The purpose of this Request for Information (RFI) is to solicit input for a potential ARPA-E program focused on accelerating the heterogeneous catalyst development cycle for incorporation into reactors, devices, equipment, unit operations, and process technology applications relevant to the U.S. 2050 net zero goals. These material development cycles can take decades to complete, starting from the discovery scale at milligram quantities and finishing at the development scale with kilogram quantities. ARPA-E is interested in decreasing the length of development cycles to months while capturing significant energy efficiency increases, emissions reductions, and/or precious metal reductions. Major bottlenecks in the process include inefficient discovery, irreproducible multi-scale synthesis, laborious characterization, narrow design space optimization, irrelevant performance evaluation, and impractical integration (i.e., not “drop-in”) of heterogeneous catalysts into emerging technologies.
ARPA-E is interested in identifying potentially disruptive techniques or workflows that expedite:
- Integration of catalytic material discovery and synthesis with device (i.e., cell or reactor) performance in a rapid, parallel, automated, and/or combinatorial manner. Devices should operate under realistic working conditions and correlate to deployment at relevant scales.
- Utilization of hardware automation and modern data science to generate, handle, and process large quantities of high quality, multi-dimensional experimental data.
Such approaches must ultimately accelerate the optimization and feedback at each level of complexity from material synthesis to device.
ARPA-E seeks input from experts in catalysis, acceleration, and computation. The tools and workflows of interest should be generalizable and applied to catalyst and process optimization activities across the same class of catalytic chemistry (e.g., electrochemical or thermochemical) that significantly impacts energy technologies of interest to ARPA-E.
Areas Not of Interest for Responses to this RFI:
- Work focused on basic research aimed purely at fundamental knowledge generation.
- Experimental catalysis outside of electrochemical and thermochemical systems, including:
- Homogeneous catalysis;
- Plasma catalysis;
- Photocatalysis; and
- Battery chemistry (electric vehicle applications).
- Work focused purely on generating synthetic data.
RFI Guidelines:
Note that the information you provide will be used by ARPA-E solely for program planning, without attribution. THIS IS A REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ONLY. THIS NOTICE DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A FUNDING OPPORTUNITY ANNOUNCEMENT (FOA). NO FOA EXISTS AT THIS TIME.
The purpose of this RFI is solely to solicit input for ARPA-E consideration to inform the possible formulation of future research programs. ARPA-E will not provide funding or compensation for any information submitted in response to this RFI, and ARPA-E may use information submitted to this RFI without any attribution to the source. This RFI provides the broad research community with an opportunity to contribute views and opinions.
No material submitted for review will be returned and there will be no formal or informal debriefing concerning the review of any submitted material. ARPA-E may contact respondents to request clarification or seek additional information relevant to this RFI. All responses provided will be considered, but ARPA-E will not respond to individual submissions or publish a compendium of responses. Respondents shall not include any information in the response to this RFI that could be considered proprietary or confidential.
Responses to this RFI should be submitted in PDF format to the email address ARPA-E-RFI@hq.doe.gov by 5:00 PM Eastern Time on June 13, 2024.