Phase III Success Stories

Brains4Drones Climate events are a continuous threat to the Nation’s electric infrastructure. Within the Department of Energy (DOE), the Office of Electricity (OE) provides national leadership to ensure that the energy delivery system is secured, resilient, and reliable. In 2017, OE issued an SBIR topic that focused on the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and sensing technology for rapid response inspections of the electric grid after climate disasters. Brains4Drones, a woman-owned small business, proposed equipping drones with AI to keep utility first responders safe and productive.

Brechtel Manufacturing, Inc. The company was not founded by Fred Brechtel Jr. nor was it originally delivering instrumentation for measuring nanoparticles that control cloud formation.  However, when Fred became part of the Brechtel team in 2002, his goal was “to shift the paradigm; to take climate change and air quality measurements from sophisticated and expensive to user friendly, durable and inexpensive.” Originally founded in 1983 by his father in a Silicon Valley garage, the family business was passed to Fred in 2012. Over the last 10 years, the company has evolved and expanded to employ a staff of 18 and annual revenues of nearly $6M.  A key part of the team’s success has been sustaining a spectrum of in-house manufacturing capabilities critical to fabricating items for products. These capabilities remain important even today.

Fend, Inc. With more solar energy and other high-value assets going onto the electric grid, protecting the nation’s power system is a priority for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).  So, when Fend Incorporated’s CEO, Colin Dunn, wanted to domestically develop and manufacture a device that protects large-scale photovoltaic (PV) control systems from hacks, DOE awarded Fend $1.2 million in SBIR awards.  As Dunn puts it: “I saw the need from an infrastructure perspective to improve energy efficiency and resilience. To do that, a lot of folks were turning to the cloud.  We brought the ability to meet legacy equipment where it is by providing an innovative way to bring those systems online in a secure way.”

PHDS Co. Germanium detectors are fragile, expensive, and complicated to make and use.  However, the isotope identification results are worth the required effort: the detectors yield information that is extremely important to nuclear physicists for their research and for nuclear security missions.  Germanium gamma ray detectors are also important to law enforcement, national security personnel, first responders and nuclear waste-management personnel in the identification of nuclear materials.  The information from a germanium detector is the final word confirming the presence of fissile materials that may be used in the construction of nuclear weapons.  Gamma ray signatures coming from the nuclei of the uranium and plutonium atoms can't be faked.

RadiaBeam Systems The Advanced Photon Source (APS) operated by Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne) provides high brightness x-ray beams to over 5,000 researchers each year enabling scientific discoveries in materials science, biological and life sciences, earth science, chemistry, environmental science, physics, and polymers. The Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES), within DOE’s Office of Science, is responsible for current and future synchrotron radiation light sources. In 2017, BES issued a topic specifically focused on the development of robust microwave thermionic guns to enhance light source user facilities and enable future upgrades. Partnering with scientists at Argonne’s APS facility, RadiaBeam responded with a proposal to develop an RF gun to solve urgent reliability, control, and performance issues with the existing RF guns. Issues that threatened to suspend APS operations.

Twelve For the industrial sector to embrace low-carbon business models, the nation needs innovative, cost-competitive carbon-removal technologies. With help from DOE SBIR as well as private investment and other government grants, OPUS 12, a Berkeley-based startup is playing a major role in this incredible challenge. If implemented on large scale, Opus 12 core invention holds the promise to address nearly 10% of global carbon emission by recycling industry carbon dioxide emission into valuable chemicals and fuels. In this way, while reducing the carbon footprint of the world’s heaviest emitters, the company creates a new revenue stream from what is discarded today as a waste product.

Clostra, Inc. COVID-19 has elevated internet connectivity to an essential resource. All aspects of life from education to commerce are taking place in cyberspace. Network connectivity failures can cause costly disruptions. With support from the DOE SBIR program, California-based startup Clostra, Inc. has developed Keymaker, a data analytics platform powered by machine learning. Keymaker’s neural network is trained to identify network anomalies more quickly and effectively than other network analytics solutions. When it comes to keeping a network running at top performance, Keymaker outclasses existing platforms by simultaneously learning from existing network data, monitoring current network traffic, and keeping operators informed about significant changes to network behavior.

Materials Development, Inc. Many materials are processed in the liquid state to produce a variety of structures and properties, including high performance optical and laser glasses, defect-free single crystals for the semiconductor industry, nanocomposite alloys for lighter weight and improved strength, and amorphous pharmaceuticals. Understanding the short-lived metastable states formed in liquids, particularly at high temperature, is critical for producing desired properties in energy conversion materials, or to model the behavior of nuclear fuels to optimize safety. However, the study of materials in extreme conditions is hampered by the container. A perfectly inert container does not exist in nature; therefore, sample interaction with the hot container’s walls often sabotages experiments by introducing contamination and other spurious effects. Materials Development, Inc. (MDI) has a solution to the container problem that is brilliant and technically complex at the same time: eliminating the container!

H3D Inc Technological progress is often linked to the discovery of a new, advanced material with intrinsically higher performance. However, the new material, typically a complex compound, is often challenging to grow with the chemical purity and/or microstructure needed to be molded into a marketable product. Overcoming these materials science issues requires fundamental scientific understanding and innovative engineering. For applications involving gamma ray detection, the “new material” is the wide band gap semiconductor cadmium zinc telluride (CdZnTe or CZT), exhibiting performance similar to the gold standard of Higher Purity Germanium (HPGe) while operating at room temperature (RT).

Integrated Dynamic Electron Solutions Inc The latest advances in nanotechnology, including electronic and energy storage devices, have emphasized the need to add a temporal dimension to transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to follow atomic motion in materials, in real time and far from equilibrium. Being able to image materials with a time resolution of picoseconds to microseconds can reveal the inner workings of key processes for energy and biology applications. Examples are pulsed-laser sintering of nanoparticles for additive manufacturing, chemical reactions and structural changes at battery electrode interfaces, and studies of protein movement in biology. Integrated Dynamic Electron Solutions, Inc. (IDES) is commercializing technologies that allow TEMs to capture images at ultrafast time scales, driving technological and scientific progress across a host of markets and disciplines.

Molecule Works Inc. Synthetic membranes are a well-known technology with wide applications in air and water filtration, and molecular separations in industrial plants. Although the current market is served by several experienced companies, Molecule Works Inc. (MWI), a startup based in Washington State, is commercializing an innovative line of membrane products, which offer higher performance than conventional polymer- and ceramic-based membranes. MWI membranes are based on the fundamental inventions and understandings that were obtained at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) through scientific research that started in 2008, and on subsequent critical scale-up developments in MWI’s pilot-scale facilities that have enabled manufacturing at competitive prices.

ColdQuanta Only a decade ago, quantum computing was an exotic topic solely reserved to a small group of specialized scientists. Today, quantum computing has gained the public interest, and many Venture Capital (VC) firms have started investing in quantum-technology companies, including several spinouts from universities. The excitement is linked to the potential of large quantum computers to solve certain problems exponentially faster than any of our current classical computers. This ability would provide a solution to the foreseen slowdown of Moore’s law and consequent scaling of classical computing performance.