September 2005

BFRL Monthly Highlights

April 2005

May 2005

June 2005

August 2005

September 2005

PAST Highlights

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BFRL Helps Identify Energy Savings for Chillers

The recent escalation in the price of a gallon of gasoline has heightened and reemphasized the need to save energy. One significant way for the nation to save energy is to improve the energy efficiency of water chillers that cool many of the nation’s large commercial buildings. Recent BFRL research on the boiling of refrigerant/ lubricant mixtures has shown that energy savings will occur if the right surface tension, viscosity, composition, and chemical characteristics of an oil additive are chosen relative to those of the base lubricant that exists in the chiller. Choosing the right properties allows the oil additive to form a monolayer on the evaporator surface of the chiller and enhance the nucleate boiling heat transfer that occurs there. The savings correspond to the improvement of chillers’ efficiency by 1 percent. If used in all current U.S. chillers, this could amount to as much as 3.2 billion kWh of electricity annually or 920,000 barrels of oil a day. In order to make the theory available for use in the public domain, it has been published in the IP.com Prior Art Database as a technical disclosure, entitled “Method and Transport Properties for Enhancing the Nucleative Heat Transfer of Refrigerant Chiller Evaporators.” IP.com is an Internet warehouse of technical disclosures that documents the existence of “prior art” at a fraction of cost and effort required by the patent application process.

CONTACT:
Piotr Domanski
301-975-5877

BFRL Solar Team Receives 2005 ASME Best Paper Award

Hunter Fanney, Mark Davis, and Brian Dougherty of BFRL were awarded an ASME Best Paper Award for the paper, “Comparison of Photovoltaic Module Performance Measurements,” at the 2005 International Solar Energy Conference. This paper was written jointly with Sandia National Laboratories’ researchers David King, William Boyson, and Jay Kratochvil. All authors will receive a certificate and were honored during the conference. The conference was sponsored by the International Solar Energy Society, the American Solar Energy Society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Institute of Architects, the Wind Energy Association, and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers. More than 2,000 people attended the conference, making it the largest solar energy conference ever held (see www.swc2005.org). Of the 600 papers presented at the conference, approximately 150 were peer-reviewed ASME papers. Four of these received ASME Best Paper Awards. The paper, viewable at www.bfrl.nist.gov/863/bipv/Pubs.htm, resulted from research sponsored by BFRL and the Advanced Technology Program.

CONTACT:
Hunter Fanney
301-975-5864

BFRL Guest Worker Elected ITCC Fellow

Daniel Flynn, guest worker, was elected a fellow of the International Thermal Conductivity Conferences in 2005. The fellow citation reads: “Recognition is hereby given for outstanding contributions to the field of thermal conductivity. This certificate is presented as a token of the high esteem in which this person is held by professional colleagues.” Flynn, who retired from NIST at the end of 1990, was employed by NIST for 31 years and has more than 70 publications in heat transfer and thermal conductivity measurements. Flynn was a founder of the International Thermal Conductivity Conferences in 1961 and, in 1967, he was co-chairman of the Seventh International Thermal Conductivity Conference held at NIST with the largest attendance to date. Flynn has designed and operated techniques for measuring thermal conductivity from room temperature to over 2,000 degrees Celsius on a variety of metals, alloys, ceramics, and soils. Most recently, he has designed a new guardedhot- plate apparatus for development of high-temperature reference materials needed by the thermal insulation
testing community.

CONTACT:
Robert Zarr
301-975-6436

 

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