Evaluating the validity of innovative technologies in HVAC engineering.

I get to see a lot of innovations in my job. Sometimes these are ideas we are developing as a new product or system; in other cases I’m asked to comment on some new piece of technology in the market that is being touted as the next greatest thing. It’s fair to say some (but not all) have some technical merit and are a valuable contribution and some (but not all) are bogus, but how can we tell the difference?

It’s even more fun when the new idea is “patented.” This might mean a patent has been granted, or that an application has been lodged with a patent office somewhere (technically this is not yet “patented,” as the examiner has not yet finished his assessment). In other cases, despite my best efforts, I can find no trace of any intellectual property—which ought to ring an alarm bell. The whole point of the patent system is to help the spread of ideas in a formal and regulated way, so if the patent can’t be found the system’s not working very well, or the supposed document doesn’t actually exist.

If you have been given a patent number or application number, any internet search ought to lead quickly to the appropriate document. If you don’t, try the handy website Espacenet, run by the European Patent Agency that has a useful “advanced search” option. If Espacenet can’t find it, it probably doesn’t exist. A tip: if the number ends in A1, A2 or A3, you’re looking at an application that has been published but not yet granted. If the patent number ends with a B, it is fully authorized.

When the proponent of the new technology cannot explain in plain English how it works, or resorts to throwing in “pseudoscience,” particularly if the justification relies on some vague reference to “entropy” or “exergy” (two favorite concepts misused by sellers) without any meaningful calculation in support, alarm bells should definitely ring. The speaker may not be technically versed in the mysteries of the new technique, or might want to throw potential copycats off the trail, but it’s more likely there’s no basis in science for the fantastic claims being made. Caveat emptor!

Even when claims are false, the proponent might genuinely believe they are onto something. These are the most difficult people to shake off because in their minds there is no con and everyone should want this marvelous benefit. An engineer assessing new ideas must always insist on speaking to the inventor directly, not through a marketing associate or financial backer. If the inventor is also spouting incomprehensible pseudo scientific babble, it’s time to walk away, no matter how good the proposition.

A common mistake in thermodynamic systems is to confuse or conflate what happens in a sealed, fixed volume system (the plant as a whole) with what happens in a flow process (in a subsection of the plant). In the former if you heat the gas, the pressure goes up; in the latter if you heat the flow at a certain pressure, the velocity will go up but the pressure will not. This is not obvious, particularly to a layman, so it is not surprising there is room for confusion, nor that some people seek to capitalize on it.

However, it can also be frustrating and dispiriting to be on the other side of a barrage of hostile skepticism. I once sold a large chilled water system for a data center in England that used a novel type of freecooling. The seasonal efficiency was fantastic, with a COP of about 13 (equivalent to 0.36 hp/ton). I told the client the COP would be “better than 6.5.” When I went to see him two years later, he was delighted with the performance and confessed that when he put the project proposal to his boss, he had been skeptical about the energy performance, so had halved my figure again. He wanted to know why I hadn’t been honest about the numbers. “I knew it would be that good,” I said, “but you didn’t believe the lower figure, so what chance did I have?” Sometimes you just can’t win, even when you’re winning!