The foundation is yet to come: SeasonCell wants to develop an energy storage system for residential buildings. The founder and the four founders are still looking for financing.
This young energy startup is still in its infancy: ZHAW master's student Selina Pfyffer is about to found SeasonCell together with Simon In-Albon, Janis Perren, Tim Zgraggen and Raphael Moretti, four students from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Their idea: an energy storage system for residential buildings that can store excess energy from renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics in the summer and release it to the heating system as needed in the winter.
The principle behind the memory model is very simple and should look familiar to many: It is modeled on the small hand warmer pads that you carry with you when skiing, for example. If you bend a small metal plate, the phase change material it contains crystallizes, becomes solid and gives off heat. The process can be repeated as often as required by reheating the material, which then becomes liquid again. The heat generated from this can then be fed into a heating system.
The idea for SeasonCell emerged in the summer of 2022 during joint master's courses taken by the five students in search of a research topic for their master's thesis. "It was very important to us that we launch a project that has an impact on the federal government's national energy strategy - that was the prerequisite for us for a startup," explains Selina Pfyffer.
Before the foundation of SeasonCell is to be tackled, the entrepreneur and the four entrepreneurs are looking for financing. "We have already made several submissions, including one to the Gebert Rüf Foundation, and we won second place in the final round of the Luzerner Kantonalbank's Future Prize, with a grant of 50,000 Swiss francs," says Pfyffer, who works as a research assistant at the ZHAW Institute of Energy Systems and Fluid Engineering (IEFE) while completing her master's degree.
Thanks to the School of Engineering's Entrepreneurship Initiative, the startup is supported by mentor Andreas Witzig, head of the Institute of Computational Physics (ICP): "Andreas Witzig is currently advising me primarily on legal issues relating to contracts, but at the same time he is also helping us with his expertise in the various financing submissions," says Selina Pfyffer, who hopes that these will be as successful as possible so that nothing more stands in the way of SeasonCell's official founding.