Two Hungarians innovating heat storage

HeatVentors, a company that revolutionizes heat storage, did quite well in startup contests. Their pilot projects are about to launch, and they are planning to take their invention to China. They do not fear copycats, as Forbes.hu reports.

Founders of HeatVentors Rita Farkas and Zoltán Andrássy both studied as energetics engineers. They have been dealing with phase change materials for five years — writing their thesis about them — and now they use them for creating a product and building a company.

Zoltán stated that they were mostly encouraged at professional conferences to try and make a profit off their ideas. This is how HeatVentors was founded, as the founders decided to get involved in the world of business and law. Still, they tried to remain what they are: engineers.

HeatVentors has become a financial success: they have won 10,000 euros of support in the Climate-KIC accelerator program in June.

But what is so original about their ideas? Well, most of the heat containers run on water nowadays. We store energy by heating and cooling water. HeatVentors, however, use phase change materials’ state of matter. It is like an ice cube. “As we melt or freeze the material, we can store much more power, almost without any change in temperature”, Zoltán explained.

The greatest advantage of the new technology is that it requires almost 90 percent less space than water containers. They are also able to store heat energy between 100 and 600 degrees Celsius. This system is proper for heating, freezing and renewing systems, as well as for solar plants.

The other great advantage of HeatTank energy containers is that they repay their value more quickly. It means that the required investment is a couple of hundreds of euros per apartment buildings, which will be regained in 3-4 years.

Building a product based on their studies was a difficult task. It had to be connected to energetics and building-engineering, contain novelties and challenges, but still be marketable.