Department of Energy Grant – DIFFERENTIATE

• Updated Full Application submission deadline to 5 PM ET, Monday, August 26, 2019.

To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) please go to the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov. ARPA-E will not review or consider full applications submitted through other means. For detailed guidance on using ARPA-E eXCHANGE, please refer to the
ARPA-E eXCHANGE User Guide (https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx).

Accordingly, this modification:

• Inserted certain deadlines, including the deadlines for submitting questions and Full Applications. See Cover Page and Required Documents Checklist.

• Revised the following sections of the FOA to provide guidance on required application forms and the content and form of Full Applications and Replies to Reviewer Comments: Required Documents Checklist and Sections IV.D, IV.E, and IV.G of the FOA. Applicants are strongly encouraged to use the templates provided on ARPA‐E eXCHANGE (https://arpa‐e‐foa.energy.gov).

• Inserted Go/No-Go milestone requirement, see Section II.A of the FOA.

• Inserted criteria that ARPA‐E will use to evaluate Full Applications, see Section V.A.2 of the FOA.

• Inserted criteria that ARPA‐E will use to evaluate Replies to Reviewer Comments in Section V.A.3 of the FOA.

• Inserted information on the anticipated announcement and award dates, see Section V.C of the FOA.

• Inserted information concerning Full Application Notifications, see Section VI.A.3 of the FOA.

• Inserted Administrative and National Policy Requirements, see Section VI.B of the FOA.

• Inserted Reporting Requirements, see Section VI.C of the FOA.

• Updated Project Team definition, see Section IX.

To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) please go to the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov. ARPA-E will not review or consider full applications submitted through other means. For detailed guidance on using ARPA-E eXCHANGE, please refer to the ARPA-E eXCHANGE User Guide (https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov/Manuals.aspx).

The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), an organization within the Department of Energy (DOE), is chartered by Congress in the America COMPETES Act of 2007 (P.L. 110-69), as amended by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (P.L. 111-358) to:
“(A) to enhance the economic and energy security of the United States through the development of energy technologies that result in—
(i) reductions of imports of energy from foreign sources;
(ii) reductions of energy-related emissions, including greenhouse gases; and
(iii) improvement in the energy efficiency of all economic sectors; and
(B) to ensure that the United States maintains a technological lead in developing and deploying advanced energy technologies.”

ARPA-E issues this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) under the programmatic authorizing statute codified at 42 U.S.C. § 16538. The FOA and any awards made under this FOA are subject to 2 C.F.R. Part 200 as amended by 2 C.F.R. Part 910.

ARPA-E funds research on and the development of high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment. The agency focuses on technologies that can be meaningfully advanced with a modest investment over a defined period of time in order to catalyze the translation from scientific discovery to early-stage technology. For the latest news and information about ARPA-E, its programs and the research projects currently supported, see: http://arpa-e.energy.gov/.

Program Overview and Objectives:

The DIFFERENTIATE program seeks to enhance the pace of energy innovation by incorporating machine learning into energy technology development processes. By doing so, this program aims to enhance the productivity of energy engineers in helping them to develop next-generation energy technologies.

In order to organize the proposed efforts, a simplified engineering design process framework has been adopted and utilized to identify several general mathematical optimization problems that are common to many (perhaps most) engineering design processes and then to conceptualize several machine learning tools that could help engineers to execute and solve these problems in a manner that dramatically accelerates the pace of energy innovation.

In this framework:

1. A problem/challenge is posed (e.g. cost-effectively generate electricity from natural gas at an efficiency in excess of 70%),
2. A potential solution is hypothesized and refined with Reduced Order Models (e.g. fuel cell/engine hybrid systems),
3. The low fidelity concept is further refined and evaluated with high-fidelity partial differential equation-based solvers and/or experiments (e.g. computational fluid dynamics simulations, finite element analyses, full-scale system demonstrations), and
4. The hypothesized solution is updated with knowledge gained during the high-fidelity evaluation process, and iteration continues until either the problem is either solved or deemed insoluble.

The objective of the DIFFERENTIATE program is to enhance the pace of energy innovation by accelerating the incorporation of machine learning into the energy technology design process. Specifically, ARPA-E is seeking to develop machine-learning-enhanced—

1. Hypothesis generation (i.e. Conceptual Design) tools,
2. High-fidelity hypothesis evaluation (i.e. Detailed Design) tools, and
3. Inverse design tools.

In order to facilitate the achievement of the above-mentioned objective, ARPA-E is issuing this FOA to encourage teams consisting of mathematicians, operations research analysts, computer scientists, energy engineers, and others with applicable skills and experience to jointly work on developing the tools required to enhance the creativity and efficiency (i.e. productivity) of the energy technology design process.

To obtain a copy of the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), please go the ARPA-E website at https://arpa-e-foa.energy.gov.