to explain the potential energy impact for their air conditioning technology texas a&m engineering experiment station (tees) researchers dr david claridge and dr charles culp draw a parallel to the auto industry if we were still using vehicles that used as much gas as they did in the early 1970s compared to what were doing today the additional oil that we would need would just about double the oil imports in this country said claridge who is director of tees energy systems laboratory and the leland t jordan professor in the department of mechanical engineering at texas a&m university the air conditioning business right now is about a $100 billion a year added culp who is a professor with the department of architecture and a joint faculty member with mechanical engineering by 2025 its projected to be about $200 billion that energy use is going to double what if we can come up with something that uses half the energy or less if you look at where the population is growing its all around the tropic belt in the hot and humid climates and our air conditioner loves hot and humid climates a new approach to an old technology evaporative cooling is a known technology with benefits over conventional air conditioning systems the biggest of which is it does not use refrigerants and is very efficient but its a technology with geographic limits because it requires dry air claridge and culp believe theyve found a way to remove that limitation simply put evaporative cooling adds water to the air and the evaporation of that water cools the air around it however adding more water to the air is a problem in high humidity climates in a climate like this the air is so humid that theres no way you want it to get more humid even if it does get a little bit cooler said claridge basically the technology weve developed is something that enables you to efficiently remove enough moisture from the air so that you can then go ahead and use this evaporative cooling technique to get the air colder though theyre now closing in on their goal of creating a prototype system its been a long journey since they first thought up the idea we are basically two physicists and we started thinking about how we could come up with a more efficient air conditioner culp said a 50 percent or even two times more efficient air conditioner because air conditioning takes a tremendous amount of energy their inspiration came from james clerk maxwells famous physics thought experiment called maxwells demon in it maxwell imagined a tiny demon that could open and close a small door between two chambers of gas separating out the fast moving particles from the slower ones causing the chamber of slower molecules to lower in temperature while the chamber of faster ones rises we thought maybe we can do something like that with water vapor claridge said their solution didnt come overnight and though it isnt a demon it does work on a very small scale we had years of failure said claridge we tried all kinds of crazy things about six years ago we had a breakthrough someone else came up with a molecular material that passes water vapor but only a tiny bit of air using this molecular membrane their system solves the humidity problem by removing water molecules from the air after the air is cooled producing cool dry air and pure water in wet climates the ability to control the humidity without changing the temperature of the air is also a benefit of the system think about those mornings this time of year that maybe its 70 degrees outside but theres condensation on the windows claridge said the house doesnt need to be colder but its sticky this technology allows you to dry the house sufficiently to make it comfortable at normal temperatures tees office of commercialization and entrepreneurship encouraged the two to form a company in 2015 which they named simply claridge-culp and has guided them from a business standpoint for example tees encouraged them to find a ceo with ties to the industry and they found the perfect person for the job in damon gowan aggie class of 1958 a self-made executive who built the largest mechanical contracting business in houston and is a former president of the american society for heating refrigerating and air-conditioning engineers (ashrae) a big thing for us is that a number of people who work for tees have been superior at giving advice on things that neither one of us had any experience working with culp said theyve also put us in contact with other small companies and we have a lot of shared experiences just sharing little bits of guidance makes a big difference there has already been early interest in the technology claridge-culp was selected as one of the best university startups by the national council of entrepreneurial tech transfer (ncet2) theirs was one of 35 university startups selected to present their company pitches in washington dc on sept 20 at the inaugural university startups demo day pushing technological limits last year they proved that the science behind the system works now they just have to engineer it theyre aiming to have a prototype system built and tested by 2018 were addressing all those myriad engineering problems said culp cost size weight -- you can just go down the list but we know it works the biggest hurdle to cross is the overall efficiency of the system they know that industry will be unlikely to adopt their system unless the cost is competitive with conventional air conditioning to do that theyre pushing the limits of technology in several areas take the compressor for example in conventional air conditioners the refrigerant is compressed to high pressures usually over 250 pounds per square inch in claridge-culps approach the compressors are faced with totally different requirements as they only need to compress about 15 pounds per square inch but with a higher flow basically the devices they use are in the general classification of vacuum pumps theyre generally not worried about the efficiency culp said the first compressors we used in the early prototype had an efficiency of less than 5 percent and we need something in the range of at least 60 percent to have a practical device were working with a company in colorado to use a different type of technology to build a compressor that looks like it should get us into the 65 percent range global implications according to the us department of energy 6 percent of the average american households annual energy use is space cooling in texas that number is even higher according to the electric reliability council of texas (ercot) the record peak demand was 71 093 megawatts on august 11 of this year thats 305 percent higher than the expected peak demand in autumn and 213 percent higher than expected peak demand in winter combine that with the fact that 764 percent of texas power is generated from fossil fuels (483 percent from natural gas and 281 percent from coal) and you can already see the potential impact of more efficient cooling i believe whatever the time frame were going to be running out of fossil fuels claridge said i personally believe burning fossil fuels unnecessarily is pretty harmful in terms of what its doing to climate change fundamentally it looks like this idea is one that will make air conditioning work better and more comfortably and it will do less harm to the environment than the way the current refrigerant systems do and it should do it at less cost thats something i think is pretty exciting while their team continues to solve the complicated engineering challenges to address the ‘how of their system claridge said the ‘why remains unchanged from when they started to change the world he said photo: claridge-culp at university startups demo day in washington dc from left to right: mark andrews manager contract negotiation (tees); culp; us rep bill flores; claridge; dr balakrishna haridas executive director for technology commercialization and entrepreneurship (tees)