SBIR Phase I: High-Efficiency, Refrigerant-Free Space Cooling

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to enable the commercialization of a new air conditioning (AC) technology that will reduce AC power consumption by two-thirds. If broadly adopted, this solution will reduce annual carbon emissions by about 0.5 gigatons annually and bring air conditioning to the point of affordability for many of the two billion people who increasingly need it, but can’t afford it. The global AC market is about $120 Billion annually and the industry has been served essentially by the same vapor compression technology invented over a century ago. That technology is inefficient and, for vast numbers of people around the world, unaffordable due to its large electricity expense. The proposed technology has the potential to disrupt this market by providing a two-thirds reduction in power use. This project also has the potential to lead to the commercialization of a new class of membranes that can increase the efficiency and decrease the cost associated with high-salinity fluid treatment applications such as lithium recovery, wastewater treatment, and water desalinization. This SBIR Phase I project proposes to develop a novel, hollow-fiber membrane technology tailored to operate with high flux in a liquid desiccant AC system. Commercial off-the-shelf membranes are not designed for this high-concentration environment and, if used in a commercial implementation of the system, would drive its size and cost to the point which would limit the product’s marketability. This project’s objective is to demonstrate a customized membrane design and quantify the membrane’s impact on the proposed AC system’s efficiency, size, and cost. The proposed research will accomplish this by a series of design/fab/test iterations followed by an update to the system and techno-economic models using the measured characteristics of the final membrane. This solution will broaden membrane developers’ understanding of the design and potential of high-concentration membranes. Beyond its applicability to the liquid desiccant cooling technology, a high-concentration membrane would have broad applicability to multiple high brine concentration applications, including mineral recovery operations such as performed during lithium mining, zero liquid discharge wastewater treatments, and high-brine water desalination pursued in arid regions of the world.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.