Nanotechnology Corporation Signs Project Financing Agreement with Termiona

RUSNANO, established in 2007 to enable Government policy in the field of Nanotechnology, and TERMIONA have signed a project financing agreement for large-scale manufacturing of thermoelectric devices for cooling, thermostatic control, and thermoelectric generation. RUSNANO CEO Anatoly Chubais and TERMIONA president Evgeny Kogan signed the contract today during the Nanotechnology International Forum RUSNANOTECH. The budget for the project is 1.7 billion rubles of which RUSNANO will finance 600 million rubles.

The project company will manufacture cooling systems for solid-state lasers, cold-plate cooling systems for diode lasers, temperature controlled cabinets for telecommunications equipment, commercial cooling equipment, and electric power generators for home use.

Thermoelectric devices manufactured with CERATOM technology use nanostructured composite materials that overcome deficiencies intrinsic to their ceramic predecessors. The devices are highly efficient and their prices are competitive. For example, the direct forced-cooling system for the body of a solid-state laser reduces the laser’s weight by 15 percent to 30 percent. It lowers thermal overload in active elements. And it raises the capacity of the solid-state semiconductor mechanism by 50 percent.

“These kinds of devices will mainly be used in cooling and temperature control systems for powerful solid-state and diode lasers. It is a growing market with considerable promise. The high degree of efficiency in TERMIONA devices opens a nearly untapped niche—power generation as an independent sector and as an addition to the traditional methods of generating electric energy. From a business perspective,” noted RUSNANO managing director Dmitry Pimkin, “this is an opportunity for a real breakthrough.”

“In realizing this project, we bring a fundamentally new product to the market—with cost of power that is comparable to other energy sources with its indices. Until now, application of thermoelectric systems as generators that transform idle heat into electricity has been limited by the efficiency of ceramic modules,” explained TERMIONA CEO Efim Lev. “This project and the technology are part of an emerging global revolution in the industry. We’ll see classical construction of thermoelectric modules abandoned in favor of adopting and adapting more effective technology from the allied sphere of microelectronics.”

At manufacturing facilities in Zelenograd, pilot production of thermoelectric systems is already underway. When TERMIONA reaches design capacity in 2014, the plant will be producing one million modules per year.

TERMIONA is a Russian high-tech company and author and developer of CERATOM, a technology for producing nanomodified dielectric coatings on aluminum. TERMIONA was founded in 2004 to manufacture thermoelectric converters with the CERATOM technology. In 2008 RIO group invested 150 million rubles to purchase a 51 percent interest in TERMIONA. The investment was used for research and development work. Today the company is engaged in small-batch production of thermoelectric systems and end products using the systems.