GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) – Happy Tech Tuesday. I’m Melanie Morón here with UF Innovate, and today I’m joined with President of Micro Nano Technologies, Michael Schmid. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
Tell us, what do you guys do at MNT?
We are commercializing three separate technologies that use membranes at their core. Today I’d like to talk about just one of those three, which affects society a little bit more than the others, and that’s dehumidification.
A building like this building takes outside air and it cools it down to 52 degrees Fahrenheit to get the humidity out so we can live in here without being real damp. Then it reheats the air back up to a temperature that you have in this, so any commercial building. What happens is in our technology, you don’t have to cool the air down to 52. Just pull the air in, take the water out as a vapor, and then you just cool down to the temperature you want. You don’t have to overcool and then reheat. There are big systems in these buildings that are cooling and heating at the same time to give you the air at the temperature you desire.
How are these prototypes going to impact the world?
What they’re going to do is allow you to achieve indoor air qualities at a much lower cost, in a much simpler and more flexible way.
Michael, why Gainesville?
In this particular application, the technologies are coming from the University of Florida. This allows me access to the research that’s currently being done and funded through the University of Florida as well as being able to fund additional research at UF. There’s also, UF is a very willing partner with respect to facilities for being able to install prototypes.
What’s a project you guys are working on lately?
Currently, we just got a contract with the government of Qatar to do some research and development for them to remove the humidity from air and create and use it for agricultural purposes as water, because they have a big problem with not being able to do desalination because the water is too salty. They have a big shortage of agricultural water.
Well Michael, thank you so much for joining us today. That’s it for today’s Tech Tuesday episode. We’ll catch you next week.
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