4.13.22-Build.nano-Startups-Transaera

SPEAKER 1: Right along. This one I'm especially intrigued about. We have Ross Bonner here. He's the CTO of Transaera. He's also an MIT alum engineering.

ROSS BONNER: All right. It's great to be back.

SPEAKER 1: Developing a new class of affordable energy efficient, sustainable cooling systems to address the issue of air conditioning. We all know, and I'm sure you're going to share it that tremendous environmental impact but increasingly important as temperatures in at temperatures rise. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. Thanks.

ROSS BONNER: Great. So my name is Ross Bonner. I'm CTO at Transaera. It's good to speak with you today. And I realized that I'm the thing standing between you and lunch. So I'll try to keep it short. So why air conditioning? Transaera is trying to make air conditioning more efficient and more affordable for everyone.

Currently, air conditioners are a huge chunk of global greenhouse emissions. That number today is 4%, and it's growing fast. To put that in perspective, that's about twice the size of aviation globally. And there are about 2 billion air conditioners in use today. That's about the same as the total number of iPhones that have been ever produced since the phone was introduced in 2007.

So it's a huge number. And as I mentioned, it's growing really quickly. That 2 billion is expected to triple by 2050. If we meet this energy demand with today's inefficient technology, it will be a disaster for the electricity grid as well as the climate.

So what's so bad about today's AC? It turns out AC has a Achilles heel, a big weakness. And that is water management. Your air conditioner is doing two functions. It's cooling the air, but it's also pulling moisture out of the air in the form of liquid water. That's how it's done today.

And that creates some practical issues. The water can leak out, cause water damage. It can stagnate and grow mold. But there's also an energy penalty associated with pulling moisture into liquid form. And it turns out that actually accounts for about 50% of the energy use of today's air conditioners.

So there's got to be a better way to do this. And Transaera has found a way to remove moisture from the air to dehumidify it without ever condensing moisture into liquid water. We use these incredible new materials called Metal Organic Frameworks or MOFs with nanoscale pores and extremely high surface areas to give you a sense about two grams of MOF, which fits in a small vial that I could hold between my fingers, is the equivalent of one football field worth of surface area.

So that property allows us to pull moisture down onto the surface and hold it there, which unlocks some really incredible energy savings when we put it into a device.

So I'll get into how it actually works. If we take a look under the hood of our device, any air conditioner or heat pump basically has two heat exchangers. One of them gets cold, one of them gets hot. And we apply an ultra thin coating of our MOF material onto those heat exchangers and use them to dry out the air instead of pulling it into liquid water.

So if you look here, do I have a laser? Yeah. So we also configure the device in a way so that we can switch which side is producing the cooling and delivering it to your room. So here, we show the left side is cooling, and water from the air is being trapped in the MOF on the surface of this heat exchanger.

That goes on for some time. And then eventually, it saturates, it can't hold any more moisture. So at that point, we switch. And what was the cold heat exchanger becomes the hot one. That dries out them off. It's then taken out into a hose, which hooks up to your window like any portable AC today and goes outside.

And what was the hot heat exchanger on the other side becomes cold. And then that cycle just repeats. And again, this allows us to demonstrate some really impressive energy savings over today's AC. It also gets us away from that problem of liquid water condensate, which I mentioned.

So we're looking for partnerships in the form of manufacturing to help us scale up. So white goods OEMs, chemical manufacturers to help us scale them off production, as well as building developers, and utilities, to offer incentive programs and pilot programs to get the drive user adoption.

So if that sounds like you or you have any interest in our technology and learning more about it, find me in the next session. I'd be happy to talk to you. Ross.