Funding Selections: 2023 Technology Commercialization Fund Lab Call

Award Amount: $1 million (AMMTO, IEDO, BTO)

Location: Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Partner: DuPont de Nemours, Inc.

Description:  Heat transfer and air leaks are among the top 3 contributors to air conditioning load in buildings. While spray foam is the most effective building insulator, they are not widely adopted. Spray foams are made with petroleum-based polymers, making them carbon intensive and use isocyanate: a toxic substance that can be dangerous to installers and occupants without adequate protection. Less than 15% of homes use spray foam today, despite its superior insulation capabilities.

ORNL and DuPont aim to develop the ORNL-developed biobased spray foam to have a 50% lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based foam and does not contain isocyanate, while matching the performance of traditional spray foams. Improving building insulation through the adoption of low-carbon spray foams can eliminate around 10% of the primary energy used in the united states.

Full Title:Efficient decarbonization of heating using a cascade heat pump with phase-change thermal storage

Award Amount: $875,000 (AMMTO, IEDO, BTO)

City, State: Golden, CO

Partners: Trane, NETenergy

Description: Heat pumps are a highly energy-efficient heating alternative to fossil fuel burners. However, they face two key barriers: 1) Lower performance at cold temperatures and 2) Interruptions during outdoor coil defrost. The team proposes to use a cascade compressor to improve cold climate performance and a thermal storage system. The proposed thermal energy storage system would both help defrost the outdoor coil and provide space heating during defrosting, eliminating the need for inefficient backup electric resistance heaters during defrost. If widely adopted, the proposed system could save around 10,000 gigawatt-hours equivalent of energy each year just by eliminating inefficient defrosting.

Award Amount: $1,200,000 (IEDO, BTO)

City, State: Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Partners: Samsung Electronics America, University of South

Description: Desiccants, used in dehumidifiers, require energy input to reuse after being saturated with moisture. An advanced clothes dryer is proposed which uses desiccants to remove moisture and waste heat recovery when the desiccant is being recharged. This will be accomplished by using two air flow paths. The first air flow path includes the desiccant for moisture removal and is used during clothes drying. The second is used during recharge and includes a heater to dry the desiccant and a heat exchanger to transfer the heat to water for use in other appliances such as a clothes washer. These innovations are aimed at achieving a 35% energy savings and a 75% reduction in peak energy demand versus an electric resistance dryer. If widely adopted, savings of about 0.23 “quads” (quadrillion Btu) of energy per year could be achieved.

Award Amount: $900,000 (IEDO, AMMTO, BTO)

City, State: Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Partners: Johnson Controls, Carrier

Description: The project participants propose to design and demonstrate a heat exchanger with 400% higher heat transfer rate than current technologies. This high heat transfer rate will be achieved by using polymer composites with high thermal conductivity. They aim to do achieve lower costs by additively manufacturing the polymer composite heat exchanger, which does not suffer from corrosion, reducing maintenance cost, and enables a more compact structure, reducing refrigerant charge. The project aims to achieve a 30% reduction in manufacturing cost and a 40% improvement in compactness compared to the state of the art.

Award Amount: $900,000 (IEDO, BTO)

City, State: Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Partners: Carrier

Description: The proposed industrial heat pump aims to improve on the state-of-the-art industrial drying systems with a novel high-temperature heat pump that uses low-global-warming-potential refrigerants to recover and repurpose industrial waste heat for drying. Heat pumps provide more thermal energy than the amount of electricity they use, making them far more efficient than traditional fossil fuel combustion-based drying systems. Decarbonizing drying with industrial heat pumps would provide significant energy savings due to the higher efficiency of heat pumps, improve drying operation efficiency, and significantly enhance heat and water recovery.

Award Amount: $649,711 (IEDO, AMMTO, BTO)

City, State: Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Partners: Vitriform3D

Description: This project aims to reduce the carbon intensity of building materials by recycling glass into a fire resilient exterior siding for buildings. Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program participant Vitriform3D has developed an additive manufacturing technique that can utilize recycled glass for a 75% reduction in carbon intensity. The project will use additive manufacturing to Oak Ridge National Laboratory binder to form pilot production of the exterior siding and install it to analyze its life cycle and techno-economic impacts.

Full Title: Inconel-718 Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger with Micro-Channels for Optimal Thermal Performance of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Cycles

Award Amount: $649,711 (IEDO, AMMTO, BTO)

City, State: Oak Ridge, Tennessee

Partners: EarthEn Inc.

Description: Heat exchangers account for about 12% of capital costs in power production. 3-D printed circuit heat exchangers (PCHEs) are compact, with drastically higher heat transfer areas, enabling much higher thermal efficiencies, capable of withstanding high-temperature operation. Heat exchangers are used in thermal energy storage as well as power production, a key technology to enabling the use of renewable energy to supplying industrial heat. The performance of the PCHE will be optimized by 3D printing micro-channel grooves and through computational optimization with the goal of achieving thermal efficiencies of 55%.