Apr 28, 2015

Font Resize York inventor secures patent for concrete sealer Michael Leaman, who owns Total Asphalt and Uniseal Solutions, worked with a chemist to create the copolymer. By Brett Sholtis bsholtis@ydr.com @BrettSholtis on Twitter Updated:   04/24/2015 04:26:08 PM EDT Uniseal Solutions owner Michael Leaman with containers of raw product -- some of the measuring containers and concrete he used to test the sealing solution at another company he owns, Total Asphalt in York. The sealer can penetrate and bind with new and old concrete, sealing in the moisture. He has had a patent approved for his invention. (Paul Kuehnel - Daily Record/Sunday News) Michael Leaman, left, who owns Total Asphalt as well as Uniseal Soutions, stands with Seth Altholz, a York entrepreneur who is CEO of Uniseal. Altholz has experience in tech startups, a background Leaman hopes will help to market his concrete-sealing technology worldwide. (Paul Kuehnel - Daily Record/Sunday News) For years, Michael Leaman has been obsessed with a problem most people probably don't think much about. The problem, Leaman said, is that concrete tends to deteriorate as it loses its water content over time. As the owner of Total Asphalt, a pavement consulting and maintenance company at 66 Murray Place in York, Leaman was accustomed to thinking about surfaces used for walking and driving. He had developed a product to extend the life of asphalt, and he was marketing that product when he recognized a need for alternatives to the epoxies used to coat the exterior of concrete. Rather than coating concrete with epoxy, a process Leaman said comes with problems of its own, he came up with a copolymer formula that binds with the concrete at the molecular level to prevent water vapor from escaping it. Now, Uniseal Solutions, a company he founded, has an exclusive deal to distribute the new product. Leaman, a York native, has no chemistry degree or formal science training. But that didn't stop him from developing a product that he thinks will change the way the construction industry will treat concrete. "It's a miracle," Leaman said. "When I realized what I had, I sat on my back deck looking at the stars, smoking cigars for three days. " Leaman enlisted veteran chemist Arnold Rosenberg to work with him on developing the formula. Rosenberg said there wasn't necessarily anything wrong with epoxy coatings, but their product would be cheaper, thinner and would last longer. Advertisement "The problem was to find something that would not let the moisture get through to the subsequent coatings put on the concrete," Rosenberg said. "We had to put a coating on that was very thin and very low cost, and it had to work. " Rosenberg said he and Leaman adapted polymer technology used in the food industry to package products and keep water sealed. They had to change the formula, though, because the alkalinity of concrete would otherwise erode the sealer. An added benefit of borrowing from the food industry, Rosenberg said, is that the water-based technology is safer for humans than epoxies. Now that the patent is approved, Leaman is rolling out his product on a large scale. Working with Seth Altholz, an entrepreneur from York with a dot-com background, he formed Uniseal Solutions. Altholz, the CEO of Uniseal, emphasized that Uniseal Solutions is a technology company, not a manufacturer. As such, it doesn't have a factory; rather, it contracts its manufacturing process to Custom Processing Services in Reading. Altholz said the company has signed its first exclusive, private label distribution deal with Florida-based Specified Services Inc., granting the company exclusive international rights to market three commercial flooring products that use the Uniseal technology under their brand. From there, Altholz hopes to take the copolymer technology into other industries ranging from home paints and textiles to archaeological preservation. Altholz said he'll be working to partner with companies in those industries, possibly setting up exclusivity agreements with them to carry their products. "Our business model is to find partners to sell it," Altholz said. Patents by the numbers