September at Temperate: Airflow moving & SAFE talks underway
What we did in September
Airflow breakthrough. We boosted the unit’s airflow to power ratio by 110%, reaching ~90% fan efficiency. This gives us the air volume we need to see meaningful cooling. When we build another full scale unit we will need bigger fans, but the set up is now correct so it’s just a matter of scaling up. We thought that airflow was the key bottleneck in our tech, but since building this latest unit we’ve discovered some issues with our photonic crystal manufacturing which will be addressed in our next unit.
Undaunted Greenhouse: accepted. We attended the entry event and received confirmation on Friday - we’re in. The Greenhouse will be our home base for the coming months. We get £20k non-dilutive from the Greenhouse, as well as access to Royce at Imperial.
Baby news (and a brief slowdown). Our CSO, Fergus, welcomed a new daughter into the world . We paused major technical builds for a couple of weeks for parental leave (and attempted sleep). Moving toward full pace now.
Plans for October
Squeeze in more cooling. We’re compressing and rearranging the IR-path components inside the unit - bringing spacing down from 7cm to 4cm - so we can fit more cooling panels and improve the cooling output. We’re really starting to see the value of working in a tighter iteration cycle as we can identify improvements for our next unit on a month by month basis.
Hiring for coating performance. We’re just about to close on a mechanical engineer to own the panel coating production. This will help us attack the issues we uncovered in our latest unit and ensure we can optimise our directional IR uniformity per cm² as well as make application repeatable at pilot scale.
SAFE funding. We’re continuing discussions and aiming to sign a SAFE in October. We’re well-funded at current burn, but SAFE funding would let us scale the team and accelerate core development, getting us to pilot readiness faster.
The Temperate Team
(Less hot air, more cold air)