DOE request input about wood heater R&D needs

The Bioenergy Technologies Office of the US Department of Energy has begun to provide R&D funding

to the wood heater manufacturing community.  To date, it has had two rounds of funding, with $10 million available.  The DOE provides R&D funding to many different renewable energy technologies to "enable sustainable ... energy security, reliability and resilience while creating economic opportunities across the country."  The Bioenergy Technologies Office "selects research and development projects through open and competitive procurements called Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOA) and encourages collaborative partnerships among:

• Industry
• Universities
• National laboratories
• Federal, state, and local governments, and
• Non-government agencies.

Now, the DOE is asking for input from the extended wood heater community about what the community needs to build cleaner and more efficient stoves.  This likely indicates that they may change the focus of their funding next year.  In the past, they provided funding for 

• Novel and innovative residential wood heater designs to improve combustion chamber geometry, combustion air flow distribution, mixing of combustion air with gasification products, stove baffling designs, etc. 
• Improvements in automation of stoves to optimize combustion control. 
• Wood heater power generation via thermoelectric module integration 
• Improvements in catalyst technologies for emissions reduction

Input should be sent to FY21MultiTopic@ee.doe.gov and is due by 5:00 PM September 21, 2020.  We have reproduced the details of the Request for Information below (except we omitted language about a parallel ROI on biofuels). For the full text, click here.

FY 2021 Bioenergy Technologies Office Multi-Topic RFI (DE-FOA-0002386)

DATE:           August 20, 2020 

SUBJECT:     Request for Information (RFI) 

Description 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) is requesting information on research opportunities related to residential wood heater technology advancement 

Purpose 

The purpose of this RFI is to solicit feedback from industry, academia, research laboratories, government agencies, and other stakeholders on issues related to overcoming the technical barriers and challenges in the design of clean, efficient residential scale wood heaters. EERE is specifically interested in information on identifying the critical technology gaps and resources required to significantly reduce emissions and improve efficiency of residential wood heaters. Gaps of interest include but are not limited to the stove design, automation, catalyst development, retrofit technologies for older wood heaters, sensor technology, and stove performance testing methods. 

This is solely a request for information and not a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA). EERE is not accepting applications. 

Category 1: Residential Wood Heater Technology Advancement 

Technological Barriers 

1. What are the critical technical hurdles for improving performance of stoves for new installations (e.g. combustion chamber design, combustion air management, controls, mixing, sensors, etc.)? 

2. What are the critical technical hurdles for improving performance of stoves already installed in homes (e.g. combustion chamber design, combustion air management, controls, mixing, sensors, etc.)? 

3. What practical and new techniques are used to significantly reduce transient emissions (startup, shutdown, load changes)? 

4. What practical and new techniques are used to measure transient emissions that could be implemented in laboratory or field testing? 

5. How can new exhaust emission control technologies be developed and practically deployed? 

6. How could integrated hybrid systems, in which biomass heaters are combined with other technologies such as heat pumps, solar, and high efficiency gas and liquid-fired appliances, be a route to reduced emissions? What are the technology barriers to this approach? 

7. How could field measurement methods be improved to ensure that biomass-appliances do not create local air quality issues in long-term use? 

8. What stove features commonly encourage end-users to purchase new or replace a wood heater? Or, what stove features are commonly attractive to the end-user? 

9. What advantages or disadvantages would continuous field performance data provide for advancing stove designs? 

Tools and Capabilities

1. How are trial-and-error test methods used to improved stove performance and advance stove design (i.e. development by implementation of incremental change and testing)? 

2. Is access to performance testing facilities a barrier to development? 

3. What in-house test methods are relied upon to validate and facilitate wood heater development? 

4. How much could rapid performance measurement methods shorten R&D test cycles? 

5. What specific test methods would be of interest to your enterprise? 

6. How are modeling and simulation tools being applied to improve wood heater designs? 

7. How could modeling and simulation tools be improved to meet your needs? 

8. What are the fundamental modeling gaps to enable broader use of modeling and simulation such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to improve wood heater design? 

9. How are current measurement methods meeting your needs for evaluating performance and emissions from wood heaters? What could be done better? 

10. What performance/emissions measurements are most challenging to obtain? What makes obtaining these measurements challenging? 

11. What are three primary challenges your enterprise faces for advancing stove designs?

 Request for Information Response Guidelines 

Responses to this RFI must be submitted electronically to FY21MultiTopic@ee.doe.gov no later than 5:00pm (ET) on September 21, 2020. Responses must be provided as attachments to an email. It is recommended that attachments with file sizes exceeding 25MB be compressed (i.e., zipped) to ensure message delivery. Responses must be provided as a Microsoft Word (.docx) attachment to the email, and no more than 6 pages in length, 12 point font, 1 inch margins. Only electronic responses will be accepted. 

EERE will not respond to individual submissions or publish publicly a compendium of responses. A response to this RFI will not be viewed as a binding commitment to develop or pursue the project or ideas discussed.

Please identify your answers by responding to a specific question or topic if applicable. Respondents may answer as many or as few questions as they wish. 

Respondents are requested to provide the following information at the start of their response to this RFI: 

• Company / institution name; 

• Company / institution contact; 

• Contact's address, phone number, and e-mail address.

Innovative Fine Particulate Measurement Systems for the Wood Stove Design Challenge

This blog originally had a poster and text about the details of the PM analyzers that we will use at the Decathlon.  However, because some of the findings were preliminary and not finalized, we have taken down the poster and text, except for the abstract, below.  We will repost the poster and content when it is more finalized. - Editors

Abstract

As the price of heating oil has increased in the US, more residents are returning to wood heat. Most existing wood stoves date from before the EPA implemented emissions certification requirements for these devices. Even those wood stoves that meet EPA’s Phase II requirements often have unacceptably high emissions once in use. This is due to several factors including fuel quality, operator habits and design. While the EPA is developing new regulations, the test method used for certification is not representative of in-use performance and the performance criteria in the test fall short of high efficiency or low emissions.

Designs that improve combustion and emission performance, thermal efficiency, and operational variability are needed in the U.S. heating market. The Alliance for Green Heat and Popular Mechanics Magazine has initiated the Wood Stove Design Challenge (WSDC) to address these needs by developing a competition for manufacturers, innovators, and university teams working towards these objectives.

This project seeks to develop a WSDC energy efficiency and emissions testing protocol which reduces the variability in fuel and operator. The current test method (EPA Method 28 WHH) involves testing stoves using a dilution tunnel. Seeing that the WSDC is held at the mall in Washington DC, this test method does not suit. Recently, new particulate measurement systems have been introduced in Europe, both the Wöhler SM 500 and testo 380. Both analyzers are a low cost option and offer the advantage of ease and portability. To determine the accuracy, precision, instrument range, and applicability for use in the WSDC for thermal efficiency and emissions, these portable direct measure analyzers, an evaluation will be conducted while simultaneously using the standard methods for determining the emissions.

There is, also, interest in the potential use of instruments of this type for field evaluation of the performance of both stoves and boilers.

The technology of these systems include near real-time, sub-microgram sensitivity, and is the only filter-based mass monitoring technology which has these properties and does not depend on questionable, surrogate measurements for mass