Finding the right temperature for every room in a house or building is nearly impossible. Some people want a room hotter, while others prefer a much cooler environment.
Imagine if there was a way to customize the temperature of each room through thermal storage units in the walls of buildings?
That is the goal of a collaboration between Xiangyu Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering, and ThermoVerse, a Spark Cleantech Accelerator and Innovation Crossroads startup company founded by Shantonio Birch that creates smart insulation material systems (SIMs).
Traditional heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems have a fixed thermostat across a living space, which leads to significant energy inefficiency. ThermoVerse is trying to develop a product to distribute and control the heating and cooling actively, so that local temperature setpoints are established and maintained based on occupancy and heating and cooling demand.
In responding to the national agenda for building decarbonization, the hope is to produce a strong-performing product that aligns with real-world needs that can be implemented in all buildings at a low cost.
ThermoVerse has developed a unique panel for accessing thermal energy stored in materials to balance out uneven temperature distributions in the building envelopes, which are the physical separators between the conditioned and unconditioned environment of a building.
The challenge is making the panels. Putting them inside the wall could require a major renovation if it’s an older home or building. That would be costly, and occupants would need to vacate the premises for an extended period during the work.
“What we want is to build something flexible, like a wallpaper. That way, we just attach things on the wall so that it works for both existing buildings and new buildings as well,” Li said. “The key technology barrier is how do we make the sheets with the phase change material thin enough and flexible enough to directly apply to the wall without the thermal energy storage leaking out while it’s operating, and while preserving high energy storage capacity you get in bulk.”
UT Student Involvement
ThermoVerse is sponsoring two UT senior design teams under Li’s supervision to help work on the issue. One team is tasked with building rigid panels of the thermal energy storage material and attempting to create a thinner version of the prototype that is also flexible. The other team is working on thermal transducers—devices that move thermal energy—to agitate the thermal storage materials for the purpose of smart insulation and energy conservation.
Li and ThermoVerse recently received seed funding from UT’s Center for Materials Processing (CMP) to support ongoing projects and initiatives in the region, including funding more graduate students at UT. CMP and Spark Cleantech Accelerator also matched the contributions from ThermoVerse to fund the senior design teams.
The collaboration with Li and his students is invaluable for ThermoVerse as it continues to grow.
“On the startup side, we need to go very fast, and working with Professor Li is almost like outsourcing some of the high-risk, high-reward tasks that we want to do,” said Birch, ThermoVerse’s chief executive officer. “We don’t always have the time, bandwidth, capacity and resources to do it. Having someone like Professor Li in academia who wants to dig into these basic aspects and come up with a comprehensive understanding of what is going on at the material scale versus the device scale is a huge asset. It will give us convincing data sets to provide to investors and other stakeholders.”
Mutually Beneficial Outcomes
Birch and Li were brought together by CMP Associate Director Andy Sarles because of their mutual interest in reducing building energy costs. Birch and Li were working together under the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program to direct technology development in alignment with customer discovery activities.
Combining academia and industry not only helps in future product development, but also cultivates a talent pool ready to work at a startup venture like ThermoVerse.
“Quite frankly, a lot of students, once they graduate, they’re not necessarily equipped for this particular world,” Birch said. “They might be equipped for industry, but when it comes to deep tech entrepreneurship, which is sort of new non-existing industries that we’re trying to create, we think we need a different approach.”
For Li, the collaboration with ThermoVerse allows his students to be on the ground floor of innovative technology while also introducing them to more pathways to explore once they graduate from UT.
“Having the student exposed to a startup company or a CEO such as Shantonio really gives them another career choice,” Li said. “Because for me, early on, I didn’t know what a startup was about. I didn’t know the pros and cons of starting a company. But I think some students have the talent or leadership to do that, and this gives them the exposure to see how startups are developing products. I think that’s a unique opportunity for students that UT provides.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)