Aeroshield, a MIT spinout and developer of heat reduce window technology has announced the opening of a new facility to manufacture its energy-efficient window.
The start-up claims its window technology reduces energy use and heat loss by up to 65%.
“Our mission is to decarbonise the built environment,” says Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, co-founder and CEO of AeroShield. “The availability of affordable, thermally insulating windows will help us achieve that goal while also reducing homeowner’s heating and cooling bills.”
The windows use aerogels, an ultra-porous, lightweight material that provides a barrier to heat flow. The team at MIT decided to incorporate aerogel sheets into windows to keep heat from entering or escaping buildings.
To solve the issues to transparency with the aerogel material, MIT researchers decided to make the materials silica particles both small and uniform in size to allow light to pass through.
The researchers determined that aerogel sheets could be inserted into the gap in double-pane windows, making them more than twice as insulating. They can also be manufactured in existing production lines, with only minor changes needed.
Aeroshield was founded in 2019 by Strobach and her MIT colleagues, Aaron Baskerville-Bridges and Kyle Wilke.
In spring 2024, AeroShield received a $14.5 million award from ARPA-E’s “Seeding Critical Advances for Leading Energy technologies with Untapped Potential” (SCALEUP) program, which provides new funding to previous ARPA-E awardees that have “demonstrated a viable path to market.”
