Helbling supports the EPFL Innogrants and the Start-up Osmotech

Helbling Technik Bern AG (Helbling) has initiated the Helbling Innovation Fund to support young entrepreneurs in early stage projects that would both have a positive impact on society and support Helbling’s vision “Innovation, together we do it”.

The Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a teaching and research organization with a mission in know-how transfer and research for the benefit of society. The Vice-Presidency for Innovation and Technology Transfer (VPIV ), which is responsible for the coordination of all relationships between industry and EPFL, financially supports high-potential projects in which employees or students are involved by means of Innogrants.

Therefore, Helbling and EPFL have agreed to join forces to support projects out of EPFL laboratories with Helbling Innogrants. The grants allow students or collaborators from EPFL to make further progress in their projects with the help of financial support for one year.

Helbling announces to grant the Helbling Innogrant 2012 to Elodie Dahan and her project OsmoTech
OsmoTech is developing an innovative technology that converts low-temperature heat into electricity. Industries are releasing a lot of waste heat into the environment. In data centers, servers release a large quantity of heat that must be eliminated to ensure a long lifetime for IT equipment. As a consequence, data centers face a peculiar situation where 30% of their energy consumption is used for cooling the heat that they produce. Data centers worldwide have a carbon footprint similar to the aviation industry.

The aim of OsmoTech is to provide data centers and other industries (such as chemical plants or incinerators) a profitable and sustainable solution to recycle their waste heat for generating electricity at high power capacity. OsmoTech will distinguish itself from other technologies by being able to operate at very low temperatures (below 100°C). In the long term, the team wants to exploit the multiple and freely available natural (such as geothermal or solar heat) and man-produced heat sources to produce green electricity.

Elodie Dahan, from France, holds a M.Sc. in Electrical engineering from ESME Sudria (Paris, France) and a PhD in Microtechnologies in BioMEMS from EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). She was a visitor scientist at Raindance Technologies in Lexington (MA, USA) and a Postdoctorant at Harvard University in Cambridge (MA, USA). In June 2011, she co-founded OsmoTech based at the Microsystem Laboratory of Prof. Philippe Renaud at EPFL