IOP Business Start-Up Award: Metasonixx

For the development of mass-produced acoustic metamaterial panels that allow airflow, enabling improvements to noise management and ventilation, and facilitating net-zero industrial ventilators and heat pumps.

4 team members in black trousers and grey shirts at an event. Image text reads Meta Onixx

Metasonixx is a spin-off from Sussex and Bristol universities, incorporated in 2019. They specialise in engineering advanced materials for sound and noise management.

The company builds on its patented IP, proving that sound can be shaped using only a set of 16 pre-defined, sub-wavelength, quantized shapes, reassembled into different configurations. This discovery has allowed thems to bridge centuries of development gap between sound and light.

Their mission against unwanted sounds started during the 2020 lockdown, when team Metasonixx received a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) grant to find solutions to reduce noise in hospitals: a known problem, with no practical solution at the time, affecting the recovery of patients and staff wellbeing. They were awarded the Armourers and Brasiers Venture Prize in 2021 for their successes in COVID wards.

At the end of the project in 2021, Metasonixx had plans to mass-produce panels that weigh at least one third of traditional solutions (for the same performance), use one twelfth of the space, are greener, are modular and allow air and light through. From the physics point of view, these are interferential filters, but working over four doublings of frequency (i.e. ”octaves”).

With manufacturing and first sales in 2023, their desk separators are now being tested in noisy offices worldwide.

They see their products that allow airflow (SonoBlind Air and SonoFlow) as a crucial facilitator for net-zero industrial ventilators and heat pumps.