Application Period Opens for SBIR and STTR Building Technology Topics

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy announced 12 topics to fund more than 100 new projects, totaling approximately $20 million as part of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) research programs. Five of the announced topics focus on building technologies:

Next Generation Residential Air Handlers

• DOE is seeking the development of air handlers with improved motor designs and new system configurations that utilize advanced computational fluid dynamics modelling to reduce energy consumption by at least 25% while improving HVAC performance by at least 5%.

Novel Materials and Processes for Solid-State Lighting

• DOE is seeking development of materials for light-emitting diodes, organic light-emitting diodes, and optical materials for high-efficiency luminaires that show promise to achieve the predicted and requisite performance advancements and risk limitations to advance to successive stages of research.

Automated Point Mapping for Commercial Buildings

• DOE is seeking the development of innovative, early-stage algorithmic solutions to the currently laborious and expensive process of tagging and mapping individual points of a building’s sensors, actuators, and controllers, which stands as one of the largest barriers to automated fault detection and diagnostics implementation.

R&D to Augment Building Energy Modeling

• DOE is seeking the development and/or incorporation of new or enhanced modeling capabilities that could complement whole-building energy modeling, e.g. life-cycle analysis, daylighting, indoor and outdoor environmental quality and thermal comfort, urban microclimate, cost, water use, resiliency.

Data Fusion for Building Technology Projects

• DOE is seeking the development of new and emerging data science techniques with possible relevance to building technology research projects – especially those with a focus on demand reduction and flexibility, critical water issues, and resiliency – to counteract the lack of data standardization that often prevents the “fusion” of disparate data sets and inhibits the effectiveness of advanced building technology testing and validation.

Letters of intent are due on Monday, January 7, 2019, at 5 p.m. ET. Applicants should review the FY19 Phase I Release 2 funding opportunity announcement on the DOE SBIR and STTR website for directions on how to submit a letter of intent.