Effusio focused on alleviating the contribution of data centers to the energy crisis
The start-up's big idea involves the fusion of vapor compression and absorption refrigeration systems into a novel thermodynamic cycle that radically reduces the power required to cool electronics.
Two seasoned corporate technology developers have joined with a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) to take on a big challenge: alleviating the contribution of data centers to the energy crisis.
“The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has already led to increased utility rates in areas of the country,” says Viktor Zenkov, the UTK Ph.D. candidate, while electricity demand is projected to outstrip supply at an increasing rate for the foreseeable future. And while Big Tech rightly focuses on increases in energy production through new nuclear power and other sources, these founders are focused on the avoidance of energy usage in the first place.
If “a dollar saved is a dollar earned,” then what does that make “a kilowatt saved?” The founders are not yet certain, but they formed Effusio to find out.
Effusio’s big idea involves the fusion of vapor compression and absorption refrigeration systems into a novel thermodynamic cycle that radically reduces the power required to cool electronics. In fact, as crazy as it sounds, this invention has the potential to use the heat from electronics to generate power, much like nuclear power plants use the heat of fission processes to generate electricity.
With increased stress on the nation’s electricity grid, the founders believe that the timing of their big idea could not be better. “We are looking to increase energy efficiency for everything from data centers and supercomputers to buildings and industrial processes,” Zenkov says.
Like other disruptive technologies before it, this invention’s epiphany arose out of the fusion of evolutions in disparate fields—in this case, chemistry, thermodynamics, and data science. This patent-pending technology, dubbed IoniCool, is an industrial reincarnation of its inventors’ experiences in advanced defense technology development.
They expect that it will be adaptable to existing data center designs and, in some cases, can be retrofitted into existing data centers; the technology holds promise to reduce energy consumption in some systems by more than 40 percent.
Effusio has applied for the next cohort of the “Innovation Crossroads” program operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. If selected, the program would offer several advantages for the start-up, including access to the vast breadth of the Lab’s bright minds and domain knowledge as necessary to identify, assess, and prioritize energy market applications of this novel technology.
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