Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1278896
38 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 pact. It only weighs 35 pounds, and you can bring it on the plane as a carry-on. I showed up to this big meeting with General Motors with my little Blue Box treatment case, and they said, "I thought you were doing a demo to- day." I said, "I am." "Great," they responded. "Where's your gear?" I replied, "Everything I need is in this box right here." Their reac- tion was, "There are 75,000 CFMs in there? No way." In four hours, I had restored their system like it was brand new, which blew them away. I saved them $200,000 right away because they wouldn't have to replace their system, and they calculated it would save them another $50,000 in energy costs for that specific unit over the next year because the system was no longer running under pressure. Often, the most important part of manufac- turing in electronics and other very highly- specialized types of environments is air. They need clean-room level environments, with pre- cise control of the humidity, particulates, and more. HVAC systems are of utmost importance. For Infineon, a semiconductor company, our product greatly improves on the delivery of a cleanroom type of environment because they often use tremendous amounts of HEPA filters to remove the particulates. These filters are downstream of the coils to capture the biologi- cal particles streaming out of the coils. Now, by solving the coil issue, you have higher qual- ity control in your downstream, and it takes a load off of the HEPAs, so you have better control. Johnson: The coils, in many cases, act as fil- ters, and then you have to worry about clean- ing the coils. Metropoulos: Yes. The world also consumes $50 billion in filters every year. The whole filter in- dustry evolved because there's never been a way to clean these coils. Filtration can be very complex. You get into what are called MERV 8 filters up to MERV 9, 10, 11, 12, etc., and it goes all the way up to HEPA-grade filters. The higher the number, the more restrictive that fil- ter is, so it captures smaller and smaller par- ticles; there's a whole science behind it. The higher the MERV rating, the more extreme the airflow restriction. The more airflow restric- tion, the more energy-intensive that filter is on the HVAC system. In a building, up to 30% of all the energy consumed in the HVAC system is consumed by the filters because of airflow. The role of the filter is to protect the coils, but no matter what, these coils will still get fouled up, and no one in the industry has ever thought about it this way. The coil is a wet filter because there's always condensation. It's very effec- tive at capturing all the particles, but it would plug up. Once that happened, you had to cut out that coil and put in a new one, which is a very expensive proposition. Blue Box com- pletely changes that, and we guarantee that coil will never plug up on you. This means you can dramatically, almost radically, change how you handle the filters upstream. It has a huge impact on the energy efficiency of that system. At General Motors, all plants follow the same filter protocol: three stages of filters and three walls to help capture the particles, all to pro- tect that coil. But one thing I'm out to prove with General Motors is that we can reduce fil- ter usage by 80% by eliminating stages two and three of the filter program. We replace that remaining filter every three months, and when we do, we foam out the coil. You clean the coil more frequently with the first filter capturing most of the particles, and all of a sudden, GM saves $2 million in energy costs across the en- tire plant. I just bought a filter company in January that specializes in filtration. I wanted to gain exper- tise in filters and how to replace industrial fil- ters. My objective is to completely change how you do filtration: fewer filters and more coil cleaning. If you look at it from an engineering perspective and cleaning more frequently, this is a radical change. Every engineer I've talked to gets it. When they first hear about it, their reaction is, "It's too good to be true." But once they hear the explanation and see it, they com- pletely understand. It makes total sense. It's just that their whole training has been that the mechanical people like to replace coils and the