1 product worldwide, selling out as quickly as it's manufactured, to customers as far away as Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica, Mahoney said.
Tuf-Strand represents a growing percentage of Euclid Chemicals' total sales, but he didn't know the exact share. "Considering we have hundreds of products, I think Tuf-Strand SF is somewhere around 10 percent of sales," he said.
Tuf-Strand has been used in Yankee Stadium, MetLife Stadium, Madison Square Garden, the George Washington Bridge, General Motors facilities throughout Canada and the U.S., a Mercedes Benz dealership in Scottsdale, Arizona; Tractor Supply stores nationwide, and more than 110 FedEx ground facilities.
Pieces of patented Tuf-Strand fiber look like dental floss or plastic twist-ties at the Euclid Chemical Co. headquarters in Cleveland. When a New York City construction worker and secret Red Sox fan tried to bury a David Ortiz jersey in a concourse of Yankee Stadium hoping to curse the Yankees, crews had a terrible time jackhammering it out of the Tuf-Strand-reinforced floor, he said.
"The Cleveland Convention Center is full of this product," Mahoney said. "That floor's not going to go anywhere for a very, very long time." Tuf-Strand also reinforcing University Hospitals' Ahuja Medical Center, Cleveland State University, the Ghent Road RTA station, the Cleveland Clinic parking garage, and the former Plain Dealer parking garage.
"We're not trying to replace steel in bridge decks or high-rise buildings," he said, but Tuf-Strand can maintain the integrity of structures in a way that's stronger, greener and cheaper than traditional building methods.
That first year, Euclid Chemical sold $90,000 worth of Tuf-Strand, he said. "Today, we have almost $20 million in sales just of this, and are still growing. We expanded our facility once and now we're talking about expanding again."
Yet for all of its applications, its biggest doubters are within the construction industry, which has been slow to adopt new technologies, Mahoney said.
So the man who helped develop the formula and oversaw the years of testing to find the optimum strength per strand now travels the world explaining to fellow engineers why it's superior to reinforcing concrete with steel rebar. Instead of being added to the concrete at the construction site like steel, Tuf-Strand is already mixed into the concrete when it gets there, and flows out of the mixers like thick oatmeal.
A patented blend of polypropylene and polyethylene that looks like strands of white twist-ties, Tuf-Strand is manufactured and distributed out of two factories: one near Nova Scotia and one in Lafayette, Georgia, just south of Chattanooga.
It arrives at the plant as a pelleted resin and is extruded into strings that are the thickness of dental floss and the length of football fields. It is spooled like rope, then snipped into strands and shipped around the world.
Rumbling around in the back of trucks frays the tightly wound strands and makes the resulting concrete even stronger, Mahoney said, interlacing his fingers and trying to pull apart his hands.
Eve Arnold, a concrete fiber technician, tests a concrete beam reinforced with Tuf-Strand at the Euclid Chemical plant in Cleveland. During a recent visit, Eve Arnold, a concrete fiber technician, placed beams of Tuf-Strand-reinforced concrete inside an Instron Test Frame in the basement of Euclid Chemical's headquarters on Cleveland's East Side.
The machine exerts pressure on top of the beam while instruments measure its flexural strength and how much force it can withstand before cracking. Her measurements help Euclid Chemical figure out how much Tuf-Strand is needed to produce the desired strength in the final structure.
Tuf-Strand SF (for synthetic fiber) isn't available to consumers, but consumers can ask their contractors to get it for whatever projects they need.
"It's still the No. 1 performing product in the industry," as measured by performance, said Mahoney, who is also president of the Fiber Reinforced Concrete Association.
"The first year, we only sold 30,000 pounds," he said. "Now, 30,000 pounds is an order."