AT Selected as NITI Competition Finalist

by

Ambient Trends’ automated rapid testing technology for photovoltaic modules was selected among 2,500 entries from 67 countries as a finalist in the NITI Aayog Mission-LiFE competition. The National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) is a public policy think-tank agency of the government of India which serves to advance the nation’s economy. AT found that due to the high complexity, cost, and available technologies to address the extreme variability found in decommissioned modules (of even the same model), current-day testing schema does not support reuse or repair markets at scale and there are substantial gaps in knowledge and technology which hinder this important component of the photovoltaic circular economy. AT’s technology serves to address the mounting issue of photovoltaic waste through rapid testing and characterization of end-of-life PV modules, applying novel techniques for determining optimal automatable repair and enabling intelligent utility-scale reutilization. Estimates suggest that reutilization could meet up to one-third of PV demand over the next twenty-five years, while AT’s system also enables a long-term custodianship model for solar industry lifecycle management. Approximately 80% of the world’s global e-waste goes unaccounted for and the costs associated with ‘cleanup’ of improper disposal of PV modules will ultimately impact utility customers and the public. Even with zero-cost material recovery, preliminary financial modeling reveals a 442-times advantage over state-of-the-art material recovery value.

DOE R&D Grant Award: Energy Time-of-Use

by

The Nation’s transition towards renewable energy is creating the need for homes to vary their energy use across the hours of the day, and become responsive to the dynamic supply of renewable sources. Time-of-use rate structures have been developed by utilities and energy stakeholders as a strategy to incent home occupants to adjust their energy use patterns with supply. Nationally, approximately half of investor-owned-utilities utilize time-of-use rate structures. Carbon emissions intensity of electrical use varies throughout the day, providing further impetus to shift loads to off-peak hours, or when renewable sources make up a greater proportion of supply. Overall home energy performance can now be viewed as a combination of savings and flexibility.

Ambient Trends was selected and awarded grant funding by DOE’s Building Technologies Office to develop a Time-of-Use capability for their Home Energy Score™ platform. In cooperation with DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, our team developed a computationally efficient methodology to use the Home Energy Score™ platform to analyze the impacts of time-of-use rates and the energy efficiency improvements affected by these time-relevant factors.

This new analytical capability utilizing existing data from the Home Energy Score™ platform serves as a digital twin for America’s housing stock with inference capabilities to better understand and model a multitude of energy generation, distribution, consumption, and efficiency program scenarios. This enables further optimization of utility rate structures, combination with demographic data via GIS to analyze and formulate solutions to equity and energy poverty concerns, and examine how extreme weather events affect electrical grids on a granular level to complement NREL’s tools for grid-scale digital twinning. The project will better aid homeowners, utilities, jurisdictions and government in analyzing housing and effective improvement measures as well as time-of-use-accurate calculation of forecast and actual carbon emissions.

The integration will enable live user interaction and evaluation of multiple scenarios using time-of-use data analytics, expanding the Home Energy Score™ tool’s user base and improving its accuracy for the growing proportion of time-of-use rate structures in the US.

Imprecise Computing

by

The rise of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the exponential growth in quantity and scale of data and sensor inputs redefines storage and processing criticality. Optimal task prioritization is morphing from linear-stacked to dynamic-flat. For edge and embedded systems where architecture and power are limited, traditional mixed-criticality systems (and storage) introduce a new dimension: accuracy. This dimension provides the greatest value in systems where the availability of data and sensor inputs exceeds the hardware’s capability to compute all potentially beneficial elements, and a processing-level imprecise calculation enables inputs to, in turn, inform accuracy needs. The key to achieving this at the hardware layer can be found in analog computing. For AI/ML systems, imprecise and analog processing approaches hold the potential to dramatically increase overall accuracy for a growing range of applications. An added benefit of analog computing is its resiliency to a variety of external interference – especially critical for lightweight space applications.

Organic Materials Laboratory

by

Ambient Trends’ Organic Materials Laboratory makes plans to collaborate with researchers around the world to develop bio-based materials technologies suitable for surface and structure applications for the built environment.

Future development updates will be posted at omatlab.com

PCBs to FHEs – Flexible Electronics to Become Ubiquitous

by

fhe-at2

The advancements enabled by the silicon revolution are reaching a new pivot point which finally breaks the discrete adjacency of the physical world and the digital world which fueled the productivity growth of the last several decades.

Sculpting everything from finance and trade to communications, and dramatically upsetting the human story of generations prior, the digital revolution to date has done so, largely through external interaction. The first computers were created to process inputs and deliver solutions for labor intensive calculations such as trajectories for missiles, encoding communications, or tabulating and drawing conclusions from large data sets such as the U.S. census. The integrated circuit, using a miniaturized lithographic process based upon technology developed nearly 200 years prior, has delivered this digital computing in a vastly-scalable format which now serves as a critical underlying infrastructure for nearly everything we do today. Gordon Moore’s observations promised exponential advancement, storage technologies reacted, data points from sensors and other input data sources became relevant in retrospect and even real-time, and data science was born.

Consider electronic ink surfaces and Bluetooth interfaces used in reusable luggage tags made by Rimowa, and being trialed by Lufthansa and Alaska Airlines; RFID tags used for inventory, tracking and access control, or chip-embedded EMV credit cards which have now replaced the majority of credit cards in your wallet.

Data no longer moves from static databases through processors to report a solution. Now, something happens in the real-time world and an immediate technology-provided response is becoming both ubiquitous and expected. Printing technologies are again being leveraged to replace the flat, minimally flexible glass-reinforced epoxy-based printed circuit boards used in the majority of electronic assemblies to create new flexible circuits on nearly any form or type of surface. Coined ‘flexible hybrid electronics’ (FHE), these flexible hybrid manufacturing techniques most often rely on thin silicon wafer based chips embedded onto flexible materials which may be applied to surfaces or embedded within objects. Implanted energy harvesting technologies and similarly flexible batteries enable sensor networks to independently react or transmit data passively with intelligent real-time responsiveness. Form factors range from temporary skin-adhered circuitry barely visible to the naked eye, to surface applications on critical components in transportation infrastructure such as airplane wings or bridges. Revenue from flexible electronics in 2016 is estimated at $8.6 billion, and is predicted by the market research firm IDTechEx to triple to $26.2 billion by 2020.

Industry groups including NextFlex and the DoD-backed FlexTech Alliance, serve as innovation hubs for advancement and implementation; both are based in San Jose, CA.

IF THERE IS ANYTHING WE CAN PREDICT FOR THE FUTURE - IT IS CHANGE