High Performance Membrane Heat Exchangers for HVAC

More than 15% of the energy in the US is used for building heating and cooling. The most critical components in these processes are heat exchangers. More efficient heat exchangers allow for energy savings up to 50% in room air conditioning. Typically, heat exchangers are built from metals. An approach to increasing the effectiveness of heat exchange is to increase the surface area over which energy is exchanged. However, increasing the surface area of metal heat exchangers is costly. A very low cost and low weight polymer heat exchanger technology will be developed, which will enable high efficiency and low cost building heating and cooling systems. In Phase I, materials for polymer heat exchangers were screened, and a candidate material was selected. A survey of manufacturing methods was conducted, and a manufacturing process capable of high reliability and low cost was selected. We designed and tested a heat exchanger which showed 1/3rd lower cost at the same performance of today’s state-of-the-art heat exchanger. Finally, we identified an initial market for this product, a building heating and cooling system that is 50% more efficient and 75% less polluting than today’s systems. The research funded by the Phase I grant, and the results generated with that research, were leveraged to raise an additional $2M of venture capital, and an additional $2M in grant funding, to develop and commercialize this heating and cooling system. In phase II, we will continue the development necessary to manufacture and commercialize this heat exchanger. We will develop and run long-term reliability testing, that will validate lifetime performance and reliability. In parallel, we will continue to research performance enhancements of polymer heat exchangers, advancing the state-of-the-art of this field. These performance enhancements include higher density architecture, more efficient surface topology, and surface modifications for improved heat transfer. The result of this effort will be a heat exchanger that is ready to commercialize and a pathway to even further performance improvement. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The first application we are exploring is residential heating and cooling, as the proposed heat exchanger technology will allow for energy savings while also reducing installation cost and improving the user experience of these devices. Once proven for this application, the technology will be developed for larger-scale building systems.