Jill Elsner and Fred Leavitt were anxious to show off their company’s latest technological innovation, but they couldn’t just fire it up inside their Miramar Road offices. Breakthrough or not, it puts out a fair amount of smoke.
Technician Tom Lillestol placed the device — essentially a modified stove — on a small table, wheeled it outdoors and sparked it up. Predictably, flames began to heat a pot of water, which didn’t seem worthy of a government research grant — until something else happened.
Within three minutes, a light connected to the stove by a USB cord flickered on. Leavitt, vice president of San Diego research and development company Hi-Z Technology Inc., removed the bulb and plugged in his cellphone. It began to charge.
The demonstration wouldn’t dazzle anyone familiar with thermoelectrics and the semiconducting properties of a compound called bismuth telluride. But to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it might be a way to improve the health and everyday lives of millions of people in India.
And that’s just the start.
Wider Applications
Hi-Z is also doing work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Department of Transportation. The company sees potential commercial applications in the areas of household heating and survivalism.
The $100,000 grant the EPA recently awarded to Hi-Z is vindication for a small company that has worked since 1988 to refine — and more recently, commercialize — a technology that has been mostly limited to car cigarette lighters and seat-coolers.
The key now, besides finding investors, is maximizing the cost-efficiency of the company’s bite-size modules capable of generating about 14 watts of electricity with no fuel other than heat itself.
“Our challenge isn’t a technical challenge,” said Elsner, Hi-Z’s CFO and acting CEO. “It’s an economic challenge.”
Old Technology
An important thing to understand about Hi-Z is how that stove turned on that light bulb.
In 1821, German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck discovered he could create voltage by connecting two kinds of metals and exposing one side to heat and the other to cold.
What happens is electrons packed tightly on the cooler side migrate to the warmer side, creating electrical current. It works in reverse, too: Electrifying the system makes the cold side colder and the warm side warmer, hence the soothing car seats and burning-hot cigarette lighters.
For a long time, Hi-Z concentrated on increasing the efficiency of its thermoelectric materials, which led it to focus on bismuth telluride, a compound found in copper mines. The company sources the metal, together with small plastic grids that hold it in place, from China, then applies and sands aluminum circuitry in San Diego.
Desalination
In recent years, the company turned from research and development to designing and making thermoelectric systems. This has led to a series of government contracts that have proved Hi-Z’s technology and helped build commercial interest in its work.
For NASA, Hi-Z has been working for almost two years on a prototype that would power space probes and science packages in cases where solar power is not feasible or is unreliable. The company hopes to find investors to commercialize the tiny module, which can run for up to 20 years on a nuclear battery.
The Department of Energy has contracted Hi-Z to design and test a thermoelectric generator that would power a forward-osmosis desalination system in places without readily available electricity.
Meanwhile, the company’s work for the Department of Transportation centers on a thermoelectric device mounted on the exhaust system of a city bus. It would not power the vehicle’s drivetrain but provide auxiliary electricity for things like air-conditioning.
Improving Lives
The EPA grant is related to work Hi-Z is doing for an Indian company that makes wood stoves. The agency sees health benefits to the stove’s thermoelectric component, in that adding a generator could reduce the need for dirty kerosene lamps now used to light Indian households. Also, a fan attached to the device to create a thermoelectric temperature differential is seen as making the stove’s combustion more efficient and therefore less unhealthy for people inhaling the smoke.
“Hi-Z’s work is an example of the creative thinking needed to address environmental problems,” the EPA’s acting regional administrator, Alexis Strauss, said in a Dec. 13 news release announcing the grant to Hi-Z, which was among 13 such grants awarded to small businesses.
The company’s prototype isn’t the only stove generating thermoelectric power. A New York City company called BioLite sells one geared toward campers that retails for about $130.
Higher standards
Hi-Z’s version will be different because it must overcome two special challenges: It has to meet certain wood-burning standards in order to satisfy the EPA, and it must keep costs low so that the stove’s manufacturer, Mumbai-based Greenway Appliances, can retail the product for $65.
“We’re sweating every penny,” Elsner said.
The exercise could do the company good. Vice President Leavitt sees a number of potential commercial applications — feeders for pellet-fired heating stoves, for example, and a survivalist stove to rival BioLite’s — that become more attractive as their thermoelectric costs come down.
But for now, he sounds most enthused about the prototype stove’s ability to cut down on emissions-related lung disease and give Indians an inexpensive way to charge their cellphones.
“It feels good to work on a project where you are able to improve the lives of millions of families,” he said.
HI-Z TECHNOLOGY INC.
CEO: Jill Elsner
REVENUE: Undisclosed
NUMBER OF LOCAL EMPLOYEES: 13 (full and part-time)
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
YEAR FOUNDED: 1988
COMPANY DESCRIPTION: Hi-Z creates, designs and manufactures thermoelectric materials, modules and systems
KEY FACTORS FOR SUCCESS: Core competency in thermoelectric power, a relatively unknown technology the company believes hasn’t reached its full commercial potential
