NOTICE OF INTENT
ANNOUNCEMENT DATE: November 1, 2021
HPC4Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg)
DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy is the primary sponsor of the HPC4Mfg Program. The Office of Fossil Energy and EERE’s other Technology Offices may also sponsor select projects in this portfolio. AMO partners with private and public stakeholders to support the research, development, and deployment of innovative technologies that can improve U.S. competitiveness, save energy, and ensure global leadership in advanced manufacturing. AMO supports cost-shared research, development, and demonstration activities in support of crosscutting next-generation technologies and processes that hold high potential to significantly improve energy efficiency and reduce energy-related emissions, industrial waste, and the life‐cycle energy consumption of manufactured products.
Improved energy efficiency across the manufacturing industry is the primary goal of the HPC4Mfg Program. The program solicits proposals that require HPC modeling and simulation to overcome impactful manufacturing process challenges resulting in reduced energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and/or increased productivity. Proposals should provide a realistic assessment of the energy impact, the improvement in U.S. manufacturing competitiveness, and the increase in U.S. manufacturing jobs that a successful outcome of the project could have across the industrial sector.
Of particular interest to AMO are:
Improvements in manufacturing processes which result in significant national energy savings. Examples include:
- Process improvements in high-energy consuming industries such as paper and pulp, primary metal manufacturing, water and wastewater, glass and chemical industries;
- Improvements in material performance in harsh service environments such as very high temperature or highly corrosive processes;
- Integration of advanced object recognition and other machine learning algorithms (e.g. sortation, defect detection) into high throughput industrial processes;
- Improvements in modeling prediction and closed-loop control for smart manufacturing systems (e.g. advanced sensors and process controls);
- Improvements in separation and processing for critical materials (e.g. rare earth elements); and
- Electrification of processes.
Improvements in the lifecycle energy consumption and carbon emissions reduction of products of interest to AMO. Examples include:
- Improved materials and shape optimization for light-weighting in transport technologies;
- Operational efficiency of electronics systems; and
- Increased recycling of waste associated with industrial-scale materials production and processing or enable reuse at end-of-life.
Efficiency improvements and carbon emissions reduction in energy conversion and storage technologies. Examples include:
- Improvements in combined heat and power units which save significant energy and/or increase operational and fuel flexibility;
- Novel energy storage and energy conversion techniques; and
- Improvements in waste heat recovery.
Reductions in CO2 or CO2-equivalent emissions. Examples include:
- Improvement in the performance of carbon-capturing processes.
- Modification of fossil-fueled systems to accept low-to-zero carbon fuels.
- Electrification of processes to replace combustion-driven processes.
HPC4Materials (HPC4Mtls)
The Advanced Energy Materials program, funded by DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management(FECM) and managed by DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, is the primary sponsor of the High Performance Computing for Materials (HPC4Mtls) program. FECM funds research, development, demonstration and deployment projects to decarbonize power generation and industrial sources, to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to mitigate the environmental impacts of fossil fuel use.
The Advanced Energy Materials program works to characterize, produce, and certify advanced alloys and high-performance materials that are key to realizing dispatchable, reliable, high-efficiency, decarbonized power generation from gas or hydrogen. In addition, the program aims to encourage change and stimulate innovation in the high-performance materials value chain to spur U.S. competitiveness.
FECM partners with industry, academia, national labs, and research facilities on research, development, demonstration, and deployment of carbon management technologies that are essential for decarbonizing key sectors, including power and industrial sectors, some of the largest sources of carbon emissions today. Clean hydrogen is expected to play a considerable role in decarbonizing these sectors. Today, roughly 95% of the hydrogen in the United States is produced from natural gas without carbon capture, which is not clean. However, there is significant potential in applying carbon capture technologies to help advance a cost-effective and low-carbon hydrogen economy.
Proposals for the HPC4Materials program should provide a realistic assessment of the proposed project’s benefits to the domestic materials supply chain and/or fossil energy application (e.g. reduced energy consumption and/or greenhouse gas emissions for power plants or clean hydrogen producers/users).
Of particular interest to FECM in this solicitation are:
Advanced Structural Materials for Hydrogen Applications
- Improving the understanding of the materials impacts including corrosion and erosion effects of gasification of feedstock blends of coal, sustainably sourced biomass and waste plastics on materials in high temperature regions of a gasifier, including sensitivity analysis of blend percentages and types of feedstocks
- Improving the understanding of the material impacts including hydrogen embrittlement effects of blends of natural gas and hydrogen on materials in pipelines, welded joints or compressors, including sensitivity analysis of blend percentages
- Use of computational databases and machine learning for thermal barrier coating (TBC) development for hot gas path components of combustion turbines firing natural gas-hydrogen blends or 100% hydrogen
- Use of computational databases and machine learning for development of ceramic metal composites for use in components of combustion turbines firing natural gas-hydrogen blends or 100% hydrogen
Advanced Structural Materials for Fossil Energy Applications
- Improving the understanding of detailed processes in critical focus areas such as oxidation, corrosion, and electrochemical interactions in creep strength enhanced ferritic (CSEF) alloys, austenitic alloys and high nickel superalloys
- Improving reliability of dissimilar welds between CSEF alloys, austenitic alloys and/or high nickel superalloys
- Developing the capability to predict the mechanical behavior and properties of additively manufactured components for use in advanced power cycles such as supercritical carbon dioxide cycles
Advanced Functional Materials for Hydrogen Applications
- Use of computational databases and machine learning for catalyst development to synthesize, test, characterize, and scale materials which convert carbon oxides into value-added products with increased energy efficiency, higher selectivity, and lower environmental impacts based on a lifecycle analysis relative to conventional products
- Use of computational databases and machine learning for catalyst development to synthesize, test, characterize, and scale materials for reforming of natural gas/methane to produce syngas or hydrogen
- Developing machine learning capabilities to predict composition, thermal performance and mechanical properties of new materials for thermal energy storage
- Developing machine learning capabilities to identify promising new materials for non-battery energy storage technologies that can integrate with fossil energy power generating units
- Overcoming barriers to the manufacture of components for fuel cells
