6.22.22-Showcase-AeroShield

AARON BASKERVILLE-BRIDGES: Hello, everyone. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for coming out. My name is Aaron Baskerville-Bridges. I'm VP operations and co-founder at AeroShield, where we are making super-insulating transparent materials to enable the next generation of energy efficient products. My co-founders are Dr. Elise Strobach, one of the co-inventors of this material at the MIT Device Research Lab, and Dr. Kyle Wilke.

I know that many of you in the audience are-- well all of you in the audience are working on a diverse set of problems, but there might be one material that many of you have in common, whether you're working on electric vehicles or construction, aerospace, or appliances. Glass is something that is used in a wide variety of industries and consumers seem to want more of.

Unfortunately, glass has an energy efficiency problem. Let's take buildings, for example. While we love windows in our buildings and in our homes, even a double pane window is a very poor insulator. This is a thermal scan of a building, and what you can see is that the windows are less insulating than the walls.

In fact, 30% to 40% of the energy that you put into your home-- so that's your heating bill or your AC-- is lost through your windows. And globally this represents $200 billion a year worth of energy that's being wasted, 5% of global CO2 emissions.

But if you think about it, it is a hard problem to solve. We expect a lot out of our windows and glass products. We want a material that is transparent, durable, insulating, cost-effective. There's really not a lot of materials that fit the bill. In fact, the best alternative that we really have today is just adding another pane of glass, creating a triple pane product. But that's going to be 50% heavier, 50% thicker, and much more expensive.

And that's created the situation that we have today, where in the market consumers have to choose between affordability and thermal performance. In North America less than 5% of consumers are choosing the more energy efficient product, which is a triple pane window, because of the incredibly long payback period and high upfront costs of a triple pane window.

But that's where AeroShield sees opportunity, turning traditional glass into a high performance, energy efficient product with the breakthrough that we have in silica aerogels. Now what is a silica aerogel? It is a material, a class of material, that is 95% air, and it's trapping air in these tiny little pores.

It's long been used at places like NASA, because it's one of the most thermally insulating materials ever created. It's super light. It's fire resistant. It has all these amazing properties, but it's always been blue. As you can see on the screen, I don't think many people would want a window that was filled with something quite like this.

And that's where Elise's PhD research came in. She realized that by optimizing the nanostructure, by changing the size of those nanopores, you could actually increase the visible transmittance of the aerogel to a point where we were able to achieve the optical clarity of glass with this material while maintaining those thermal and fire resistant properties.

And so what we have now is a sheet of super-insulating material that is clear and can actually be integrated into the window manufacturing process. So this is an early prototype that we made out of our facility. And what you can see is aerogel between glass, almost like a macro coating.

Just 3 millimeters of our material is enough to make window products at least 50% more energy efficient. A triple pane-- or sorry-- compared to a triple pane window, AeroShield can be thinner, lighter, and less expensive.

We are actively working on scaling up the manufacturing process, so making larger sizes than this, increasing our throughput. We're actually working with three national labs to put this through all the extensive durability and performance testing that would be required to certify this for window products.

But right now, and why we're here, is because we believe that collaboration is critical to bringing this to market. Now we strongly believe that the world needs more energy efficient products yesterday and that working with people who have experience in bringing products to market is going to accelerate the timeline that this happens on.

We are incredibly driven by impact, and we want to work with people like you who are coming to these conferences and are excited about making our lives more sustainable. So if you're in the audience today and you work at a chemical manufacturing company, we are looking for supply agreements to provide xylenes and other chemicals that we use in our process.

If you're a window company and you want to create the next generation of energy efficient products, reach out to us. But if you work in a wide variety of industries, we want to hear your innovative ideas, whether that is freezer doors, oven doors, electric vehicle windows.

We are incredibly excited about the chance to reduce global CO2 emissions by over a gigaton while also saving homeowners money. So if you're interested in any of this, please come stop by our booth at the showcase.

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