Three professors from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering were among 10 teams of University of Colorado Boulder faculty, researchers and graduate student innovators awarded $125,000 each in this year’s Lab Venture Challenge (LVC). 

This year, 14 teams of University of Colorado Boulder faculty, researchers and graduate student innovators competed for a combined $1.25 million in startup funding grants. Judges from CU Boulder’s entrepreneurial network heard Shark-Tank-style pitches across two nights, one for innovations in biosciences and another for physical sciences and engineering.

LVC supports projects that address a commercial need, have a clear path to a compelling market and have strong scientific support. The LVC grants are funded by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) Advanced Industries Program, as well as Venture Partners at CU Boulder and the Chancellor’s Innovation Fund. 

Professor Mark Hernandez, Emmalee Biesiada, a postdoctoral associate in the Hernandez Aerobiology Laboratory, and Steve Hughes, CEO of SteriO3, won in the biosciences division for their work on Peroxide Enhanced Germicidal Irradiation (PEGI) technology, which quickly inactivates microbial contaminants at low temperature. With LVC funding, the team plans to develop compact, portable sterilization systems for medical instruments, including those made with 3D-printed materials.

“I look forward to overseeing the progression of PEGI from the laboratory into real-world applications in emergency medicine,” Biesiada said.

The team envisions the portable sterilization technology being used by emergency medical technicians and paramedics, as well as by disaster response agencies like the Red Cross. Biesiada, who developed the technology during her doctoral studies at CU Boulder, said the team has also been in communication with Army and Navy groups interested in using PEGI for surgical instrument sterilization in combat field medicine. Additionally, the technology has potential applications in veterinary medicine for on-site treatment of animals that cannot be easily transported to a clinic, she said. 

Professor Gregor Henze, along with Galen Williams and Gerry Conroy, received the award for Whisper Energy, a wireless, battery-free sensor fusion platform tailored for small to medium-sized commercial buildings. Using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and machine learning, Whisper Energy aims to significantly reduce energy consumption by providing real-time data to optimize energy use and reduce emissions. Developed with a $2 million  grant, the technology promises cost-effective sensing of occupancy and indoor environmental conditions, low-cost energy and emission savings in buildings that have been historically difficult to retrofit.

“The award will allow further refinement of the technology, tailoring it to new use cases, and building a series of prototypes for demonstration purposes,” Henze said.

Assistant Professor Tony Straub and Kian Lopez, a chemical engineering PhD student, won for their startup OsmoPure Technologies, which is developing a membrane for advanced water treatment.The technology uses pressure-driven distillation, rather than heat, to produce high-purity water with 10 times greater energy efficiency. The startup has been developing its  technology for water recycling systems on NASA-crewed space missions. LVC funding will enable them to expand into ultrapure water systems for semiconductor manufacturing and other industrial applications.

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• What: 2024 Embark Showcase, the inaugural showcase of the Embark Deep Tech Startup Creator
• When: Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2-6 p.m. Doors open at 1:30 p.m.  A networking reception with refreshments will be held from 4-6 p.m., and the bar will be open.
• Where: The Riverside, 1724 Broadway, Boulder

required. Seating is limited.

WHISPER Energy, a startup aiming to bring to market a wireless sensor platform, will be presented at the University of Colorado Boulder's 2024 Embark Showcase on Jan. 24. Developed by a multi-institutional team under the leadership of Professor Gregor Henze, the innovative technology seeks to optimize energy consumption in both residential and commercial settings by intelligently adjusting usage based on detecting human presence.

In 2023, Henze was selected as one of 12 entrepreneurs for the inaugural Embark Entrepreneurs in Residence program for his Wireless Home Identification and Sensing Platform for Energy Reduction (WHISPER) technology. 

Embark, CU Boulder’s startup catalyst for deep tech ventures, connects entrepreneurs with groundbreaking innovations. The program offers selected entrepreneurs intellectual property (IP) rights, salary support, grant funds and introductions to investors.

Galen Williams, formerly an Entrepreneur in Residence at Venture Partners at CU Boulder and now affiliated with the University of California Riverside, will lead WHISPER Energy.

We spoke with Henze about the project.

When did you start working on WHISPER?

The WHISPER technology was the outgrowth of my Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E ) project from 2017 to 2021, which was part of the SENSOR program.

What does Whisper's sensor platform do?

Many regions of the world rely on heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems to provide productive, comfortable and healthy indoor environments through automatic building controls. The increasing use of HVAC systems globally, driven by climate change, population growth and industrialization, has led to a surge in energy consumption. Unfortunately, these systems often operate continuously regardless of human presence, resulting in unnecessary energy consumption. The heating, ventilation and cooling of unoccupied building spaces significantly contribute to the environmental impacts associated with carbon-based electric power generation, requiring urgent attention. We developed the WHISPER system to address the energy and power demand triggered by human presence in homes.

WHISPER incorporates a maintenance-free and privacy-preserving human occupancy detection system. It utilizes a local wireless network of battery-free environmental, acoustic energy and image sensors employing RFID backscattering technology. These sensors are strategically placed in homes to monitor and record empirical data for various modalities, transmitting the information to a base station. At the base station, machine-learning algorithms, including a hierarchical sensor fusion algorithm, infer human presence based on the received data. Results from the prototype system demonstrate a human presence detection accuracy exceeding 95 percent, with ongoing commercialization efforts suggesting approximately 99 percent accuracy.

Using machine learning, WHISPER enables various applications based on its binary occupancy prediction. This allows situation-specific controls targeted at both personalized smart home needs and contributing to opportunities for modernizing the electric grid.

Why did you develop WHISPER?

The original intent was to develop a technology that reduces unnecessary energy consumption in homes as a result of conditioning homes while unoccupied. Accurate occupancy detection was crucial to prevent users from disabling the system, in other words we needed to minimize false negatives (incorrectly assuming the house is empty, potentially annoying occupants) as well as false positives (wrongly assuming the house is occupied, leading to unnecessary energy consumption). At the end of the project we discovered additional applications for the versatile sensing platform that relate to indoor air quality and assistive technology for the elderly who wish to remain in their home and smart grid applications.

Whisper Energy is actively working to develop solutions based on this sensing platform to address the challenges of creating healthy and energy-efficient homes and workplaces.

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Analysis tool for calibrating energy models with utility data.

Thermal image for a building envelope element. 

Energy model for an existing nonprofit building.

A research group from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering is set to receive $8 million through the to provide technical assistance that helps nonprofits reduce energy use, with the saved funds redirected toward the nonprofits’ mission-driven initiatives. Professor Moncef Krarti serves as principal investigator, while Professors Gregor Henze and John Zhai serve as co-principal investigators for this award.

The project will be supported for four years with a budget of $5.7 million from DOE funds and $2.3 million as cost-share, primarily from industry contributions.

“In addition to assisting numerous nonprofit organizations in the Rocky Mountain region, CU Boulder’s project places a significant emphasis on involving and training students in all stages of renovating existing buildings,” said Krarti, who also is the project’s director. 

The project involves creating tools to measure and analyze the impact of energy efficiency strategies in facilities owned and operated by nonprofits in the Rocky Mountain region, including Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

The students’ involvement spans from using advanced tools for energy auditing, to preparing construction bids, conducting retro-commissioning tasks and assessing the impacts of deploying diverse energy efficiency strategies. Futhermore, the students will have the opportunity to develop and demonstrate innovative approaches for evaluating, managing and maximizing the sustainability benefits of energy retrofit projects. 

The DOE launched the $50 million Renew America’s Nonprofits Program, also known as the Energy Efficiency Materials Pilot Program, under President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. This program aims to reduce carbon emissions, improve health and safety, and lower utilities costs for buildings owned and operated by 501(c)(3) nonprofits. This first-of-its-kind investment in the nonprofit sector aims to facilitate high-impact energy efficiency improvements, creating cleaner, healthier community spaces, while generating sustainable savings that can be redirected toward mission-driven work. Additionally, it aims to stimulate widespread energy improvements in the nonprofit sector, fostering partnerships between stakeholders to establish a pipeline of energy and cost-saving projects that will continue beyond the grant's duration.   

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University of Colorado Boulder professor Gregor Henze knows what it’s like to watch the world change.

Henze was named a Fulbright scholar in 1989, moving from his home in West Berlin to study at Oregon State University three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell.

Now he’s watching the world — and his life — change again as a 2021 honoree of the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Science, Technology and Innovation, through which he will spend a semester in Australia working on renewable energy and digitalization. The program starts in February.

Henze said he still resonates with the Fulbright mission to develop better understanding between countries through the exchange of academics and research.

“I still think this is true and is more necessary than ever before,” he said. “As much as I’m going to Australia to be someone who provides value from a research perspective, I also think the primary attitude should be one of a student and learning from them and bringing that back.”

Henze’s work focuses on the “three Ds” of renewable energy — decarbonization, distribution and digitalization.

In Australia, he will work with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization on those three areas, including the challenge of distributing energy, connecting relatively few customers per square mile to an energy system and using data to study how energy is consumed and predict what energy needs will be in the future.

“With more data we have more capability, and that’s an effort Australia is hoping I can contribute to,” Henze said.

Fulbright programs are also about being an ambassador to another country and culture, which Henze did once as a German citizen in the United States and now again as a dual citizen in Australia.

“Now we face so many confrontations that being an ambassador of your country to another country is, in a way, a little more challenging and a more multifaceted endeavor,” he said. “I’m trying to promulgate and promote a sense of U.S. excellence in research and development and hopefully convey a positive image of America, which was a little battered over the past eight years.”

Henze said he hopes his time in Australia will open the door to future collaborations between American and Australian researchers at CU Boulder and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

“We are very different, but I think we can aspire to a better way of being different, that we embrace and appreciate diversity instead of just tolerating people who are different from us,” he said.

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Gregor Henze is expanding renewable energy research Down Under.

A University of Colorado Boulder professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, Henze is a 2021 honoree of the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Science, Technology and Innovation.

Through the initiative, Henze will spend a semester in Newcastle, Australia at the Henze anticipates traveling to Australia to begin the fellowship in February 2022. A scholar in renewable energy, energy efficiency and distributed energy solutions, Henze will be sharing his expertise as a CU Boulder professor and as associate director of the Renewable & Sustainable Energy Institute on campus. Henze also holds a joint appointment at the in Golden.

“Australia is a vast country with similar challenges to us with large energy systems covering large distances,” Henze said. “We and they alike are trying to transition to low-carbon or no-carbon fuels. They’re especially interested in how buildings, mostly commercial buildings, can benefit from data-driven digitalization.”

An area of focus for Henze, data-driven digitalization of the energy sector includes predictive HVAC controls and systems to detect faults in existing buildings as well as adding renewable energy and batteries that can feed power back into the grid.

“There’s an often-quoted estimate that you can walk into any US commercial building and save between 10-30% through better controls and fault detection. Buildings are not run well and are not run efficiently,” Henze said. “But just focusing on that is not enough. We also must focus on the greater system and building-to-grid interaction -- to have 5.5 million commercial buildings that instead of just being merely energy sinks, they also produce, shift, and store electric power. However, such an energy system becomes vastly more complicated.”

Although integrating significant numbers of commercial buildings into the grid in this way increases complexity, Henze said it supports a greener future for power generation.

“Roughly 75% of our electricity is consumed by buildings. I started my career working on the large-scale power generation side: nuclear power and traditional fossil-powered designs. But I felt like it was incremental and that we needed to change the way we use energy, which got me interested in demand and buildings,” Henze said.

The Fulbright honor is a unique callback for Henze to an earlier time in his education – when he was an graduate student selected for the program’s better-known student scholarships, which bring foreign college students to America for study.

“I’m particularly humbled because a long time ago I was privileged to be a Fulbright scholar as a student from Germany coming to the United States. It’s coming around full circle, in a way,” Henze said. “I planned to be here one year in 1990-91. Now 30 years later as a naturalized American, I’m hoping to bring American research excellence to Australia, serving as an ambassador for the United States. It feels like an enormous honor to be chosen.”

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