by Brianna Crandall — July 16, 2014—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) just announced up to $14 million in funding for 15 research and development projects to support technologies that will contribute to advancing early-stage, breakthrough energy-efficient solutions for buildings and homes. These projects are intended to help building managers and homeowners reduce energy demand, save money and accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies.
Seven incubator projects will be funded with nearly $6 million to improve heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), water heating, sensors and controls, and building energy modeling. Additionally, eight frontier projects will receive $8 million to address energy efficiency in advanced clothes dryers, windows, and building thermal insulation. Frontier projects seek to improve the efficiency of existing technologies by incorporating new, innovative materials or components.
Cost-shared with a $3 million investment from industry, the projects are expected to dramatically reduce energy consumption in commercial and residential buildings. In 2013, this accounted for nearly 40 percent of all energy use in the United States, an estimated cost of $413 billion.
The innovative approaches are working to improve smart-building technologies including lighting, lighting controls, and highly insulated walls and windows, and to increase efficiency measures that complement a building’s entire energy management system. A summary of the technologies follows:
- A high-performance refrigerator that uses a novel rotating heat exchanger that allows for evaporation without a defrost cycle;
- A hybrid energy modeling method that combines physics-based simulations with in-situ measured temperature data to create a more robust model for retrofit analysis;
- An ultra-efficient air-conditioning and heating system based on an air-bearing rotary heat exchanger for building-scale HVAC systems;
- A higher efficiency HVAC electric motor with a novel parallel magnetic circuit path that will lower the cost of the motor by reducing the size of the conductor loop and using less powerful magnets;
- Low-cost, user-installable building sensors that are powered without wires or batteries and instead harvest power from vibrational energy in the environment;
- Improving energy efficiency in small and medium commercial buildings by non-intrusively monitoring load and equipment health of HVAC systems;
- Three clothes dryer projects: using ultrasound to remove moisture without creating much lint; using infrared heating to add energy directly to the water molecules in the clothing and heat recovery from the condensed water; and a ventless thermoelectric dryer that uses low-cost, solid-state heat pumps that use temperature differences to generate electricity;
- Three foam insulation projects: a biobased, inexpensive, noncorrosive, nonflammable insulation that incorporates better foaming agents and strong nanocellulose fibers to make it more commercially viable; an enhanced insulation that is placed between the inner and outer frames of a commercial window to prevent temperature transfer through the frame and condensation on the inside frame; and a new type of foam board insulation that uses a modified atmosphere insulation panel sandwiched inside a foam board insulation;
- Lowering manufacturing costs for highly insulating vacuum-insulated glazings with a fabricate-on-demand process, improving edge sealing, pillar design and the evacuation process; and
- A transparent window glaze that insulates without distorting or hazing the image, with applications to skylights and windows.
For more information on these and other building technologies, visit the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)’s Building Technologies Office Web page.
