Advanced Manufacturing for Thermal and Environmental Control Systems: Achieving National Energy Goals
- Syracuse Univ., NY (United States)
This project was part of a regional initiative in the five counties of Central New York (CNY) that received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and four other federal agencies through the 2012 Advanced Manufacturing Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge (AMJIAC). The CNY initiative was focused on cultivating the emergent regional cluster in “Advanced Manufacturing for Thermal and Environmental Control (AM-TEC).” As one component of the CNY AM-TEC initiative, the DOE-funded project supported five research & development seed projects that strategically targeted: 1) needs and opportunities of CNY AM-TEC companies, and 2) the goal of DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) to reduce energy consumption by 50% across product life-cycles over 10 years. The project also sought to fulfill the AMO mission of developing and demonstrating new, energy-efficient processing and materials technologies at a scale adequate to prove their value to manufacturers and spur investment. The five seed projects demonstrated technologies and processes that can reduce energy intensity and improve production as well as use less energy throughout their lifecycles. The project was conducted over three years in two 18-month budget periods. During the first budget period, two projects proposed in the original AMJAIC application were successfully completed: Seed Project 1 focused on saving energy in heat transfer processes via development of nano structured surfaces to significantly increase heat flux; Seed Project 2 addressed saving energy in data centers via subzero cooling of the computing processors. Also during the first budget period, a process was developed and executed to select a second round of seed projects via a competitive request for proposals from regional companies and university collaborators. Applicants were encouraged to form industry-academic partnerships to leverage experience and resources of public and private sectors in the CNY region. Proposals were evaluated by a national panel of experts. Three projects were selected for awards and were completed successfully during the second budget period: Seed Project 3 focused on enabling self-powered furnaces to permit residents to shelter in place during power outages; Seed Project 4 addressed development of a novel method of controlling air conditioning systems that could enable flexible load matching in market segments not possible with existing technologies; and Seed Project 5 focused on the creation of smarter occupancy sensors to enable effective highly localized demand based ventilation.
- Research Organization:
- Syracuse Univ., NY (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Energy Efficiency Office. Advanced Manufacturing Office
- Contributing Organization:
- Cortland Research, Inc.; SBB, Inc.
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0006031
- OSTI ID:
- 1344177
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-SYRACUSE-EE6031
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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