9.20.22-Sustainability-Infinite-Cooling

KARIM KHALIL: My name is Karim Khalil. I'm the co-founder and CTO of Infinite Cooling. You heard from my PhD advisor, Kripa Varanasi, earlier in the event. My other co-founder is Maher Damak, my co-founder and our CEO. Both Maher and I did our PhDs at MIT in mechanical engineering and graduated in 2018 and launched Infinite Cooling.

Our board is comprised of Mark Little, the retired CTO of General Electric, and Carmichael Roberts is our lead investor, managing partner at Material Impact Fund. So Infinite Cooling's main aim is to make industrial cooling more efficient all around. So if you look at basically water consumption, which is one of the biggest users of water in the country, fresh water, specifically, 30% of non-ag water consumption is used for cooling in cooling towers across the country.

That amounts to over a trillion gallons of fresh water used just for those cooling needs. And it comes at a considerable cost. You'll have areas where you have high water costs or extremely high water needs. And this will cost these operations, whether it be a power plant or a data center or whatever it might be, a lot of money. Upwards of $30 billion is spent just for those needs.

So let's look at an example plant. So this is a 600 megawatt natural gas combined cycle plant that you would find around the US. They'll use over a billion gallons of water per year to cool their system down. They'll spend somewhere in the single digits of millions of dollars to cool down that system. And lastly, it emits these very large plumes that you see over the cooling towers as you're passing them on the highway or wherever they might be.

That's actually a humongous problem for them, because typically they're looking for lowering their visual footprint with their nearby communities, also creates safety and efficiency issues when this plume travels to other parts of the power plant, and can create all sorts of issues. Infinite Cooling has a solution to this problem. So we've created what's called the water panel. This is a device that can be retrofitted to existing cooling towers, so that you can actually reduce the appearance, the visual appearance of these plumes, and recycle the water that we capture back into your cooling system.

So the way that the system works is we create a bunch of ion generation electrodes, and we deploy those on top of your cooling tower, using a structure that you'll see in a minute. We charge all the water droplets in the cooling tower plumes that you see. We create an electric field to extract all of these droplets out on an array of meshes that you will see in a minute. And then, basically, with the flip of a switch, we can capture all that water and recycle it back into your cooling cycle.

So what we're able to achieve is full plume capture. So all the plume droplets that you'll see we'll be able to capture. The water is extremely pure because it's evaporated, re-condensed water. It's basically water that's gone through a distillation process in many ways. So it's extremely pure.

And lastly, plume abatement, which I mentioned, is actually quite critical for certain applications and certain towers. Additionally, which I'm happy to elaborate on more afterwards, because of the presence of our system on these industrial facilities, whether it be power or data centers or whatever they might be, we've noticed that actually just utilizing the sensors that we're already deploying, and some additional information that we can extract utilizing some advanced analytics, we're able to also understand how we can improve our customers' usage of their cooling towers in the first place.

So just operating the cooling towers in a smarter way, whether it be controlling their fan speed, their pumps, their flow rates in their towers, we can reduce their energy consumption by quite a lot, additional water savings and actually reducing the amount of evaporate that's coming out of the cooling tower, and lastly provide actually some insights, some real time insights into what's going on with the cooling tower. Typically at these industrial facilities what you'll notice is problems in these cooling towers will essentially be ignored for quite a long time, until it's too late, causing either a power plant shutdown or a process shutdown.

And we think we can solve that problem by giving these operators of these plants real time insights into what's going on at their cooling tower. We have eight granted patents and we have around 15 more in the pipeline. Products have been deployed already. So this is actually an image of the MIT NRL just down the street. This is a nuclear reactor, a test reactor where they have a fully operational cooling tower. As you can see, our water panels are deployed on the right side of this image, and on the left side you won't see, you'll see essentially the plume rising up through it unaffected.

We're taking that water right now, it's just a partial deployment. But we're recycling that water in the nuclear reactor so they can reduce their water consumption. Here's a video of the system. So when the system is off, you can see basically the plume will rise up through our system unaffected. However, when we switch it on you'll see the complete elimination of that plume. And we're taking that water and recycling it.

And lastly, here, we've also been able to deploy our system at scale over the last year. So this is actually an image of our system. You can see it, essentially the second from the left cooling tower with a much visually abated plume. This is a 900-megawatt power plant in North Carolina that we've partnered with for a first initial deployment. So this is a full scale power plant. And we've achieved some great initial results here.

And now we're looking at deploying the system in other applications to see essentially how widely applicable it could be. So in terms of who would be great to talk to, I'll be in the room off to the side. Anyone who has cooling towers, these cooling towers are produced by the same OEMs across many of these industries. So any thermoelectric power generation process, nuclear, natural gas, biomass, coal, but industrial process cooling, data centers, chemical refineries, raw materials processing, steel, cement, things like that, food and beverage.

And then lastly, our technology is also applicable to what we'll call modular cooling. So these are cooling towers that are essentially deployed fully built to the industry. This could be used for comfort cooling, some smaller industry as well. Our technology obviously could be applied to those as well. And we're talking to several OEMs of these different cooling towers to potentially integrate it into it in advance.

So happy to talk to any of you about your water and your cooling tower needs. And thank you very much.

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