Recent KU PhD graduate, Dr. Kalin Baca, has taken the helm of sustainable engineering startup and KU spinout, Icorium Engineering Company, as its Chief Executive Officer. Dr. Baca, who co-founded the company as a PhD student in 2022 along with KU Professor Mark Shiflett, will begin to build the company as she leads R&D efforts for the company’s recently awarded STTR Phase I R&D grant from the National Science Foundation. “Thanks to the STTR, Icorium will have revenue from day one that we can use to hire additional part-time engineers within the next couple of months, and to keep growing from there.”

Over the next year, Baca and Icorium engineers will work with KU researchers to develop proof-of-concept for commercial scale separation of refrigerant mixtures so that they can be recycled again and again. The technology, which was first developed at KU and is the focus of Baca’s doctoral research, will enable efficient separation of what are called azeotropic mixtures. “In simple terms, azeotropes are mixtures where all the components have the same boiling point at a specific composition, which means they can’t be separated using standard distillation methods” says Baca. “Refrigerants are very intentionally designed to be azeotropic, which is one of the things that makes them effective. But it also makes them very difficult to deal with at end-of-life because they can’t be separated by the usual methods, which is necessary to recycle them.”

HFC refrigerants are the replacement for prior CFC and HCFC refrigerants, which were damaging to the ozone layer. While HFCs have zero ozone depletion potential, they have significant global warming potential and are slated to be phased out in favor of newer alternatives. While production will mostly phase-out by 2036, it will take decades for existing systems to be replaced with systems that can run on the new alternatives, creating significant new demand for recycled HFCs. In 2021, Baca and Dr. Shiflett participated in the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, which is a federally funded program that teaches best practices in entrepreneurship to scientists, engineers, and researchers to speed commercialization of their research. Throughout the program, they conducted customer discovery interviews and market research to evaluate the commercial potential of the technology. “KU has a very strong chemical engineering program, and Dr. Shiflett’s research group is investigating some incredibly innovative technologies”, says Baca on why she chose KU for her PhD. “On top of that, I knew that Dr. Shiflett appreciated the entrepreneurial side of research and would be supportive of my interest in that career pathway as an advisor.” Baca credits this support, and the experience of the I-corps program for her decision to form the company. “I think we both saw early on that there was commercial potential for this technology,” says Baca, “But the I-corps experience was definitely the catalyst for creating the company and pursuing the STTR to commercialize it ourselves.”

Like many startups, things are moving quickly for Icorium. The company recently cut the ribbon on its new office space at the KU Innovation Park and has plans to grow to 10 or more employees by 2025. “The technology is attracting a lot of attention in the refrigerant industry, but we’re also getting inquiries from other industries we hadn’t really thought about, asking if the technology would work for their applications,” says Baca. “Things are really picking up and the momentum is really exciting.”