(Mezzo Technologies co-founder and CEO Kevin Kelly went from riding a bike to work as an LSU professor to making equipment used by Formula One, IndyCar and NASA. All photography by Don Kadair)
Fans of Formula One auto racing understand that performance on the track, where single-seat cars go as fast as 220 miles per hour, depends as much on engineering as it does on driver skill. 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.
Mezzo Technologies’ microtube heat exchangers are one such piece of equipment. In 2007, the Baton Rouge-based 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. 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, Kelly jokes 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.
The company’s name stems from a scientific term, meso structures, used in Kelly’s work at CAMD, but with the inclusion of letter z for marketing reasons, Kelly says.
For its first several years, Mezzo was solely a research and development company, functioning first out of the Louisiana Business and Technology Center at LSU and later out of the Louisiana Technology Park. Principle sources of funding came through a series of competitive federal Small Business Innovative Research grants, many through the Army and Navy. Kelly was successful in landing multiple grants as well as some venture capital investment.
ENGINEERING SUCCESS
The basic purpose of heat exchangers is to divert and cool heat caused by combustion and other sources. It’s a piece of equipment necessary in a variety of applications, and Kelly’s goal has always been to find ways to make them more efficient. By 2007, he had zeroed in on a method that trumped others: the integration of painstakingly placed microtubes. Situated within the core of the heat exchanger, a panel of these hyper-thin tubes channels and cools off hot air much faster than past equipment, while also enabling a lighter weight design.
More business from Formula One racing, as well as continued federal research and development funding for possible aerospace projects, has helped the company grow substantially. Kelly won’t reveal annual revenue, but he says 2013 was the company’s breakout year. Mezzo now has a staff of 53, including engineering, assembly and manufacturing bays in its new Mammoth Avenue building, a 20,000-square-foot facility on nine acres.
“It’s happened through a lot of luck and some crazy, unpredictable turns,” Kelly says.
Like golf with titanium, auto racing has been an early adapter of Mezzo’s technology. Kelly says his team works closely with clients to perfect the right size and shape of each heat exchanger. During the racing offseason, when Formula One and IndyCar teams are improving designs, Mezzo’s clients send engineering spec sheets and CAD files to Mezzo’s engineers, who draw the appropriate size and shape heat exchanger. Each race car requires several.
Nearly everything is fabricated in-house at Mezzo, and many of the components that go into the heat exchangers are made or tested by hand. At one station in the manufacturing facility, Mezzo employees submerge lengths of microtubes in a shallow water bath to make sure none has been compromised with leaks or punctures. In other stations, wet saws custom cut the fittings that hold the tubes in place.
The company recently concluded a NASA-funded research project for heat exchangers in the Orion module, now under development. The 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 and Mezzo is waiting to hear from NASA, says Kelly.
The company will continue to do research, but Kelly also plans to beef up business development. Up to now, Mezzo has relied on word-of-mouth marketing among its international clients. Kelly says it will now push products and services through an updated website and other means.
“There are inherent challenges in an aerospace or defense project in that it’s just difficult to replace the incumbent product.” Kelly says. “The private sector works a lot faster.”
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