Conventional turbine
Radial jetsDead-zone area–
Flow coherence–
Cavitation / min–
Nature's golden-ratio flow geometry
Fluid dynamics, sculpted by nature.
PAX Scientific designs impellers, fans, mixers and water systems from the spiral paths fluids already take in whirlpools and shells. The equipment moves more with less energy, less noise and less wear. We build our own products and license the geometry to manufacturers.
Live centripetal vortex
1997Foundedby inventor Jay Harman
300 WMixes 10M gallonsabout three 100-watt bulbs
Up to 85%Less electricityFlair vs. same-size fans
ThousandsWater systemsrunning PAX Water mixers
Products
One principle, five product lines.
Each line applies the same streamlining geometry to a different fluid problem. Open any tile for the full product page and its interactive model.
Getty comp slot
Innovative Technology
Getty comp slotFlow decides the shape
The Streamlining Principle behind every PAX design.
Open →Water Purification
PAX H2(O)
Membrane-free, chemical-free distillation for water of any salinity.
Open →Water Quality
Tank mixing
Lily impellers keep stored drinking water fresh.
Open →Mixers
Industrial mixing
Low-shear blending for process industries.
Open →Fans and Blowers
PAX Air
Quieter fans that need smaller motors.
Open →3D geometry workbench
The Lily impeller, built from one equation.
Three vanes trace a golden logarithmic spiral in plan view and rise into a trumpet, like a calla lily. Rotation draws water down through the throat and out along the tank floor. Drag to orbit, right-drag or two fingers to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom.
Wireframe mesh
Velocity streamlines
Auto-orbit camera
Tip speed8.5 m/s
Vanes3
Spiral pitch17.0°
Growth / 90°1.618
Tip speed assumes a 0.9 m reference diameter. Playback is slowed so the vanes stay readable. Streamline color runs teal (slow) to white (fast).
Flow theory
Same tank, two ways to stir it.
A flat-blade turbine throws fluid outward in jets that break into eddies, leaves still corners, and forms vapor bubbles behind its blade tips. A spiral impeller sets up one vortex that turns the whole volume. The figures under each tank are measured from these simulations as they run.
PAX centripetal spiral
Coherent vortexDead-zone area–
Flow coherence–
Cavitation / min–
Fast, aligned flowModerate flowHigh-shear eddyStagnant (dead zone)Cavitation bubble
Two-dimensional teaching simulation. Dead-zone area counts grid cells moving slower than a quarter of the tank's mean speed. Coherence compares each cell's average velocity with its particles' individual speeds. These illustrate the principle; they are not test data.
Energy and carbon
Estimate what a spiral retrofit could save.
Pick a preset, then set your own hours, motor size and power price. The energy reduction is an assumption you control. Confirm it for your site with a PAX engineering study before budgeting.
Annual energy cost savings$0
Electricity conserved0
CO₂ abated0
Ten-year savings$0
Fleet power0
Energy is rated power × hours × motors at full load. CO₂ uses 0.386 kg per kWh, close to the recent US grid average. The ten-year figure holds today's price flat.
Recent milestones
From reservoirs to hydrogen.
Recent awards, contracts and launches. The Press page has the full list.
Apr 2024
DOE Hydrogen Shot Prize, final phase
PAX H2(O) wins the final phase of the Department of Energy's incubator prize.
May 2022US Navy SBIR Phase II
Distributed water and hydrogen for shore installations and disaster response.
Sep 2019Flair launches
PAX's first consumer product: a quiet room fan using up to 85% less electricity.
Jan 2017UGSI acquires PAX Water
The tank-mixing subsidiary joins UGSI Solutions.
Work with PAX
Have a fan, pump or mixer that could run quieter on less power?
Tell us about the device and its duty point. We'll say plainly whether a streamlined geometry is likely to help.
Optimizing natural flow
Innovative technology
Fans, mixers, pumps, turbines and propellers, and the hulls and fuselages that move through fluid, all fight the same losses: drag, wasted energy, noise and wear. PAX's Streamlining Principle borrows the geometry nature uses to move fluid and builds it into equipment.
“Conventional technology creates shapes to induce flow. PAX technology employs flow to create shapes.”
Most equipment is designed shape-first: draw a blade, then push fluid with it. PAX works the other way round. Fluids already prefer certain paths, the spirals seen in whirlpools, shells and growing plants. Design the surface along that path and the fluid stops fighting the machine.
The same idea applies whether the fluid is water in a reservoir, air in a server rack or coolant in a heat exchanger.
Stated benefits
What streamlining changes.
The three outcomes PAX designs for, as described on its technology page.
Increased efficiency
- Less noise
- Higher output
- Lower power use
Optimized flow pattern
- Reduced drag
- Controlled thrust or flow direction
- Low shear and cavitation
Lower build and upkeep cost
- Less material
- Smaller motor
- Greater structural integrity
Interactive · Drag lab
Shape is most of the drag bill.
Drag force grows with the square of speed, so the power to push through fluid grows with its cube. The shape coefficient Cd multiplies all of it. Pick a shape and a fluid and watch how much of the flow it disturbs.
Drag coeff. Cd0.04
Drag force0 N
Power to overcome0 W
vs. flat plate−97%
Reynolds number (0.36 m body)–
F = ½ρv²CdA with a 0.1 m² frontal area and textbook coefficients (flat plate 1.28, sphere 0.47, streamlined body 0.04). The flow picture is a simplified potential-flow sketch with a modeled wake.
Research and development
From mathematics to a tested part.
Select a stage to see what happens in it.
Being commercialized now
Where the principle ships today.
PAX H2(O)
Water purification
PAX H2(O) is a distillation system that pairs basic thermodynamics with biomimetic design. It targets desalination first, with the aim of cutting both the capital and operating cost of clean water.
No membranes
Nothing to foul, scale or replace.
No chemicals
No pretreatment dosing.
Any salinity
Brackish water, seawater or brine.
Unattended
Runs without an operator on site.
Start-stop
Follows intermittent renewable power.
Interactive · Salinity lab
Why salinity limits membranes but not distillation.
Reverse osmosis has to push water through a membrane against osmotic pressure, and that pressure rises with salt content. Past a point the pumps and membranes can't keep up. A thermal process boils water off the brine instead, so salinity barely changes the job.
BrackishSeawater 35Brine 70+150 g/L
Osmotic pressure, feed0
At concentrate0
Reverse osmosisFeasible
PAX H2(O)Feasible
Simplified van 't Hoff estimate for sodium chloride (about 0.77 bar per g/L). The concentrate's salinity rises with recovery, and RO needs a 10% pressure margin above it. Real plants vary with temperature, membrane type and pretreatment.
Interactive · Distributed Water Resource
Local water and hydrogen, from local heat.
Energy and water are moving toward small local systems connected at the distribution level. PAX pairs its modular, low-temperature still with electrolyzers and renewable power. Select a stage to see its role.
Stage
Recognition and funding
Backed by the Navy and the Department of Energy.
PAX is demonstrating the system for the US Navy SBIR program and won the DOE Hydrogen Shot incubator prize.
Oct 2020
Navy SBIR Phase I
Low-temperature purification at any salinity, running on low-grade or solar-thermal heat.
May 2022
Navy SBIR Phase II
Water plus hydrogen for naval, logistics, microgrid and disaster-response settings.
Oct 2022
DOE Hydrogen Shot, Phase 1
One of nine Phase 1 winners of the incubator prize.
Apr 2024
DOE Hydrogen Shot, final phase
Winner of the final phase, with national-lab testing to follow.
PAX Water Technologies
Ensuring water quality
Treated water can go bad while it waits in storage tanks. PAX founded PAX Water Technologies to fix that with the PAX Water Mixer, whose Lily impeller blends fresh inflow through the whole tank.
Why stored water degrades
Three causes, one result.
In a thermally isolated top layer, water ages and can lose its disinfectant residual completely. That residual is often the last barrier against microbes and harmful bacteria.
01
Thermal stratification
Sun-warmed water floats on cooler inflow and stops mixing with it.
02
Underutilization
Tanks sized for peak demand turn over slowly the rest of the year.
03
Inlet and outlet layout
When inlet and outlet sit low, new water short-circuits past the upper volume.
Interactive · Tank simulator
Watch the top layer lose its chlorine.
A 1-D model of a storage tank fed from the bottom. Turn the mixer off and the warm top layer stops exchanging with the inflow, so its chlorine decays. Turn it on and the column stays uniform.
PAX mixer
Day0
Top residual1.00 mg/L
Top–bottom ΔT0.0 °C
Top water age0 d
Illustrative model: 24 layers, first-order chlorine decay of 0.15 per day, bottom inflow at 1.0 mg/L and 12 °C. Values below 0.2 mg/L are often treated as a low-residual warning.
PAX Mixer
Industrial mixing
PAX Mixer designs rotary and static in-line mixers for agriculture, petroleum, pharmaceutical and beverage processing. The goal is lower energy and capital cost, very low shear, faster blending and higher yield.
Interactive · Application explorer
Where low shear pays off.
Pick a process to see what it needs from a mixer and where a streamlined impeller helps.
Lower energy
Less motor power for the same blend.
Lower capital cost
Smaller drives and simpler builds.
Extremely low shear
Gentle on cells, crystals and emulsions.
Better yields
Shorter blend times and more uniform product.
Concept under exploration
Atmospheric de-stratification.
Smog in megacities costs residents and businesses, harms health and sometimes halts flights. A temperature inversion acts as a lid that traps it near the ground. PAX Mixer has modeled a low-carbon way to break that lid. This animation shows the idea, not a validated result.
Vortex mixing (concept)
Ground-level haze–
Venting through lid–
Traffic and industry keep adding smog (amber) at street level. The dashed band is the inversion lid: the stronger it is, the less leaks through, so haze builds. Turn on vortex mixing and a rising ring vortex draws ground air into a column and vents it above the lid, where it disperses (blue). Haze is shown relative to the model's capacity.
PAX Air
Fans and blowers
PAX Air applies patented PAX geometry to ordinary fan blades for appliances, refrigeration, HVAC, consumer products, computer cooling and transportation. The blades run quieter, need less energy or a smaller motor, and give more controllable flow at lower manufacturing cost.
Interactive · Fan affinity laws
Small efficiency gains, cubed.
For a given fan, flow scales with speed, pressure with speed squared and power with speed cubed. A blade that delivers the same airflow at a lower speed saves power out of proportion to the speed change, and noise drops with it.
50%conventional = 100%
Power saved0%
New fan power0 kW
Noise change0 dB
Per year, 24/70 kWh
Noise change uses the fan-law estimate of 50·log₁₀(speed ratio). The listening samples are synthesized noise at those relative levels for illustration; they are not recordings of PAX fans.
Consumer product · launched 2019
Flair. Save a billion tons.
Flair is a quiet, very efficient portable fan, designed with PAX's biomimetic geometry. In PAX's tests against leading competitors it used up to 85% less electricity than conventional fans of the same size.
Energy use, same-size fans
6 watts to circulate a whole room.
At about the power of a 6-watt LED bulb, Flair moves an average room's air as many times per hour as health guidance recommends. Very large rooms take under 28 watts.
Bars derived from PAX's stated comparisons: conventional fans use up to 85% more, and fans with premium motors about 50% more, than Flair's 6 W.
Interactive · Room destratification
Warm air rises. Flair brings it back.
Heating and cooling take nearly half a household's energy. In winter warm air pools at the ceiling while you sit in the cool layer. Flair's ring vortex turns the whole room over, so you can lower the thermostat; PAX estimates savings above 25% per room.
Flair on
Ceiling–
Floor–
Gradient–
At seat height–
Illustrative model of a 2.7 m room with a heat source near the ceiling (winter) or floor-level cool air (summer).
Interactive · Global CO₂
The billion-ton arithmetic.
PAX's reasoning: power plants emit about 33.1 billion tons of CO₂ a year (IEA). If fans use 22% of electricity, that share is about 7.3 billion tons. Improve the average fan by 20% and the savings pass a billion tons. Adjust the inputs to test it.
CO₂ avoided each year0
Fan-attributed CO₂0
Equivalent share of total0%
The 22% share is PAX's figure; other estimates put fans and pumps at different shares depending on scope. Sources on PAX's Flair page include ASHRAE Journal, REHVA, EPA and IEA.
Quiet on low
On low speed, you can't tell it's running. PAX treats fan noise as a symptom of wasted energy.
More velocity you can feel
In PAX's airflow tests Flair delivered noticeably higher air velocity than comparison fans.
Engineered with CFD
Optimized in airflow and sound test chambers and with supercomputer simulations. Additional test data is available from PAX.
Working with PAX
Nature-inspired solutions for better products
PAX works with client companies to develop and commercialize products through joint development and master licensing. PAX engineers also take on specific technical problems where its design methods can help, on short or long engagements.
Interactive · Engagement models
Three ways to work together.
Select a model to see how it typically runs from first call to product.
Master licensees
The model, proven three times.
Each licensee took the geometry into a specific market.
PAX Air
Fans
Industrial, domestic, computer and automotive fan markets.
PAX Water Technologies
Water and wastewater
Tank mixing and water-quality management. Acquired by UGSI Solutions in 2017.
PAX Mixer
Industrial mixing
Process mixing outside potable and wastewater, plus atmospheric mixing research.
Inquiries to Francesca Bertone, Chief Operating Officerinfo@paxscientific.com
Research and patents
Intellectual property
In-house and independent tests support the benefits of the Streamlining Principle. Work with Cascade Technologies at Stanford University confirmed the theory behind PAX's discoveries and measured substantial gains over conventional designs.
Interactive · Research network
Tested beyond our own lab.
Universities and research groups PAX has worked with. Select one to highlight it.
Partner
Patents
A growing US and international portfolio.
PAX holds numerous US and international patents and keeps filing new ones. Detailed technical information is shared under confidentiality agreements.
- Send a short description of your application through the inquiry form.
- PAX returns a mutual NDA.
- Once signed, you receive the relevant patents, test data and design notes.
Since 1997
A nature-inspired R&D firm
PAX finds streamlined answers to friction and fluid problems in industry: better control of turbulence, less drag, quieter and more efficient equipment, and better heat transfer at lower pressure. Internal research covers heat transfer, refrigeration and pumps.
Interactive · Timeline
Milestones.
Use the arrow keys, the dots or the year buttons to move through PAX's history.
A fascination with flow
The Streamlining Principle
Scientists, philosophers and artists have studied flow for centuries. Jay Harman asked a practical question: if fluids prefer certain paths, why not build equipment that follows them? His answer, the Streamlining Principle, turns nature's flow efficiencies into design geometry.
PAX calls this biomimicry, a term popularized by author Janine Benyus: deliberately copying solutions that nature has already tested. Harman first applied it to boats, producing the award-winning Goggleboat and WildThing watercraft.
He founded PAX Scientific in 1997 to bring the same efficiencies to fluid-handling equipment: fans, mixers, pumps, turbines and heat exchangers.
Our mission
Translate nature's efficiencies into technology, so every industry gets tools that use less energy and material and perform better.
Interactive · Spiral explorer
One curve, many growth rates.
A logarithmic spiral, r = a·ebθ, keeps the same angle to its radius everywhere. Change b to tighten or open it. At b ≈ 0.306 it grows by the golden ratio every quarter turn.
Quarter-turn guides
Pitch angle0°
Growth / 90°0
Growth / turn0
Golden match–
Interactive · Phyllotaxis
Why plants pick 137.5°.
Sunflowers place each seed a fixed angle from the last. Only the golden angle packs them without gaps or spokes. Move the slider a fraction of a degree and the pattern breaks.
The golden angle is 360° × (1 − 1/φ) ≈ 137.508°. Seeds are colored by order of growth.
Management and advisors
Leadership
A founder-led company advised by leading voices in biomimicry, energy, economics and mathematics.
Engineering team
The team
Mechanical, aeronautical, aerospace and electrical engineers work alongside client companies to develop PAX technology.
People
The people behind PAX.
Founders, operators and advisors who carry the Streamlining Principle from the lab to the market.
Mechanical
Rotors, housings, drive trains and manufacturability.
Aeronautical
Blade and vane aerodynamics, wakes and noise.
Aerospace
High-fidelity CFD and structural simulation.
Electrical
Motors, controls and test instrumentation.
Careers
No openings right now.
PAX offers competitive salaries and a full benefits package. Leave your details and we'll keep them on file for future roles.
News
Press
Releases, awards and features, newest first. Older coverage lives in the past press archive.
Archive 2004–2016
Past press
Coverage of PAX in print, online, radio, television and film. Search by outlet, author or topic. Many older links point to sites that have since moved.
| Headline | Outlet | Type |
|---|
Contact
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Choose an engagement type and the form asks only for what that conversation needs.
Business office
P.O. Box 150840
San Rafael, CA 94915-0840, USA
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Building 478
UC Berkeley Richmond Field Station, Richmond, California
Phone and email
415-256-9900
info@paxscientific.com
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