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In December, President Obama signed the 2012 budget bill, breathing life into the federal fiscal year before the continuing resolution flowed into the new calendar year. Credit: adapted from the Congressional Budget Office.

Previously, we reported that indicators were looking positive for federal R&D funding based on the “minibus” approvals Congress made in November, which covered NSF, NIST, NASA and OSTP. The agencies — the so-called innovation agencies — all saw budget increases, even if only modest. (The OSTP budget was cut severely, however OSTP is a White House office and not charged with funding research.) Now that the full budget is approved, the science R&D community has cause to be pretty happy about the outcome. Overall, most funding agencies saw increases, or at least flat budgets.

The AAAS R&D Budget and Policy program has analyzed the final budget in detail, breaking it out into manageable pieces. According to an AAAS press release, total R&D spending for FY12 is down about 1.3% ($1.9 billion) from 2011, but most of the reduction was in defense. The AAAS analysis showed that defense R&D spending is down 3.2%, while non-defense R&D is up 0.5%.

In the release, Matt Hourihan, director of the AAAS R&D Budget and Policy program, says, “It’s no doubt a tough fiscal environment, but the fact that we actually see some fairly sizeable increases in certain research areas suggests persistent support for science and innovation even now.”

In the DOD arena, the message was mixed. R&D budgets for operational systems development and classified programs were slashed 3.8% ($1.15 billion) and 7.6% ($1.33 billion), respectively, but basic science R&D (”6.1″) increased by 8.7% and applied research (”6.2″) increased 5.6%. This is welcome news for the DOD labs and their contractors, but where will that research go without operational systems research?

DOE R&D funding increased 8% overall, including an encouraging bump for ARPA-E to $275 million from $180 million in FY11. According to an article in Science (Dec. 23, 2011), legislators are impressed with ARPA-E’s approach to project reviews and have asked DOE to look into applying it more broadly.

The massive NIH $30.6 billion budget remained essentially flat with a 0.8% increase. That’s an increase of $241 million, almost the entire ARPA-E appropriation for 2012. For comparison, the FY12 budgets for NSF and the DOE Office of Science are about $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively.

The cross-agency support by Congress for R&D is a good sign, too, for the Materials Genome Initiative project. Last summer’s white paper (pdf) introducing the MGI included a request from the administration for $100 million. Because, the MGI is intentionally decentralized and managed for organic growth, there are no budget line items to point to. However, qualitatively, it looks like the agencies that have a natural role to play in the MGI — NSF, DOE and NIST — have received enough funding to advance MGI objectives.

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Abengoa, designer of novel concentrating solar power towers, is a participant in several new ARPA-E funded projects for storing thermal energy. Credit: Abengoa

Last week Eileen reported on ARPA-E’s new awards in rare-earth alternative technologies. This week I thought I would take a look at APRA-E’s $37.3 million initiative to find a disruptive thermal storage technology(ies), an effort cleverly called HEATS (high energy advanced thermal storage), all of which seem to have a novel material at their cores.

General speaking, the awards went to R&D groups working in three arenas: Large and medium-scale (utility-scale) storage systems, “thermal fuels,” and vehicular support systems.

In regard to large-scale awards, the quest is to find out if thermal storage could be used as a massive controllable and distributed load for grid stabilization. The technologies include supercritical fluids, molten salts, molten glass, metal hydrides and phase change materials.

The vehicular systems are mostly aimed at developing special “hot-cold batteries” for interior climate control to extend the mileage of an electric vehicle’s main battery pack. Some of the materials include PCMs, solid state thermal energy conversion materials and electrical metal-organic framework

Utility-scale HEATS

Navitasmax: Navitasmax, Cornell and Harvard Universities, Nano Terra and Barber-Nichols are getting $812,000 for a project, targeted at concentrating solar and nuclear applications, which involves evaluation of simple and complex supercritical fluids. They hope to show these fluids can be “tuned” to have very high heat capacity, which will provide the potential of developing low cost and efficient thermal storage.

Abengoa Solar: Abengoa Solar Inc. is getting $3.6 million to develop a new type of large-scale CSP conversion (salt?) tower and a novel thermal energy storage technology, which they predict can save 30 percent over parabolic mirror molten-salt system costs, along with higher performance. Abengoa has been developing projects based on new tower architecture, superheated steam and salt storage components

Halotechnics: This is a $3.3 million project by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne based on a low melting-point molten glass thermal storage system. Besides using abundant raw materials, the group predicts it can reduce costs by a factor of ten. It’s aimed at CSP and nuclear applications. The company, heretofore, has focused on molten salt technologies, but CEO Justin Raade says on its website, “We’ve been thrilled by the discoveries we’ve made with our molten salts and are very excited to explore the use of molten glass to reach even higher temperatures for more efficient energy storage.” It will optimize the material in order to develop a complete system to pump, heat, store and discharge the molten glass.

Pacific Northwest National Lab: PNNL’s Energy Materials Group and University of Utah will use $712,500 for a reversible high-temperature metal hydride thermal storage system exploiting recent breakthroughs. In particular, the team will try to demonstrate the desired cycle life in a reversible hydride and demonstrate an order-of-magnitude increase in storage density compared to existing systems. PNNL’s website says, “The team will first develop a metal hydride with a suitably long lifetime. If successful, they will then create a small prototype system.”

University of South Florida: USF and SunBorne Energy (a company that has tended to focus on India’s energy needs) have $2.5 million to develop a low-cost, industrially scalable system based on high-temperature phase change materials. They will use an electroless encapsulation technique (pdf) to enhance the heat transfer to overcome the low thermal conductivity of common PCMs. The proposed low-cost (75 percent reduction) system will operate at high temperatures with a small footprint. The idea is to prepare macrocapsules, from porous pellets of low-cost PCMs (salts, eutectics, metal alloys, polymers) and then encapsulate the pellets in high temperature material. Convective heat transfer would occur by submerging the PCM capsules in a liquid.

MIT: Like the project above, MIT and Boston College will use phase-change materials for high-temperature thermal energy storage. The team’s metallic composites-based PCMs will have high phase-change temperatures, high thermal conductivity values, long lifetime and low cost. The team intends to use its characterization and modeling skills to optimize the properties of these materials.

Thermal Fuels

University of Florida: With nearly $3 million, UF hopes to demonstrate a “thermal fuel,” a thermochemical fuel production system that uses a low-pressure, magnetically stabilized, nonvolatile iron oxide looping process. UF’s system uses a new dual-cavity, high-temperature chemical reactor that converts CSP to syngas with a process that uses water and recycled CO₂ as the sole feedstock.

University of Minnesota: UM, along with Caltech and Abengoa Solar Inc, says it can develop technology for a solar thermochemical reactor to make fuel production more efficient. With $3.6 million, the team is ambitiously aiming for solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies of more than 10 percent.

Vehicular Storage

University of Utah: The university, with HRL and General Motors Global R&D will use $2.7 million to demonstrate a high-density thermal battery based on metal hydrides. The thermal battery will be used for warm and cold climate control to provide heating and cooling to electric vehicles without draining the EV’s electric battery.

PNNL: PNNL’s Energy and Environment Directorate, in partnership with the University of South Florida, will be pioneering an electric-powered adsorption heat pump for EVs. Researchers will use $813,000 to develop new metal-organic frameworks with larger sorption capacities and can be regenerated electrically. The PNNL website says a heat pump based on electrical metal-organic framework material the size of a 2-liter bottle could theoretically handle the heating and cooling needs of an electric vehicle with far less impact on driving distance.

TREATS: Sheetak Inc, with partner Delphi Automotive, received one of the largest awards, nearly $4,7 million. TREATS, thermoelectric reactors for efficient automotive thermal storage, would provide EVs with a new HVAC system option that can store the energy required for heating and cooling. Sheetak has a solid state thermoelectric energy converters to recharge a dedicated hot-cold battery. The converter can also eliminate the need for an EV’s traditional compressor and heater.

University of Texas at Austin: UTA and Sinoev will use $2.5 million for R&D for a hot-cold battery. They will demonstrate a high-energy density, low-cost system based on new composite PCMs with an energy density they say is two- to three-times above the state-of-the-art PCMs for low-temperature applications.

United Technologies Research Center: UTRC and Ricardo Inc will use a $2.7 million award to demonstrate a “hybrid vapor compression adsorption” hot-cold battery system based on a metal salt that has a high mass and volumetric capacity tailored to the refrigerant.

MIT: With the University of Texas at Austin, UCLA, Ford and $2.7 million, MIT hopes to demonstrate what it calls a thermo-adsorptive battery climate control system. This hot-cold battery would eliminate the vapor compression cycle, and if it works with EVs, it may be applicable to residential and commercial buildings displacing electricity consumption during peak demand times.

MIT: Based on its HybriSol Hybrid nanomaterials, MIT will use $3 million to demonstrate the use of nanostructures for high-energy-density thermal energy storage device. The HybriSol device would be rechargeable and transportable.

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ARPA-E announced $31.6 million in awards to develop new, rare-earth-free permanent magnet materials. Credit: ARPA-E

Rare earth permanent magnets are key components in electric vehicle motors and in wind turbine electricity generators, and international concern over the economics of rare-earth raw materials has been well documented here and elsewhere. DOE is addressing the issue from the technology side through its ARPA-E program, REACT—Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies—whose mission is to develop substitute materials for rare earth permanent magnets.

Last Friday ARPA-E director, Arun Majumdar, announced awards of $156 million for 60 projects in five of the agency’s program areas. In the REACT program, 14 projects were funded with $31.6 million in awards that ranged from about $400k to $3.4 million.

Here is a capsule summary of the projects. Except for the first two projects, awardees are partnering with other organizations. Only the lead organization is listed.

• Case Western Reserve University
  “Transformation Enabled Nitride Magnets Absent Rare Earths”
  Investigators will use micro-alloying of iron-nitride alloys with the goal of demonstrating a new magnet system, containing no rare earths, in a prototype electric motor.
• Dartmouth College
  “Nanocrystalline τ-MnAl Permanent”
  Investigators will create bulk nanocrystalline manganese-aluminum alloys with the goal of developing a subsequently scalable process that demonstrates magnetic properties for bulk magnets.
• University of Houston
  “High Performance, Low Cost Superconducting Wires and Coils for High Power Wind Generators”
  The UH team will develop a high-performance, low-cost superconducting wire and demonstrate an advanced manufacturing process that, if successful, has the potential to yield a several-fold reduction in wire costs.
• Northeastern University
  “Multiscale Development of L1₀ Materials for Rare-Earth-Free Permanent Magnets”
  A unique iron-nickel crystal structure is found naturally in meteorites and the team will apply advanced synthesis to artificially create this magnetic material structure. The goal is to demonstrate bulk magnetic properties with subsequently scalable fabrication processes.
• QM Power
  “Advanced Electric Vehicle Motors with Low or No Rare Earth Content”
  The team will develop a motor that uses no rare earth materials, is light and compact, and potentially delivers more power with greater efficiency at less cost. Key innovations will include a new motor design, emerging materials and advanced manufacturing techniques to reduce costs.
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
  “Manganese-Based Permanent Magnet with 40 MGOe at 200°C”
  PNNL will develop a composite using manganese materials, which have the potential to double the magnetic strength relative to those being used today, by leveraging high-performance supercomputer modeling and synthesis experiments of various metal composite formulations that do not contain rare earths.
• University of Alabama
  “Rare‐Earth‐Free Permanent Magnets for Electrical Vehicle Motors and Wind Turbine Generators: Hexagonal Symmetry Based Materials Systems Mn‐Bi and M‐type Hexaferrite”
  The team will demonstrate advanced magnetic properties of new magnetic composite materials.
• Argonne National Laboratory
  “Nanocomposite Exchange-Spring Magnets for Motor and Generator Applications”
  ANL will create a new class of permanent magnets based on a metal composite magnet design containing a blend of very small particles embedded in a matrix in aligned arrays.
• Brookhaven National Laboratory
  “Superconducting Wires for Direct-Drive Wind Generators”
  In this project, the team will develop a new high-performance superconducting wire that can handle significantly more electrical current, and will demonstrate an advanced manufacturing process that has the potential to yield a several-fold reduction in wire costs.
• Baldor Electric Company
  “Rare Earth-Free Traction Motor for Electric Vehicle Applications”
  The project goal is to develop a new type of electric motor with the potential to efficiently power a next generation class of electric vehicles. Key innovations include an innovative motor design a unique cooling system, and development of advanced materials manufacturing techniques.
• General Atomics
  “Double-Stator Switched Reluctance Motor Technology”
  This project will focus on improving the performance and enhancing the manufacturability of the unique “double stator” motor design, initially investigated at UT-Dallas, for transportation applications.
• Virginia Commonwealth University
  “Discovery and Design of Novel Permanent Magnets using Non-strategic Elements having Secure Supply Chains”
  The project will demonstrate a new class of permanent magnets based on a carbide-based composite magnet.
• University of Minnesota
  “Synthesis and Phase Stabilization of Body Center Tetragonal Metastable Fe-N Anisotropic Nanocomposite Magnet- A Path to Fabricate Rare Earth Free Magnet”
  This is a project to develop an early-stage prototype of bulk iron-nitride permanent magnet material.
• Ames Laboratory
  “Novel High Energy Permanent Magnet Without Critical Elements”
  Ames Laboratory and its team members will develop a new class of permanent magnets from on cerium based alloys. Cerium is four times more abundant than neodymium.

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Transphorm, one of the companies that will be receiving ARPA-E and private investment funding, uses gallium nitride transistors to tackle the current level of power conversion losses (10%). Credit: Energy Information Administration.

ARPA-E announced a new round of seed awards, $1.5–$6 million each, which the agency says will unlock a total investment of $100 million when private capital is included. The awards cover interesting enterprises that are involved with flow batteries, waste heat energy recovery via thermoelectrics, biofuels or innovative new approaches to biofuels or waste heat recovery. It also says awards related to projects to diminish or replace reliance on rare-earth elements will be made in September.

Here is what was announced yesterday:

Phononic Devices (ARPA-E, $3 million; private, $11 million): The company uses advanced semiconductor materials to capture and convert wasted heat produced by factories, power plants and vehicles. In addition, Phononic wants to use these devices as efficient cooling systems. In an ARPA-E document (pdf), the company claims its technology can improve thermoelectric efficiency from less than 10% today to more than 30%. This is expected to result in a $/W energy savings of 75% for power generation and 60% for cooling, respectively.

Primus Power (ARPA-E, $2 million; private, $11 million): Although the ARPA-E release implies that Primus has developed a flow battery, I think it is more accurate to say that the company has developed low cost, long-lived electrodes for flow batteries.

OPX Biotechnologies (ARPA-E, $6 million; private, $36.5 million): OPX Bio uses bacteria to produce a liquid biofuel using electricity and carbon dioxide. This liquid biofuel is being designed to replace petroleum fuel at a competitive cost. OPX Bio technology can be traced to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Fritz Prinz/Stanford University (ARPA-E, $1.5 million; private funding, $25 million): Prinz and Stanford are commercializing what they call an All-Electron Battery. The AEB is a new type of energy storage device based on moving electrons instead of ions, and “uses electron/hole redox instead of capacitive polarization of a double-layer.” They claim it can withstand 1,000s of charges without showing a significant drop in performance.

Transphorm (ARPA-E, $3 million; private, $25 million): Transphorm uses a system based on gallium nitride high electron mobility transistors to cut power waste during power conversion (without electromagnetic interference tradeoffs) by efficiently and quickly switching electrical currents, for example in bridge converters and inverters.

ARPA-E says it will be making its next round of awards in September. Interestingly, it says the September announcement will include up to $30 million in awards “to a series of innovative projects to keep America’s manufacturers competitive by reducing the need for expensive “rare earth” materials from China.”

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