From MIT Lab to the Field: The Story Behind Infinite Cooling’s Invention

High Voltage

How a breakthrough idea became a water-saving industrial solution

Every industrial technology has an origin story—ours began with a question: What if we could stop losing so much water from cooling towers?

That simple curiosity led to the founding of Infinite Cooling, the development of a patented technology that captures evaporated water, and the launch of two complementary platforms—WaterPanel™ and TowerPulse™—now deployed across industries from power generation to manufacturing.

This is the story of how it all started.

The Problem: Trillions of Gallons Lost to the Sky

Cooling towers are critical infrastructure for removing heat in power plants, manufacturing sites, and commercial buildings. But they operate on a fundamental tradeoff: cool the water by evaporating a portion of it—then lose that water to the atmosphere forever.

In the U.S. alone, cooling towers account for over 50% of all industrial water use. In water-stressed regions, this loss isn’t just inefficient—it’s unsustainable. Yet for decades, there was no scalable way to recover the evaporated water.

The Invention: Turning Plume into Pure Water

In 2016, Maher Damak, then a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, was researching electrostatic separation of droplets from fog and sprays along with PhD advisor Kripa Varanasi. During lab experiments, Maher and co-founder Karim Khalil realized the physics behind plume capture could be applied to cooling towers—a notoriously overlooked source of water loss.

They asked:Could we harness electric fields to recover evaporated water from the cooling tower plume?

The answer was yes. Their initial prototype, built from copper mesh, wires, and a high-voltage source, showed promising results in capturing microscopic water droplets from air streams. With support from MIT's Sustainability office, the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, and seed grants from MassCEC, MassChallenge, and the DOE Cleantech University Prize, Infinite Cooling was born.

The IP: From Lab Bench to Patent Portfolio

The core idea was simple: water vapor in the plume condenses into ultra-pure droplets in the air, which can be captured using a carefully designed electric field. But making it work on an industrial scale required novel designs in:

• Electrode geometry and placement

• High-voltage safety and power control

• Mesh recovery surfaces resistant to fouling

• Integration with existing cooling tower flows and drift eliminators

  
  

These designs led to a foundational patent filed in 2016, followed by additional patents covering modularity, control systems, and performance optimization.

Today, Infinite Cooling’s IP portfolio includes multiple granted U.S. patents and international filings, forming a strong moat around the core plume-capture concept.

The First Field Trials: From Theory to Reality

The company’s first large-scale field deployment took place at MIT's Central Utility Plant, where the WaterPanel prototype was mounted on a cooling tower serving the campus power and steam system. It demonstrated measurable water recovery—reducing makeup water needs and verifying the lab model in real-world conditions.

Following that success, pilot systems were deployed at:

• Waste-to-energy plants

• Nuclear power plants

• University campuses

• Chemical manufacturing sites

  
  

These installations confirmed that WaterPanel™ was modular, retrofit-friendly, and effective across a variety of tower designs.

Evolution: From Hardware to Smart Systems

Along the way, the team discovered another opportunity: operators lacked real-time visibility into their cooling tower performance. Energy waste, fouling, and plume risks often went undetected.

This led to the development of TowerPulse™, a wireless sensor and analytics platform that continuously tracks:

• Water use and losses (evaporation, drift, blowdown)

• Fan and pump energy efficiency

• Cooling performance degradation

• Most impactful actions operators should take to improve efficiency

With both WaterPanel™ and TowerPulse™, Infinite Cooling now offers a comprehensive cooling tower optimization platform—combining physical water recovery with intelligent system control.

From MIT to the World

What started as a graduate research project is now a venture-backed climate tech company helping industrial facilities save water, reduce energy use, and operate more sustainably. Infinite Cooling’s solutions are deployed across the U.S. and internationally, including partnerships with utilities, Fortune 500 companies, and national laboratories.

What's Next?

Infinite Cooling continues to innovate at the intersection of thermodynamics, sustainability, and AI. The vision is simple: make every cooling tower a closed loop.

Whether you're a power plant operator, a sustainability officer, or an engineer rethinking water use in your facility, Infinite Cooling’s journey from lab bench to field deployment shows what’s possible when science meets scalable impact.

Want to learn more or explore a pilot? Get in touch.