How to use artificial intelligence to improve air conditioner performance 10 times

The energy we use to cool indoor spaces has tripled since 1990 and will triple again by 2050 as the use of air conditioning increases in developing and middle-income countries. Researchers are putting a lot of effort into developing new cooling technologies to reduce energy consumption, but it seems that no technology will achieve the best results in the near future.

Lin Kayser, CEO of Hyperganic, a Munich artificial intelligence design software company, said: "Air-conditioning innovation is like nuclear fusion, it will always take 20 years to succeed."

Kayser hopes to use artificial intelligence and 3D printing to bring disruptive breakthroughs to air conditioning equipment. . By using artificial intelligence to generate a completely new heat exchanger design that can then be printed with a 3D metal printer, Hyperganic says it is developing a residential air conditioning unit that it claims is 10 times more efficient than conventional air conditioners while it is easy to buy and run. The cost is the same as traditional air conditioning.

The company has partnered with Germany’s EOS, a manufacturer of metal and plastic 3D printers, and UAE-based manufacturing company Strata Manufacturing.

Air conditioners cool the building by pumping indoor heat to the outdoors through a heat exchanger or condenser unit that compresses the refrigerant gas into a liquid. A fan blows across the condenser, blowing the heat released during the liquefaction process into the air. Cooling consumes more than 16% of the energy used in buildings today, and heat exchangers are the most energy-intensive components of air conditioning units.

Heat exchangers are structures that require large surface areas and they rely on complex curved internal channels. But traditional engineering and manufacturing is limited in the complexity of its delivery and, in fact, favors simpler designs in order to reduce costs. Kayser said, "Now 10 air conditioning units are sold every second, but the air conditioning units have been the same in the past 30 years." Therefore, AI-based design and 3D printing technology have become the key to designing high-performance complex structure heat exchangers. best choice.

However, the complex design required for the heat exchanger is the best choice based on artificial intelligence design and 3D printing. In fact, the new prototype heat exchanger has become a popular product among metal printing companies looking to demonstrate the power of the technology. Hyperganic's mission is to "dramatically accelerate innovation in physical engineering. Much of the innovation of the past few decades has been in information technology, while cars, planes and appliances are still very similar to what they originally were," Kayser said. Hyperganic is based on artificial intelligence ’s design platform allows engineers to create heat exchangers with completely different structures using elements inspired by complex designs found in nature, such as coral. By increasing surface area and optimizing airflow, these designs increase the energy efficiency of the components. In order to utilize With the advantages of rapid iteration of algorithmic engineering, key design elements (such as the number of stages of branches and pipe diameters) are converted into parameters, allowing multiple designs to be generated simultaneously. In a given environment, the best performing heat exchanger can be efficiently created Machine.

For example: In May of this year, Hyperganic and EOS unveiled the world’s largest aerospike printed rocket engine. Aerospik engines are generally considered a difficult engineering and manufacturing challenge. Hyperganic’s artificial intelligence algorithm Hundreds of designs were created within days. The best designs were printed on EOS's laser powder bed fusion machine, which uses a laser to heat and fuse one layer of metal powder at a time to create parts.

In an increasingly In a warming, energy-starved world, innovation in air conditioning is a priority. New technologies that send heat directly into outer space, such as thermoelectric materials and passive radiative cooling, are exciting but may take years to become commercially viable. Hyperganic does not Doing anything radical is impractical in the short term. “What we’re doing is not rocket science,” Kayser said. “We’re trying to combine advanced manufacturing capabilities with artificial intelligence. It's not as complicated as inventing something completely different. ”

He added that the company has come up with a number of new designs for new air conditioning heat exchangers and has some performance data. They plan to release a prototype at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai next year.

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