SBIR Phase I: Interface for connecting high temperature solar collectors to legacy thermal systems

SBIR第一阶段项目将使美国和发展中国家的农村地区能够跨越建设天然气分销基础设施的需求。需要高温热量来制造和处理许多日常物品，包括食品，服装等。在世界上没有天然气基础设施的地区，工厂通过燃烧石油燃料产生热量-燃料必须在现场用卡车运输。它变得昂贵。该项目将开发直接从太阳获取高温热量的技术，其成本将大大低于客户已经支付的燃料成本。通过改善高温热能的获取和降低高温热能的成本，它有可能刺激美国农村地区和世界其他欠发达地区的经济发展。该项目将开发即插即用接口和技术，将先进的新型无燃料锅炉技术与商业和工业设施中现有/遗留的热力系统连接起来。目前的技术需要昂贵的工程设计，并且容易失败，这对采用新的无燃料热源形成了关键障碍。该项目将开发模块化、可扩展和强大的技术，将太阳能驱动的联合收割机无燃料锅炉与化石燃料驱动的传统锅炉结合起来。它将包括控制系统和系统热平衡的开发和测试。该项目的目标是展示先进的可再生热源在现场工业设施上的集成。这项工作预计将使部署此类技术的成本降低50%或更多。

This SBIR Phase I Project will enable rural areas of the United States and developing nations to leapfrog the need to build natural gas distribution infrastructure. High temperature heat is required to manufacture and process many day-to-day items, including food, clothing, and more. In regions of the world that do not have natural gas infrastructure, factories produce heat by burning petroleum-based fuel - fuel that must be trucked on-site. It gets expensive. This project will develop technology to capture high temperature heat directly from the sun at significantly lower costs than customers are already paying for fuel. It has the potential to spur economic development in rural areas in the US and other under-developed regions around the world by improving access and reducing the cost of high-temperature heat.This project will develop plug-and-play interfaces and techniques to connect advanced new fuel-less boiler technologies to existing / legacy thermal systems in commercial and industrial facilities. Current techniques require costly engineering and are prone to failure, forming a key barrier to the adoption of new fuel-less heat sources. This project will develop modular, scalable, and robust techniques to combine fuel-less boilers powered by the sun with traditional boilers powered by fossil fuels. It will include development and testing of both control systems and thermal balance-of-systems. The goal of the project will be to demonstrate integration of an advanced renewable heat source on a live industrial facility. This work is expected to reduce the cost of deploying such technology by 50% or more.