Jim Freihaut thinks he might be on the verge of one of those “Sputnik moments” that President Barack Obama referred to in his State of the Union speech.
The Penn State scientist wants to transform the building industry by making energy-efficient renovations more affordable. The administration is so interested that Obama plans to get a firsthand look at Freihaut’s lab during a scheduled stop Thursday in State College.
The project aims to “change the design-build paradigm,” said Freihaut, an associate professor of architectural engineering. “Either we’re going to be buying this technology and expertise from (foreign countries), or take a Sputnik-type approach and get there first.”
In addressing Congress last week, Obama referred to the 1950s space race in which the Soviet Union beat the United States by sending its satellite Sputnik into orbit first. That in turn spurred the U.S. to pour money into science and technology programs and eventually send the first man to the moon.
These days, the goals are more down to earth. The Department of Energy has designated three Innovation Hubs, one of which Freihaut leads, to focus on technology that has the potential to reduce dependence on imported oil and greenhouse gas emissions.
“The hubs will help advance highly promising areas of energy science and engineering from the early stage of research to the point where the technology can be handed off to the private sector,” the Energy Department said on its website.
The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in Berkley, Calif., lead one hub focused on sun-derived fuels. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee spearheads a second hub focusing on nuclear energy.
In August, Penn State was awarded $129 million in federal money over five years for its hub - the largest grant in school history. This week, Freihaut and other members of the engineering department were putting the finishing touches on the projects they plan to show the president during a tour of the lab prior to a speech he’ll give on campus.
There’s the experimental air duct in a basement lab. It’s here that Freihaut tests more cost-efficient ways to ventilate rooms and remove allergens.
Nearby is the room with the green roof experiment. And elsewhere, workers on scaffolding put the final touches on a wall integrity experiment.
The aim is to connect all those projects and others that could help make a building more energy-efficient, Freihaut said.
“We need to design the building as an entire operating system and take all these things into consideration. We don’t do buildings like that right now,” he said. “They do automobiles that way. They do aircraft that way. They don’t do buildings that way because of the way the industry is structured.”
The Penn State researchers, who are collaborating with IBM, Turner Construction and other schools and entities, are taking their project to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. There, they will test their systemic approach to retrofitting buildings on the former Navy base now primarily owned and operated by the city of Philadelphia.
“It’s a quite unusual and remarkable situation,” Rick Baxendell, of Bayer MaterialScience said of the collaboration his company is taking part in. “We see this as a chance to make a pretty good change in the energy footprint.”
The diversity of the buildings at the Navy Yard, as well as its own unregulated power grid made it ideal for testing, said John Grady, executive vice president of the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., which manages the Navy Yard.
Freihaut hopes the work yields results in five to 10 years that can then be applied to apartment buildings and, eventually, homes.
Builders are supportive of the research, said Lou Biacchi, executive vice president of the Pennsylvania Builders Association. His group is not affiliated with the hub.
“For us, that’s what we’re more interested in,” he said of making homes more energy-efficient. “What are those components in improving the energy efficiency of a new home where the consumer sees a return on the improvement?”
