Europe-based Formula One is a multibillion-dollar international sport in which backers can invest tens of millions in the construction and design of a single automobile. Their goal is to find an edge other teams haven’t discovered—a new body style or a piece of equipment—that will reduce drag and deliver an aerodynamic edge.
As Business Report details in a feature from its current issue, Baton Rouge-based Mezzo Technologies’ microtube heat exchangers are one such piece of equipment. In 2007, the company began selling custom heat exchangers for use in Formula One as well as IndyCar, helping transition the enterprise from years of research and development to the marketplace.
And recently, it concluded a NASA-funded research project for heat exchangers in the Orion module, now under development and is waiting to hear back from the space program.
Kevin Kelly, Mezzo co-founder and CEO, remembers being first approached by a Formula One team.
“I think they probably saw a little company with potential,” Kelly says. “They wanted to take us under their wing and see what we could do.”
Kelly, a former mechanical engineering professor at LSU, didn’t set out to build heat transfer equipment for race cars. In fact, he jokes that he didn’t know the first thing about auto racing.
“I used to ride a bike to work,” says Kelly, who regularly rode a congested, car-dominant route between Claycut Road and the Louisiana Technology Park on Florida Boulevard.
Mezzo itself has blazed a nontraditional trail.
The company was founded in 2000 when Kelly, then a full-time professor, was running a Department of Defense-funded research project on heat exchangers at LSU’s Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices. One of Kelly’s mechanical engineering undergraduate research students at the time, Andy McCandless, suggested they form a company around the technology.
“I said, ‘What are we going to sell?’” Kelly recalls asking McCandless, who left Mezzo in 2006 and now runs technology startup Bascomb-Hunter.
More business from Formula One racing, as well as continued federal research and development funding for possible aerospace projects, has helped Mezzo grow substantially. The company is waiting to hear back from NASA. The research project required the company to develop heat exchangers that can cool hot air while the craft is on the hot side of the moon and store the energy for later use on the cool, or dark, side. The project is finished but the company will continue to do research.
Read the full story. Send your comments to editors@businessreport.com.
