HIMANSHU POKHARNA: The refrigerants that are in use today in refrigerators are called supergreenhouse
gases, and that’s because they have a thousand times higher global warming potential as compared
to carbon dioxide.
If countries continue to develop the rate at which they are growing and people continue
to expand and buy the refrigerators the way we expect them to, there are estimates by
year 2050 refrigerants will be responsible for 40 percent of global warming.
That will be three times more than the automotive exhaust at that time.
UTTAM GHOSHAL: Sheetak is a startup founded in Austin, Texas.
We have a singular focus to develop and commercialize efficient, affordable solid-state energy converters
for a variety of refrigeration, air conditioning and power generation applications.
We saw the funding announcement about the BEETIT program by ARPA-E. The central goal
of the BEETIT program was to actually make efficient air conditioners for large building
use, which would reduce the demands for power generation and at the same time eliminate
the polluting refrigerants in these systems.
To make a big difference, you have to look at alternative technologies.
We have a technology which is completely electronic.
It is light.
It is nonpolluting.
It is very reliable because there are no moving parts.
It’s very low-cost.
It can be implemented with semiconductor manufacturing techniques in high volume.
And so it has a lot of cost metrics and performance metrics that could enable a phase-out of the
traditional vapor compression engines.
MR.
POKHARNA: This is a compact refrigerator unit that we have retrofitted with Sheetak technology.
It does all the job that our original compact refrigerator was doing.
The Sheetak engine itself is fitted at the back of the unit.
A complete engine is replacing a much, much heavier compressor and refrigeration system.
It has about the same performance as the compressor, has the same energy efficiency, zero global
warming potential, and it is significantly cheaper to begin with.
MR.
GHOSHAL: We had three major breakthroughs.
We introduced a new kind of nanostructured material, which enhanced the efficiency of
these devices by almost a factor of two.
We’ve managed these high heat fluxes.
These heat fluxes are order of kilowatts per centimeter squared, the hottest (chips ?) in
the market.
We significantly lowered the cost of the system.
The entire cooling device, for the same cooling power, is 10 times cheaper.
The same materials can be used to have efficient power generators and a lot of applications
which are reciprocal.
Where you have heat available from low-cost sources, you can actually create a temperature
difference, and that would produce electricity.
There’s all these specialized applications where our solid-state energy converters, although
right now it’s in the form of coolers, could be used in broader markets.
Getting the ARPA-E’s organizational support was very important.
But there are a lot of OEM(s) that could be introduced to us through the efforts for commercializing
our technology.
The main core in traditional vapor compressor mechanical refrigerator industry are all being
manufactured abroad in countries like China and Brazil.
We offer a new paradigm, which is based on semiconductor processing techniques, which
are more geared for U.S. jobs.
Austin is uniquely positioned because of its being a hub for semiconductor processing industries
over the last two decades.
We have the proper infrastructure to adapt these old processing plants.
Our plan is to manufacture cooling engines in Austin, Texas, and sell globally.
(END)