Every buoyant material has the same enemy. Water finds the pores, the seams and the places where two parts meet. Over months it adds weight. Over years it takes strength. For a plant-fibre composite the problem is sharper still, because the fibres themselves swell.
We set a bar that most marine coatings fail
From the start the rule was that whatever keeps water out must not rely on petrochemicals and must not shed microparticles into the sea. Plenty of marine coatings work. Few meet that bar. We hope to set a high bar for environmental safety, and we have kept it.
The 2025 study gave us our first water-uptake data
With the Ocean Supercluster grant, a team of UBC Materials Engineering students began in January 2025 under two of the project's advisors, Colton Routtenberg and Zachary Huser. The brief was to validate a mineral-based waterproofing: a treatment that bonds to the composite and closes its surface without an organic film. The study produced treated and untreated specimens for immersion testing and gave the project its first systematic data on water uptake.
In the same year the manufacturing side solved a related problem: a simple two-part mould that presses fibre into an eight-inch hexagonal brick. It was heavy, at 80% the density of water, but it floated just fine. The current brick proportions come from there.
A brick that turns to stone
The better answer came from inside the material. Soak the fibre in a silicate solution and the mineralizing agents crystallize as water slowly permeates, forming a self-healing, stone-like matrix. The brick petrifies over a decade or so, and gets stronger as it does. Waterproofing becomes something the brick does to itself, not a coating that wears off.
Gel between the bricks seals the structure
The last answer works at the scale of the whole structure. Where two bricks lock together there is a gap. Fill the gap with a gel and let it harden, and the joint is sealed: the mat becomes watertight, and the sealed cavities between the bricks add buoyancy. Tension cables make a structure rigid; the gel makes it impermeable. The cutaway on the technology page shows it.