The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is now accepting grant applications for the 2019 Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. Small businesses that win awards in these programs keep the rights to any technology developed and are encouraged to commercialize the technology. This year, DOE’s Building Technologies Office (BTO) is announcing the following buildings-focused subtopics, for which BTO will solicit applications in the coming months.

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.

Research and Development 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.