NSF Award
1533939
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes peak demand relief for utilities, reduced<br/>freezer operating costs for retail stores, and natural refrigerants for regulators. Unfortunately, no state-ofthe-<br/>art system simultaneously addresses all these issues. Industrial/commercial batteries remain<br/>unaffordable, refrigeration costs account for 60% of a retail store?s electricity bills and equipment<br/>manufacturers are only realizing incremental efficiency improvements with new vapor compression<br/>architectures. This project introduces an energy storage technology, embedded in a natural refrigerant<br/>cooling cycle, that provides load-shifting services and a 40% reduction in commercial freezer electrical<br/>purchases. More importantly, it achieves this at a 3-year payback without government incentives using<br/>natural, near ambient, materials.<br/><br/>This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will investigate an energy storage<br/>technique utilizing water as the storage material in a time delayed, freeze-point-suppression refrigeration<br/>cycle. The project will focus on the internal testing, third party validation and commercial demonstration<br/>of a 10kWth system. Successful integration within low temperature refrigeration architectures requires<br/>industrial design focused on skid/waste heat integration, validation testing to inform required part count<br/>reductions/system revisions and demonstration to monitor, learn and revise the technology in preparation<br/>for scale up.
