Sustainable Building Products Use Phase-Change Materials

We’ve all noticed the phenomenon associated with “things coming in clumps.”  For example, we may have lived to this point in our lives without ever having come across a certain word, only to hear it used two or three times in an amazingly brief stretch of time. Or maybe we become aware of some model of car for the first time, and then start to notice them everywhere in our travels.

This “clumps” expression comes to me from my younger days in tennis, where a boyhood friend whom I always aspired to beat (though never did) would shake his head in mock woe when I would double-fault, and tell me in faux solemnity, “Bummer, Craig.  And they come in clumps, you know.”

Before I get into the meat of the matter here, let me ask you to comment in the space below:  Have you even had one of these “things coming in clumps” experiences?  And if so, how do you explain it?  Chance?  Sure, it’s possible that out of the countless number of unremarkable mental experiences we have every day, the only ones that stand out to us are those we notice as somehow weird.  But aren’t some of these happenings too surreal to be accounted for by mere chance?

I just had one of these incidents associated with sustainable building materials; twice in the past 24 hours I’ve come across the subject of building materials constructed with compounds that change phase at near room temperature.  Imagine a piece of wallboard, like the BASF product linked above, that contains millions of tiny bits of wax (or any of dozens of other inorganic compounds, like calcium chloride hexahydrate, which are solids at about 70 degrees F, but become liquids when heated from that temperature.  As we remember from high school chemistry, melting is an endothermic process, absorbing energy from the ambient environment and storing it as “latent heat,” where freezing is an exothermic process, releasing heat back into that environment.

The happy result of all this is the self-moderating of the internal temperature of buildings constructed of such materials. As they start to heat up during the day, the tiny nonstructural elements comprising its walls melt, sucking in the heat from the space, i.e., cooling it; remember that cold isn’t a thing per se, but rather the absence of heat.  At night, these elements refreeze, giving back the heat they had taken in earlier.

I believe there is tremendous business potential here.  But we need to keep in mind that the successful launch of new building products takes a considerable amount of work.  I’m asked constantly how to do this, i.e., how do you take a mature industry that doesn’t openly welcome change, and get it to open up to a bold new concept?  I have to admit that this is a formidable challenge–one that I’m still trying to master after all these years.   And here’s BASF (linked above), an old client of mine, with some great IP–possibly the very best in this space.  Will they be successful?  They have the financial resources to do anything they want, but, like most great product developers, they’re not innately good at marketing.  I think I’ll try to reconnect with them and do my best to help them make this happen.

In the meanwhile, please feel free to post a comment on the “things come in clumps” phenomenon; I bet you have a good one.