Industry Partners Innovation: NuClimate – Cool Savings For High-Rise Hotels Link

In the early 2000s, NuClimate Air Quality Systems worked with SyracuseCoE to develop an innovative chilled-beam technology for providing heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) for commercial buildings such as schools and hospitals. As a member of the SyracuseCoE Partner Program they received a $50,000 award from SyracuseCoE’s Commercialization Assistance Program (CAP) enabling the company to achieve its first sales in 2005. Subsequently, NuClimate signed an exclusive deal with Carrier to sell its chilled beam worldwide with the Carrier name on it. Now the company has developed a new vertical stack fan coil unit that reduces energy consumption for air circulation to less than 20 watts, substantially lower than anything currently available on the market.

Two years ago, NuClimate was approached by an international hotel chain looking to reduce energy costs by replacing aging HVAC units in each high-rise hotel room. The old units consumed 300 to 350 watts to operate the fan. While current equipment on the market uses an average of 80 to 85 watts to operate the fan, the chain wanted NuClimate to improve that by 20 percent or more. NuClimate focused on the specific need and challenge of providing comfortable climate in individual high-rise hotel rooms, developing an oversized coil and employing a fan not used in fancoil systems today. The result: a unit that consumes an average of 16.6 watts to heat or cool the room that it’s in, performance that was verified by UL testing conducted with funding from a competitive award from SyracuseCoE’s Innovation Fund.

“We customized it specifically for the hotel marketplace and for the desire to save energy,” says John DiMillo, vice president of NuClimate. “The drawback is that the per-unit cost is higher, but the return on investment in energy savings is very desirable.” The system is particularly attractive for use in cities with high per-kilowatt energy costs, such as New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago. A prototype of the new system was installed in one of the hotel chain’s premier New York City locations, where it has been running for the past year. NuClimate plans to sell the product across the entire hotel marketplace.

“We think this is a revolutionary new product,” says DiMillo, who anticipates the company could be building 50,000 to 60,000 units once the product launches. He says SyracuseCoE shares a big part of that success story. “Whether it’s funding, or engineering assistance, or networking, they continue to be an unbelievable asset,” DiMillo says. “Any time we call, they come through for us.”

Industry Partners Innovation: SBB Inc. – Partnering for Research and Design Link

When SBB Inc. was looking to convert a sterilization chamber door from stainless steel to glass, the company turned to the SyracuseCoE Analysis and Design Center. The center is a NYSERDA-funded resource created to help companies in Central New York’s thermal and environmental control cluster with product design challenges. For small firms like SBB, it’s an invaluable tool.

“Research is very expensive. We don’t work on simple things,” says SBB chief engineer and co-founder Vince Bongio. “The Analysis and Design Center supplies engineering and research talent that I couldn’t otherwise access cost-effectively.”

The center, located at SyracuseCoE headquarters, provides companies working in advanced manufacturing in thermal and environmental controls (AM-TEC) with assistance on design problems from graduate students and faculty from Syracuse University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. SBB has used the Analysis and Design Center on a range of projects, from analyzing fluid dynamics in a small sterilization chamber system, to adapting the same technology on a room system, to analyzing a structural walking tile used in its clean-room ceiling grid system.

“Students get to do some real-life application work on difficult problems that ties to their education and has tangible outcomes,” says Bongio.
SBB, in East Syracuse, was founded by Bongio and two partners in 2000 and soon partnered with the SyracuseCoE. An AM-TEC Research and Development Award from the SyracuseCoE funded development of high-technology environmental control systems that reduced energy in refrigeration systems.

Through SyracuseCoE, SBB has also participated with SU’s Mechanical Engineering Capstone Project, resulting in the development of a latent phase change heat recovery heat exchanger. In addition to the hands-on research and design assistance, Bongio says networking opportunities through the SyracuseCoE have been extremely beneficial, particularly the annual SyracuseCoE Symposium. “I always learn about new technology I otherwise would be unaware of,” he says.

“Information is power, and the proper use of information is where the real power is,” says Bongio. “You just can’t discover these things without being active with forward-thinking entities like the SyracuseCoE.”

Syracuse University Research Collaboration Link

Project: Developing an urban energy model to simulate, test, and visualize energy usage and future scenarios and strategies. “Imagine that you have a neighborhood and are able to visualize existing energy measurements. And then, let’s simulate putting advanced technologies in all of those buildings and see the impact,” says Rakha. The project is taking place in the Interactive Design and Visualization Lab, run by Krietemeyer, at SyracuseCoE.

• Bess Krietemeyer (principal investigator), assistant professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University
• Tarek Rakha, assistant professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University
• Jason Dedrick, professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University

Nuts and Bolts: Working with the Pecan Street Institute, an energy research organization, the team is using data on household energy use from a neighborhood in Austin, Texas, to develop a visual simulation of energy use, as well as how those energy flows might differ, using different building materials or building technologies.

Intellectual Collision: Krietemeyer and Rakha are colleagues in the School of Architecture, where Krietemeyer focuses on visualization of energy use at the urban scale and Rakha on building energy models. After hearing Krietemeyer present her work at the annual SyracuseCoE Symposium in 2016, Dedrick, who has conducted research on smart grid technologies, approached her to collaborate, using large data sets he had available on energy use in Austin.

Practical Application: The data is not particularly meaningful in its existing state in Excel spreadsheets. “We’re creating a tool that visually illustrates energy use that can be used by a variety of stakeholders,” says Krietemeyer. “Maps will show how the community uses energy but also how a single household uses energy over the course of a day, a month, or a year.”

And Another Thing: The tool, which they call VIS-SIM, can also demonstrate “what if” scenarios important for designers and architects. How will energy be saved if we change the color of the roof or change the type of glass in the windows? What if we change the orientation of the building?

SyracuseCoE Impact: A $25,000 competitive award in 2016–17 funded the improvement of an existing building energy model, making it more precise and calibrating it to actual energy use data. A second award of $15,000 in 2017–18 is funding creation of a dashboard, a functioning online visual platform where multiple stakeholders can use the data and provide feedback. Both Krietemeyer and Rakha have labs in the SyracuseCoE headquarters, where much of their individual work on the project occurs.

Expert Opinion: Ultimately, the tool could be used in other geographic areas and climates to make smarter decisions about energy use or building for energy efficiency. “Austin was our initial testbed because the data was available,” says Krietemeyer, “but we hope to test this in multiple regions and multiple climate types.”

Additional research

• See a list of published research for Professor Dedrick
• See a list of published research for Professor Krietemeyer
• See a list of published research for Professor Rakha

Project: The team sampled well water in five counties in New York’s Southern Tier to compare water methane levels against those in Pennsylvania, where there is hydrofracking of the Marcellus Shale, in an attempt to gauge the environmental impact of hydrofracking in a more accurate way. “The two areas are very similar,” says Lautz. “The geology is the same, the climate is the same. The only major difference is the presence of hydrofracking.”

• Laura Lautz (principal investigator), Jessie Page Heroy Professor and chair, Department of Earth Sciences, Syracuse University
• Greg Hoke, associate professor and associate chair, Department of Earth Sciences, Syracuse University
• Zunli Lu, associate professor and director of graduate studies, Department of Earth Sciences, Syracuse University

Nuts and Bolts: Working with 10 homeowners across the region, the team tested the methane level of their well water once a month for a year. “Every month we provided a report to homeowners informing them what we found in their well,” says Lautz.

Why This Matters: One of the biggest concerns people have with hydrofracking is that natural gas will get into shallow ground water and contaminate people’s wells. Natural gas—composed of methane—also occurs spontaneously. “We are trying to understand why people have methane in their wells naturally so that we might be able to differentiate what’s natural from what’s unnatural,” Lautz says.

What They Know: Some homeowners have negligible amounts of methane in their water, while others “could probably light their tap on fire,” Lautz says. That range is normal. “What we’ve found is that the wells with high methane have been consistently high all year around. It
looks like if someone has a methane problem and it’s natural, it’s consistent and stays that way.”

SyracuseCoE Impact: A $25,000 competitive award from the SyracuseCoE Faculty Fellows Program funded a full year of water sampling and analysis, as well as a stipend for Syracuse University Earth sciences doctoral student Amanda Schultz, who has coordinated sample collection with the homeowners. “We absolutely would not have had the financial resources to collect the water samples and do the laboratory analysis without SyracuseCoE funding,” Lautz says.

And Another Thing: This project is a component of the ongoing Project SWIFT (ShaleWater Interaction in Forensic Tools), a large-scale water quality program in the Marcellus Shale region. “We have been to more than 200 homes in southern New York to collect baseline data,” says Lautz. “It’s super important. If they ever do hydrofrack in New York, we have a lot of information on what things were like beforehand.”

Additional research

• See additional research for Professor Gregory Hoke
• See additional research for Professor Laura Lautz
• See additional research for Professor Zunli Lu

Daekwon Park, assistant professor, School of Architecture, Syracuse University

Backstory: Park’s research focuses on designing innovations in the geometry and configuration of building materials at multiple scale levels—cellular materials, functionally graded materials, and adaptive materials—to improve the thermal or structural performance of building components or systems.

Projects: He is conducting early-stage research on three projects:

• Adaptive thermal skin research developing dynamic building skins that can alternate between a thermal insulator and heat exchanger, based on thermal environment
• Topo-joint research, integrating 3D-printed, nonconventional building materials for creating highly customized joints and connections for building applications
• Architectured soil, exploring the design of 3D-structured soil-based materials for structural, hygrothermal, and acoustical performance of masonry blocks.

Nuts and Bolts: All three projects implement novel geometric strategies to existing building materials and components—plastic, brick, concrete, membrane, etc.—for augmenting targeted functions. For instance, the Adaptive Thermal Skin research aims to create a dynamic insulation using thin and lightweight membranes that change insulation values based on seasonal temperature differences and building orientation. This could dramatically reduce the heating or cooling load in buildings during transitional periods in spring and fall, when there are large temperature differences outdoors between daytime and night.

Why It Matters: Compared to the materials used in high-tech products or upmarket goods, building materials need to satisfy challenging economic and performance requirements that constrain the type of material or technology that can be used. “One promising approach for the field of architecture is to augment the performance of affordable and durable common building materials, such as concrete, brick, and wood, through geometric configuration—much like how spiders produce a variety of webs with different properties via geometric/compositional variations of the same web material— rather than investing in the costly development of new and unfamiliar materials,” says Park.

Expert Opinion: Park has extensive experience with large-scale sports and entertainment facility design around the world, including the United States, Australia, China, and South Korea, where he managed projects including the Ansan Baseball Dome, Gimpo Sports Town Master Plan, and the 2014 Incheon Asian Games Main Stadium. He is a co-founder of the multidisciplinary design practice SISO (Systematic Input Soft Output), based in Syracuse, Minneapolis, and Seoul, and is director of the Material Archi-Tectonic Research (MATR) Lab at SyracuseCoE.

How SyracuseCoE Helped: SyracuseCoE provided support for fabrication equipment in the MATR Lab as well as funding for research interns, materials, and publication costs. “The support from SyracuseCoE has been critical for advancing my career as a young researcher,” says Park. “That assistance includes supporting and guiding funding proposals, inviting and introducing me to events and people, and providing the space and resources to set up my lab.”

See published research for Daekwon Park

In 2017, SyracuseCoE catalyzed a new study on the effect of daylighting on cognitive performance in the workplace. The study compares two different window technologies: conventional roller window shades and electrochromic glazing that changes tint in response to sensors or occupant control.

The researchers who conducted the groundbreaking COGfx Study returned to SyracuseCoE headquarters in February 2017 to report results from their second study, which examined impacts of indoor environmental quality on cognitive function of workers in office buildings across the country.

The initial study, conducted in 2014 at the Total Indoor Environmental Quality (TIEQ) Lab at SyracuseCoE, quantified the benefits of improved indoor air quality—including lower levels of carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds—on cognitive function of office workers. The second study evaluated indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in 12 office buildings across the United States, including seven buildings that had earned certification in the LEED green-building rating system and five high-performing buildings that were not LEEDcertified. The study evaluated cognitive function of workers in each building by the same methods used in the TIEQ Lab study. Results found that green-certified buildings improve cognitive function in general by 26 percent and that people’s overall health improved by 30 percent, highlighting the health benefits of better indoor environments.

“Over the years, green buildings have grown in popularity, and now this study has proven the positive physical and mental impacts green buildings can have on tenants, creating an even greater benefit for investing in green certification,” says John Mandyck, chief sustainability officer for United Technologies Corporation.

Study principals participating in the forum included Joseph G. Allen, assistant professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Piers MacNaughton, research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; and Usha Satish, professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Hydrogen Infrastructure Link

California is leading the way in zero-emission vehicle transportation, with more than 2,000 automobiles on the road powered by hydrogen fuel cells, which have a range of 300 to 400 miles and can refuel in three to five minutes. While at least three automakers—Toyota, Kia, and Honda— manufacture hydrogen fuel cell models, the lack of infrastructure to refuel these vehicles prohibits their wide-scale adoption. It’s a problem Paul Mutolo is tackling in New York State.

Along with two business partners, Mutolo founded Standard Hydrogen Corporation in 2012. Initially, the company won a $3 million federal award to bring a fuel cell bus to Ithaca, which would have been the first deployment of a fuel cell bus in the state. But the grant only paid for the bus itself. When the team failed to raise funds for a hydrogen fueling station—due to perceived lack of demand—they had to give the bus back, forcing the company to rethink its business model.

“We realized that we needed to diversify and make sure there was something else we could do with the infrastructure besides serve vehicles,” says Mutolo. That was an unintended blessing. In California, hydrogen stations provide fuel from storage tanks, similar to conventional gas stations. Standard Hydrogen developed a new system to produce hydrogen on site. The goal is to develop a sustainable hydrogen infrastructure to fuel vehicles and to use that infrastructure to help support the power grid across the state.

“After Hurricane Sandy, a lot of cellphone towers were the only things that remained up and running around the New York City area, and that was because they were backed up by fuel cell power units,” explains Mutolo. “That’s exactly what we’re doing, just on a larger scale.”
Standard Hydrogen has a proprietary design for the technology and is looking to build a demonstration station in New York State.

“SyracuseCoE has helped us validate our idea for functionality on the grid and for being able to generate revenues from the grid. With their support, we advanced critical conversations with Con Edison and National Grid,” he says.

An award from SyracuseCoE’s Innovation Fund helped the team develop a print and digital media campaign to educate stakeholders
about hydrogen fuel cell technology and the advantages of this dual-use, multi-revenue station.

Says Mutolo, “New York has goals to replace several million conventional vehicles with zero-emission vehicles over the next several years and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are part of that solution. Standard Hydrogen is helping New York achieve this essential goal.”

Automating for Efficiency Link

More than 76 percent of electricity used in the United States is consumed in residential and commercial buildings. Central New York-based Cortland Research has developed a novel energy conservation solution for buildings with POUNCE, an inexpensive system of electrical sensors and controls that reduces energy consumption while maintaining comfort based on occupancy of a space.

“Temperature and occupancy are big factors in trying to improve building efficiency based on use,” says Steve McMahon, who founded the company along with his son, John. “Our system allows providers of environmental systems to make them more dynamic and realize savings based on the information POUNCE can provide to them.”

POUNCE is an affordable energy monitoring system that easily integrates into existing wiring via electrical outlets and switches. The web-based system allows users to view and control their system remotely, adjusting thermostats, turning lighting and appliances on or off, and
managing power flow to outlets.

McMahon started Cortland Research in 2010. “We had a vision that building automation systems would become commonplace and our idea could provide building owners in underserved markets better options for sensing and control, leading to energy efficiency,” he says.

Today, POUNCE systems are used by the New York City Department of Education in city schools, Corning, Onondaga Community College, and SUNY Cortland. McMahon attributes much of the company’s growth to assistance received through partnering with SyracuseCoE.

“SyracuseCoE understands the benefit of POUNCE Systems as a complementary component of air quality and energy conservation, and their endorsement of our products gave us credibility,” says McMahon. SyracuseCoE contacts led to important sales, including a new contact that is helping the firm extend its sales reach nationwide.

Cortland Research has received three competitive awards to date from SyracuseCoE, including two from its Innovation Fund and one associated with a regional initiative to grow Central New York’s industry cluster in Advanced Manufacturing of Thermal and Environmental Controls (AM-TEC). The latest award from the SyracuseCoE Innovation Fund enabled Cortland Research to complete engineering design of a CO2 sensor for the system. Via funding awarded to SyracuseCoE by the U.S. Department of Energy and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) to support the AM-TEC initiative, Cortland Research is implementing and studying point-of-use CO2/occupancy/temperature sensing.

Cortland Research installed prototype CO2 sensors into POUNCE switches installed in the Willis H. Carrier TIEQ Laboratory at SyracuseCoE, creating an interface between the POUNCE system and Carrier HVAC systems. The study demonstrated a potential energy reduction of up to 34 percent in office environments. McMahon says the POUNCE platform allows for many additional features.

“SyracuseCoE has been an incredible resource and we would not have come this far without them,” he says.

Christa Kelleher Link

Assistant Professor, Department of Earth Sciences and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Syracuse University

Published research for this project:

Airborne thermal infrared videography of stream temperature anomalies from a small unoccupied aerial system

Relative information from thermal infrared imagery via unoccupied aerial vehicle informs simulations and spatially-distributed assessments of stream temperature

Project: Monitoring longitudinal patterns of stream temperature and levels of storm flow along Onondaga Creek.

The Basics: Numerous culverts along Onondaga Creek funnel storm water into the creek, which flows into Onondaga Lake. Storm water is warm and typically raises the temperature of the water it flows into, potentially making an ecological impact on the biology of the body of water.

Nuts and Bolts: Kelleher is building visual temperature models with data she’s collecting through use of a thermal camera mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle. “Conventionally, if you wanted to measure temperature, you’d install sensors at various points along the stream,” says Kelleher. “The camera on the drone allows me to look at patterns and differences across the stream.”

What She Knows: Some of the water inputs are colder than expected. “There’s a natural spring coming in near the top of the study reach, which as expected, is coming in very cold. But there are culvert inputs along the way, some of which are warm and some are colder than anticipated,” she says. “These things just light up like a Christmas tree on the imagery. It’s great.”

Lessons to Learn: Other research of this type has been conducted in warmer climates, so Kelleher says it’s possible that thermal pollution may not be as big an issue in Syracuse. “We also haven’t done a test in the heat of the summer yet, so we’ll see how different things look then.”

SyracuseCoE Impact: A $10,000 competitive award from the SyracuseCoE Faculty Fellow Program allowed Kelleher to purchase the thermal camera, pay for a pilot to fly the drone, and support Syracuse University Earth sciences graduate student Sam Caldwell to assist on the project. “As a new faculty member in a variable funding environment, it’s been great to get support for a local project, both to help me learn the area and to connect with other researchers on campus,” says Kelleher, who is organizing a session on Water in Urban Environments at the 2017 SyracuseCoE Symposium.

Bottom Line: In the Eastern United States, storm water is a big concern that will increase with climate change and urbanization of the landscape. “The more that we can understand how storm flow changes water quantity and water quality, the better we can design structures or rehabilitate existing infrastructure to help things downstream,” Kelleher says.

Read more about the researchers in the SyracuseCoE Faculty Fellows Program.

Processing Biochemicals from Paper Waste Link

As readership of paper publications has declined, paper production has shifted to serve the growing market in online sales and associated shipping.

“Packaging paper production in the U.S. has been growing at more than double the rate of the rest of the economy,” says Bandaru
Ramarao, professor of paper and bioprocess engineering at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) and director of the Empire State Paper Institute.

Ramarao and his business partner, Bhavin Bhayani, are developing technologies to use waste produced during the processing of paper for shipping cartons to create biofuels. Together, they established a startup venture, Avatar Sustainable Technologies.

Most packaging is made from recycled paper. Recycling involves chopping up used paper, mixing it with water and chemicals, then heating it, which breaks it down into strands of cellulose, a type of organic plant material. The process also produces undesirable gritty fiber waste fragments. The fragments slow down paper machines and reduce production.

“The problem,” says Ramarao, “is that they are solid waste and you have to pay to landfill them.” Avatar has developed a process using enzymes to convert these waste fragments into useful byproducts that can be used to make biochemicals, including biofuels and bioplastics, essentially replacing fossil carbon with natural carbon in their processing. A project with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) could advance the technology further. NREL has engineered a new, more reactive enzyme that could speed the process at lower cost.

Avatar won a Small Business Vouchers Pilot award from the U.S. Department of Energy to work with NREL to conduct studies using this new enzyme. The investigation is also supported by a competitive award from the SyracuseCoE Innovation Fund. “This could lead to a better and shorter process, saving money and energy,” says Bhayani. Not to mention the boost the company receives collaborating with NREL. “We get exposure at a whole new level within the industry,” he says.

Avatar got its start in 2013 when Bhayani was a doctoral student at SUNY ESF and won $10,000 from SyracuseCoE in an award made through the Raymond von Dran IDEA student competition. The company is located in the SyracuseCoE headquarters building
and uses space within SUNY ESF’s Biofuels Pilot plant. Bhayani says it would be challenging for Avatar to continue without support from SyracuseCoE.

“This is a difficult time because funding in this area has dried up due to changing priorities of the current administration,” he says. “The SyracuseCoE Innovation Fund has helped fill the gap and keeps us moving forward.”