Air Squared, Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N161-024

Description

The US Navy has identified an autonomous vacuum system as a key component to eliminate maintenance of current shipboard vacuum insulation systems. Currently, maintenance costs around $550,000, with an integrated autonomous vacuum system, this cost can be avoided.<br><br>Vacuum system of this nature already exist, leak detectors and mass-spectrometers utilize a positive displace roughing pump in conjunction with a turbomolecular pump. The problem is these systems are large, have high power consumptions and are expensive. <br><br>To solve this, miniaturization would be a natural approach as current systems are designed to pump much larger volumes. However, performance of scroll vacuum pump technology does not always scale linearly with size. And in the case of scroll pumps, miniaturization will reduce the performance bellow the required vacuum levels of this application. <br><br>This can be solved by the addition of a second stage to the scroll roughing pump. Air Squareds patented 2-stage scroll pump allows miniaturization of positive displacement scroll pumping technology without degradation in vacuum performance. This poses an opportunity for Air Squared to leverage its 2-stage scroll vacuum pump technology, in conjunction with current off the shelf miniature turbo-molecular pump technology to save the Navy hundreds of thousands per year.