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

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.