Argentina. Marcos Condomí Alcorta, Nicolas Kolliker Frers and Santiago Schmidt, graduates of the Bachelor of Business Administration at the University of CEMA, created "Chill It" a machine to cool drinks in seconds. The idea came when they were assigned the task of thinking of an innovative product in a Strategic Marketing class of Professor Pablo Raies.
This development allows that, thanks to artificial intelligence, a can of beer that enters the machine at an ambient temperature of 25°C, for example, leaves in 30 seconds at 3°C. In addition, the desired final temperature can be chosen and it can also detect, by means of a barcode reader, the brand of the drink. Thus, it can be programmed to cool only certain products.
"The first idea we had was to put the drink in liquid nitrogen, but that was impossible to do, commercially because it has a very high cost, since the nitrogen is consumed," says Schmidt from South Africa, where he is with two other members of the team in negotiations to sell the final product to one of the global giants of the beer industry. He is 24 years old and is the youngest of the five, who do not exceed 31.
"The work began with a mathematical model," explains Cismondi who, in addition to Chill It, works in an It company. "We developed the physics of how the liquid cools and we arrived at what we could call a magic algorithm. The big leap was when we managed to abstract that model and take it to a neural network that understands, based on the characteristic of the drink being entered, what is the best process to cool it in the shortest possible time," he adds.
The prototype was developed with the initial investment of US $ 20,000 made by an individual in the project, but very quickly they perceived the interest of the brands in participating. "We went out to present the product to the local market and then we went on to talk to the global levels of the companies," says Schmidt, mentioning the beverage giants with whom they have met in different parts of the world.
Source: La Nación.
