Research Tracker

Mechanical Solutions, Inc. will develop a residential HVAC system featuring a highly efficient small centrifugal compressor. This project could provide a cheaper, more efficient, more environmentally friendly HVAC option for residential and commercial buildings.

RTI International will develop and demonstrate novel luminaire designs that utilize advanced classroom lighting system technology, demonstrate the benefits of dynamic lighting, and collect feedback from education stakeholders. These efforts could increase the use of next-generation lighting in schools.

PPG Industries, Inc. will develop and demonstrate manufacturing processes that will enable commercialization of a large area and low-cost "integrated substrate" for rigid OLED SSL lighting. Enabling large volume manufacturing with these new processes will grow the OLED market, leading to a potential 1.51 quads of energy savings by 2030.

Cree, Inc. will develop high-efficacy, cost-effective LED light engines for next-generation luminaires. The advancements made in this project could lead to more efficient LED lighting options.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will investigate a novel dehumidification process to avoid the excessive energy utilized by conventional approaches, through high-frequency mechanical vibration of ultrasonic transducers to eject adsorbed water in a liquid form.

Dais Analytic Corporation will develop membrane HVAC technology that offers improved energy efficiency and eliminates harmful refrigerants. This technology has the potential to lead to notable energy usage reductions and environmental benefits.

This project will attempt to develop and demonstrate a novel fabrication process that eliminates the use of shadow masks during the OLED deposition process. The proposed system will allow blanket deposition of all organic and cathode layers everywhere on the substrate, eliminating the need for masks.

The University of Maryland will develop a heat exchanger that is 20% better than current designs in terms of size, weight, and performance. This next-generation heat exchanger will be designed for use in heat pumps and air conditioners and will drive energy savings in those applications.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will integrate heat and moisture transfer analysis of building envelop performance into one modeling system by adding moisture transfer to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory'es THERM engine.

Home Innovation Research Labs, Inc. will develop wall system design guidance for builders and improve the durability of envelope assembly systems. Findings from this project could play a critical role in improving the efficiency of home heating and cooling and could reduce HVAC energy use by at least 10%.

Building Science Corporation and partners will evaluate the use of a vapor control membrane, or diffusion vent, which could substantially reduce the risk of moisture issues in roof assemblies with fibrous insulation. This project will field test this solution in a cold climate new construction test house over three years, and will also test the approach in a high impact existing home weatherization application to be determined through stakeholder engagement.

Lumenari, Inc. will develop a narrow-bandwidth red phosphor to improve phosphor-converted LED efficacy up to 28%. This will be accomplished through a combination of experimental and computational techniques to develop a novel host material for the selected emitter ion.

ThermoLift, Inc. will develop a natural-gas-driven heat pump/air conditioner that provides space heating, space cooling, and water heating for residential and commercial buildings. This device would offer 30% - 50% improved efficiency over standard heat pumps.

S-RAM Dynamics, LLC will develop a regenerative air source heat pump for commercial and industrial HVAC applications. Initial units of this heat pump could offer a 50% improvement over existing state-of-the-art technology, leading to substantial energy-use reductions.

Los Alamos National Laboratory will develop quantum-dot down-converters to be used in LED lighting. Advancements made in this project could drive further efficiency improvements in LED lighting.

Momentive will develop next-generation LED package architectures enabled by thermally conductive composite encapsulant materials. These LED package architectures could provide more-efficient lighting options for use in U.S. buildings.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop and demonstrate a cost-effective, energy-efficient clothes dryer that is based on thermoelectric technology. This transformative dryer technology has the potential to save 356 TBtu/year.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in partnership with Georgia Tech and IntelliChoice Energy, will integrate its Ground-Level Integrated Diverse Energy Storage (GLIDES) system with HVAC systems to provide efficient building-integrated electrical and thermal energy storage. This system enables smarter building-grid integration, as well as the use of low-grade heat, which would otherwise be lost in traditional HVAC systems.

Iowa State University will develop an infiltration diagnostics system that uses a laser to locally heat a portion of the building envelope, and then uses an infrared camera to pinpoint air leaks. This system is able to measure and locate leaks within a building envelope, producing an energy saving potential of about 566 TBtu by 2030.

This project will develop and test the efficacy of novel light-based circadian interventions for enhancing sleep, health, alertness, performance, and quality of life in nightshift workers.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop a novel magnetocaloric air conditioner with the potential for efficiency improvements of up to 25% over conventional vapor compression systems. This new technology could save the U.S. 1 quad annually.

Carnegie Mellon University will develop an improved phosphor matrix to include materials that increase the thermal conductivity more than 5 times over standard matrix materials. This technology could reduce the price of light by as much as 50% - 60%.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop a clothes dryer that is extremely energy efficient and has a load drying time of approximately 20 minutes. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the clothes dryer industry, as well as to achieve 0.4 quads of energy savings.

Acuity Brands Lighting will develop an OLED luminaire that features DC current drivers integrated with each panel and advanced user controls. This advancement in OLED technology could lead to more-efficient OLED lighting systems and reduced energy use for building lighting.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, along with its partners, will develop a platform for design and specification of HVAC control sequences that inter-operates with both whole-building energy simulation and automated control implementation workflows. OpenBuildingControl will unify control design, evaluation, and optimization via whole-building energy simulation with control implementation, eliminating the manual translation steps currently associated with HVAC control implementation, reducing both error as well as effort and cost.

The OEI will capitalize on existing DOE investments to create an integrated open source technology platformthe OpenEfficiency Platform (OEP)capable of supporting a range of energy efficiency program types. Working closely with a group of utility program administrators, the OEI will support the design, planning, and use of the OEP in a series of commercial pilot programs for whole building energy efficiency, local government benchmarking, and auditing.

PARC, A Xerox Company, in partnership with Energy ETC Inc., will develop a wireless system of peel-and-stick sensor nodes that are powered by radio frequency hubs, relaying data to building management systems that can significantly reduce energy use. The wireless sensors and radio frequency hubs provide an opportunity to increase building energy efficiency by gathering and compiling data needed for building management.

Southface Energy Institute and partners will develop and validate a performance-based indoor air quality assessment protocol for homes. The assessment protocol and smart ERV solution will achieve annual HVAC energy cost savings of approximately $100 compared to central fan integrated supply system, as well as a 50% reduction in ventilation-related latent loads compared to supply or exhaust ventilation strategies.

Fraunhofer USA Center for Sustainable Energy Systems Inc. and partners will develop models that use communicating thermostat data and interval electricity and gas data to remotely identify homes with significant energy savings opportunities. The tool will identify the top 20% of homes with the greatest potential for energy savings from insulation, air sealing, and/or heating system upgrades, reducing the number of unnecessary energy audits.

Eaton Corporation will develop a new low-cost, high-efficiency LED architecture made possible by advanced manufacturing techniques which will enable both high efficiency and high color quality. Reduced material costs and optimized manufacturing could reduce the integrated light engine price from $50/klm at the project's inception to less than $4/klm.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop a thin insulation material that demonstrates comparable performance to existing insulation technology. ORNL estimates the energy savings potential of this insulation to be 1,319 TBtu for retrofit-only commercial roof and residential wall applications.

Unico Systems will develop a highly efficient, cost-effective residential cold climate heat pump that maintains efficiency and reliability at very low temperatures. The technology could lead to annual energy savings of 0.1 quads, equal to a reduction of 5.9 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), in partnership with ClimateWell and Rheem, will develop a residential, gas-fired split heat pump that will use an ammonia refrigerant, which is not a greenhouse gas and can convert chemical energy to heating and cooling without using any moving seals.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop insulation that is 2 to 4 times more efficient than conventional materials and at a comparable installed cost. This insulation technology has the potential of reaching an installed cost of $2.00 per square foot for R-12/inch and targets a technical potential of 1.7 quads.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will develop a high-impact heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration (HVAC&R) technology that can be used in many applications. This technology could lead to 0.7 - 1.1 quads of energy savings.

Sandia National Laboratories will develop a vapor compression cycle architecture. This technology can lead to an estimated 20% decrease in energy consumption in air conditioners and even greater savings when used as a heat pump in cold climates.

The Association of Bay Area Governments will perform modeling analysis in nine Bay Area counties to help small and medium businesses achieve the cost effective energy efficiency improvements. The BayREN Integrated Commercial Retrofits project will modify and enhance existing open source tools to perform large-scale building energy modeling analysis on commercial buildings throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cree will develop a versatile, low-cost, low profile LED light-module architecture that facilitates the assembly of a variety of high-efficacy, broad-area LED luminaires. This lightweight architecture will be applicable to numerous high-efficiency, broad-area LED luminaires and will ultimately reduce the cost per lumen of LED lighting.

Cree, Inc. will develop a low-cost, high-efficiency LED architecture through modification to the conventional LED fabrication process flow. These new processes can be deployed in a variety of LED production lines, leading to reduced lighting energy use.

The Building America Space Conditioning Standing Technical Committee and Expert Meeting reports identified high relative humidity as one of three issues with the highest technical priority for ensuring comfort in low-load homes. As such, the primary objective of this project is to evaluate factors that can contribute to high relative humidity in a home (variations in internal loads, equipment sizing, and equipment setup) and quantify their relative magnitude of impact on indoor relative humidity. A technical white paper will assess the sensitivity latent and sensible gains have on comfort and recommended system sizing. This will inform R&D needs for future BA/BTO work, provide actionable information to manufacturers on the equipment needs of low-load homes (see related project, Assessing the Market and Space-Conditioning Needs of Low-Load Homes), and provide system design and sizing guidance to contractors.

enVerid Systems will demonstrate modular air treatment systems that use less energy to remove indoor air pollutants, such as carbon dioxide, in order to drive widespread adoption of this technology. This approach could reduce the energy consumption in commercial and public buildings by up to 50%.

The Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator will accelerate the market adoption of super-efficient building technologies by creating a replicable transparent process for taking technologies from pilot to portfolio. The project will measure, document, and publicize the results of highly energy-efficient technology pilot demonstration projects, as well as help property owners define clear metrics to scale up projects.

Lime Energy and partners will implement an energy efficiency service delivery model for small and medium size businesses in low-income communities, aiming to complete more than 1,000 retrofits featuring a performance guarantee and meter-validated savings. The results will create 60 jobs and generate $30 million in economic activity.

Arizona State University will develop efficient and stable white OLEDs that employ a single emissive material. This advancement in OLED technology could lead to building energy use reductions.

This project will research, develop, and demonstrate blue-emitting layers (blue-EML) capable of overcoming the existing device efficiency vs. device stability tradeoff in blue-emitting OLEDs, and enable next-generation stable white OLEDs (WOLEDs).

The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will develop new strategies for increasing the lifetime of blue phosphorescent OLEDs (PHOLEDs). Longer-life PHOLEDs could provide notable energy and cost savings.

Glint Photonics will develop a stationary, roof-mounted concentrator daylighting system that uses internal optics to track the sun without external movement. This daylighting system will offset 40%-70% of the buildings electricity used for lighting and could potentially generate a total impact of 0.93 quads by 2030.

Home Innovation Research Labs will establish performance criteria and conduct comprehensive testing to evaluate the structural performance of continuous insulation walls with windows of varying shapes and sizes, insulation thicknesses, and installation methods.