2024 MIT Sustainability Conference: Startup Exchange Lightning Talks - 3D Architech

KAI NARITA: Great. Thank you so much for having me today. My name is Kai Narita. I'm the founder and CEO of the 3D Architech, so I'm affiliated with the MIT as a visiting scientist. So we are manufacturing this technology startup located in Boston here and also Sendai City in Japan.

The problem we are tackling is about how you can enable sustainable society. And in this topic, this is two challenges we are facing-- we are working on right now. The first one is that the data center cooling power consumption.

So as you have seen a lot of discussion today, data center has a lot of demand today. And it could consume 13% of the world electricity by 2030. And within this 13% of the electricity consumption, actually, 40% comes from the data center cooling. So the heat or heat dissipation is a huge and urgent problem today in the data center.

And another problem we are looking at is the green hydrogen production. In order to achieve the net zero emission by 2050, we need adopt the 200 million tons of hydrogen by 2030. However, the hurdle here is that-- the cost of the hydrogen production. We need to reduce the hydrogen cost by the factor of 5 by 2030.

And it looks like two different problems here, but as a manufacturing startup, we see the underlying common issue here, the inefficient fluid flow, which comes from actually the manufacturing inability to optimize the design at micrometer scale.

So one of the good example is a heat sink used for the data center cooling. And that has a typical fin structure, which has a 0.1 millimeter fin. And if you-- we know that already, if we can decrease the fin thickness or interval between fins, we can increase surface area so that we can improve the cooling performance, or if we can make a more organic structure, optimal structure, so that we can make a more improved cooling performance.

However, we do not have a way to manufacture such a design. So the state of the art manufacturing can only offer 0.21 millimeters scale of the design control today.

And same for the green hydrogen production. The water electrolyzer is-- using right now, the randomly oriented gas diffusion layer. And if you can optimize that structure, we can also improve on energy production and cost as well-- decrease energy production costs as well.

So to tackle this challenge, what we do here is that we invented a completely new way of making metals, which is a lithography-based metal 3D printing. And this can offer 10-micrometer features with a desired structure so that we can offer ultimate performance at scale.

So what we do here is that we use off-the-shelf lithography-based 3D printer or any lithography-based device that could be used for the semiconductor manufacturing. But we use that machine for making metals.

So we have the proprietary gel materials, which can be manufactured by that type of off-the-shelf 3D printer. And we make a 3D structure of gel.

And we have a conversion technology that can convert from a gel to metal completely so that by using this off-the-shelf, lithography-based 3D printer, which is typically used for making a resin or plastic, we can create high-performing metal and alloys parts.

And we are working with global-- multiple company in these two industry spaces. And one of the use case is that heat sink or liquid cooling heat sink. We are working with a Japan heat sink manufacturers here today.

So compared to the traditionally manufactured heat sink, we can offer 10-micrometer features with the optimized structure so that we can offer almost 60% cut of electricity cost for the cooling. And also, we can offer, by the nature of the 3D printing technology, the customization at low cost and at the scale as well.

Another example here is that gas diffusion layer for the water electrolysis system. So as you see from the left pictures, people use this randomly oriented structure for the gas diffusion layer. And we have known for the decades, if you can control this structure, we can improve the performance.

But today, we only can offer this design basically by designing CAD so that we can manufacture the same structure in a reality here. And people select us-- the couple of reason. One of the reason is that we can improve the output of the green hydrogen production by 30% with the same cost. And also, we can lower the cost of material as well by design.

And also, one of the interesting aspects is that now, today, we can offer the [? varied ?] design structure so that you can tell what parameter you want to tune to improve the performance of the electrical system-- for example, porosity, pore diameter, or any other parameters in the design space.

So today, we are seeking some partnership for the green hydrogen production water electrolyzer and liquid cooling. The example is a liquid cooling heat sink or cold plate wicks for the vapor chambers and immersion cooling system. And also, we are seeking collaboration on the water electrolyzer system and the fuel cell as well.

And we are transitioning to the mass production scale right now, so we are seeking also a chemical company that can produce our gel material at the scale as well.

So we are 3D Architech. If you are interested, please come by my booth. We have some products that has a very fine featured product. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Thank you, Kai.