The company founded by Rawand Rasheed, who earned his Ph.D. in September in mechanical engineering (MECH) at Rice, has been awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation.
Helix Earth Technologies (HET) grew out of his research in the Preston Innovation Laboratory of Daniel Preston, assistant professor of MECH. The startup is developing retrofit devices to reduce energy consumption in air-conditioning systems.
“Lowering humidity levels in the air reduces energy loads on air conditioning systems by up to 80 percent, decreasing the cost of operation. We propose a retrofit dehumidification system designed to reduce energy use by more than 50 percent,” Rasheed said.
Air conditioning accounts for roughly four percent of global CO2 emissions, almost as much as all passenger vehicles combined, Rasheed said.
His system is based on a droplet capture filter called Helix MICRA™, originally developed in collaboration with NASA for use in space. It permits high-efficiency dehumidification by enabling a large area of contact between liquids and gases.
“Rawand’s entrepreneurial interest led him to the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) at Rice,” Preston said, “and it has been a great program in terms of supporting his development.”
Last year, Rasheed’s company won first place in the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge, a startup competition sponsored by Lilie. The co-founder and chief business officer of HET is Brad Husick, who earned a B.A. is astrophysics from Rice in 1986 and an MBA from Columbia University in 1988.
Earlier this year, Rasheed was awarded a two-year fellowship from Chain Reaction Innovations at Argonne National Laboratory to develop clean energy technologies. Rasheed also won first place in the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy startup competition in March and received the 2022 Hershel M. Rich Invention Award from Rice for his research.
In 2021, Rasheed received one of the inaugural IBUILD (Innovation in Buildings) Graduate Fellowships from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office, which funded his graduate research on the development of the Helix MICRA™ technology.
Rasheed earned his B.S. and M.S. in MECH from Portland State University in 2017 and 2019, respectively. From 2019 to 2022, Rasheed also worked as a life-support systems engineer in NASA’s Crew and Thermal Systems Division at the Johnson Space Center.