Quasi-public clean-tech-boosting nonprofit Oregon BEST was the recipient of a half-million dollar grant that will pay for another round of green-minded entrepreneurs.

The $499,972 award from the U.S. Economic Development Administration is intended to “strengthen and broaden” a joint startup accelerator between Oregon BEST and the CleanTech Alliance, a Washington state-based organization.

The grant will allow the so-called Cascadia CleanTech Accelerator to boost emerging business in Washington, as well as strengthen programs such as its “funding boot camp,” according to a news release.

Oregon BEST was one of 42 organizations in 28 states that received a total of $17 million in this round of EDA funding. More than 200 entities applied.

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A ton of research for the building industry is happening at local universities. It’s all state-of-the-art and expensive; some of it is even proprietary.

University researchers with big budgets study many broad topics such as seismic retrofitting, air quality and energy conservation. Smaller-scale research for specific new products developed by startups and small businesses is underwritten by grants and loans – much of it provided by state-funded nonprofit Oregon BEST.

Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg is director of the University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratories, in Eugene and Portland. He said his labs are working on many projects, and that the research helps companies not only validate their products but also connect to each other.

“We work with a lot of different industry partners and it’s an opportunity to be an aggregator and cast the wide net and maybe make matches,” he said.

“And we have really, really deep knowledge in specific problems. Our real work is problems we have right now and how we can help make that research more meaningful.”

Such research is making possible the validation of groundbreaking and innovative building products and practices. Here are some of the latest developments:

Formaldehyde-free wood adhesive

One new product about ready to hit the market is a formaldehyde-free wood adhesive that can be used to make particle board and other manufactured wood products.

Hugh Mandel, owner and CEO of Corvallis-based EcoPro Polymers, has been working with Fred Kamke of Oregon State University’s Department of Wood Science and Engineering to test and develop his new glue.

Mandel said the research had an unexpected benefit by connecting him with his first client, Spekply, which has its own product being tested at OSU. Spekply creates wood-like products for specialty architectural panels and other products using agricultural waste, including hemp stalks and sunflower hulls.

“Spekply was looking to develop specialty architectural panels and we collaborated with them and did some pilot testing at OSU,” Mandel said. “We are ready to scale up for them whenever they are ready to produce. (The research) helped us a great deal.”

Kamke said EcoPro’s adhesive has been tested in phases over the past year and a half.

“The whole premise is to provide an alternative adhesive system for many types of wood products that does not contain formaldehyde,” he said. “This new commercial venture would not have been possible without Oregon BEST.”

Reduced-concrete wind tower base

Another emerging company, RUTE Foundation Systems of Portland, is working with Franz Rad, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University.

Doug Krause, president of RUTE, said his design for a wind tower base will cut down by 75 percent the amount of concrete used for wind farm turbine towers, which can reach heights up to 400 feet.

“As far as launching and making all other parts of the train roll right, they helped a ton in making leverage and getting the test project out there,” he said of Oregon BEST.

Rad said he has been working with Krause for about year. Everything is still in the design phase.

“What we’re trying to do is eliminate most of the concrete that is used,” Rad said. “It’s not because we don’t like concrete, but it is such a big heap.”

A wind tower’s base can be 8 feet deep and 40 to 50 feet wide to support the tall turbines, he said, which essentially makes it a permanent fixture.

The problem is that sometimes wind towers need to move because of changing weather patterns or greater need elsewhere. With the existing building method, that’s almost impossible to do, Rad said, and potential farming land is wasted.

“You can’t get rid of that heap of concrete and would have to spend lots of money to come in and dynamite it out,” he said.

The solution that RUTE came up with and that PSU is testing is a portable “hexapod” – a six-legged precast concrete structure that can be assembled in pieces and removed the same way.

“Once precast, these beams are pretty massive themselves – about 50,000 pounds each and 24 feet long,” Rad said. “The cross-section is 3.5 feet wide by 7 feet deep with a lot of reinforcement and post-tensioning systems inside. It’s a very stout beam.”

The beams, still being designed, will be able to handle 14,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. The six legs will be attached to a center hub about 17 feet in diameter, Rad said. Towers will be delivered to sites and bolted into the “hexapods.”

“Then all the equipment has to be installed – electronics and propellers – so we can eliminate most of the concrete and make construction easier,” he said.

A tower might stay in use for decades, Rad said, but once it is no longer needed, people will be able to move it.

“We can take the beams out and then reuse them somewhere else so the land can be plowed back into a cornfield,” he said.

Rad said he is also researching new methods to produce steel that is twice as strong and concrete that is three times stronger.

Better ways of capturing wind energy

Raul Cal, professor in PSU’s Mechanical and Materials Engineering Department, is studying wind energy for three proposals. Portland General Electric is providing grant money for one proposal and the National Science Foundation is covering the other two.

“Each one has a different scope, but all of them are looking toward how to increase capacity factors or be able to extract power out of wind farms in a better, more informed way,” Cal said.

Specifically, PGE has anted up about $750,000 for the PSU lab to conduct research on its Biglow Canyon Wind Farm in the Columbia River Gorge.

“They are interested in understanding what is happening with their farm and how they can product more energy,” Cal said. “We use wind tunnel experiments to try and replicate what they have and give them a better idea on how to harness the wind.”

Many people worked on the project, but Cal said high school student Jorge Reyes made a significant contribution by spending three of his summers as an unpaid intern constructing the terrain.

Efforts to increase seismic strength

Thomas Schumacher, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at PSU, is working with associate professor Peter Dusicka on seismic research.

Schumacher, who joined PSU last year, also is continuing his collaboration with Erik Thostenson of the University of Delaware on “a big federally-funded project” looking at carbon nanotube sensing of seismic events.

The nanotubes form an electrically conducive network. When the skin is put on the structure, an electric current is applied to the network in different places. Once a structure deforms or experiences tension, the skin deforms as the nanotubes in that area move away from each other. The amount of change in the skin can then be measured to determine the severity of the damage or stress.

Schumacher said he is still in the process of building his lab at PSU and working on other research, such as acoustic emission monitoring that can measure the effect of real-time seismic events.

“We measure dozens of sensors in a network and using advanced signal processing can figure out the location and type of source and the nature of the source and capture it as it occurs,” he said.

Other research can help measure damage from earthquakes by using ultrasounds to determine loads being carried by structures such as concrete columns.

“We can actually send stress waves through a material and determine the level of applied stresses on that element,” he said.

Another experiment at PSU uses digital cameras to take videos of how buildings vibrate, Schumacher said.

“We use signal processing to analyze individual pixels and see how the pixel changes as a function of time,” he said. “We get information on frequency and in some cases even the amplitude or vibration or displacement.”

Dusicka’s research concerns structural strength in seismic events. He is trying is to create a type of brace that becomes a “sacrificial” element able to absorb some of the energy of a seismic event and perhaps ensure a bridge’s continued use.

“And while that component gets damaged, it protects the rest of the bridge with the idea that you can come back and replace that component,” he said. “In effect, you are trying to have a sacrificial bit within the bridge that will hopefully protect the rest.”

Typical bridges have two or three spans with several columns in between, Dusicka said.

“This strategy we’re pursuing right now is introducing these special braces into where the columns normally sit so that when an earthquake comes through, the braces take most of the damage and protect the rest of the columns,” he said.

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Oregon BEST and several of its partners will use a $120,000 grant from the U.S Economic Development Administration to study whether cross-laminated timber has the potential to provide a new source of income for rural Oregon and Southwest Washington communities struggling to survive in the face of dwindling timber revenues.

D.R. Johnson, a mill based in Riddle, already has tapped money from Oregon BEST along with research from Oregon State University to become the first company in the country to begin producing certified CLT.

The results of the study are expected to help officials in Oregon and Washington determine next steps to help the two states establish themselves as leaders in the emerging CLT industry. Data to be gathered will include information about the type and amount of training that might be needed to build a workforce well-versed in the production and manufacture of CLT, the supply of natural resources available, regulatory and building code changes that might be needed to encourage the use of CLT, and manufacturing capacity.

Joining Oregon BEST in conducting the study will be Business Oregon, Oregon State University, Washington State University and the Oregon Manufacturing Extension Partnership. In addition to the grant money, $80,000 worth of in-kind services will be used to conduct the study, according to a press release issued by Oregon BEST.

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A new computer modeling tool developed in Portland is geared to help engineers and architects design green roofs to manage stormwater.

Portland-based green roof manufacturer Columbia Green Technologies recently launched a green roof stormwater performance model, developed in partnership with Portland State University researchers. The company has started using the tool while working with architects and engineers to predict how much rain hitting a planned green roof in a specific geographic location will be retained in the soil and how much will eventually drain out.

Data produced by the model, using factors like predicted weather patterns and scale and thickness of a proposed green roof, will aid architects and engineers in designing green roofs that are optimized for stormwater management, said Elaine Kearney, technical director at Columbia Green Technologies and a licensed landscape architect.

“We can get a little more sophisticated in terms of the performance of our green roofs,” she said. “Where we are right now is getting (the tool) into designers’ hands.”

Information gleaned from the modeling tool can prove that green roofs – like bio-swales and other more traditional methods of capturing and filtering runoff – are a viable alternative to meet city or county requirements for proposed developments to manage stormwater, Kearney said.

“Every designer is faced with many possibilities,” she said. “A lot of times they are faced with a situation where they are deciding how to treat stormwater on-site … A lot of what they’re looking for is some solid numbers to make those decisions. When it comes down to it, stormwater is one of the biggest factors in making a green roof pencil out.”

Development of the modeling tool was supported through an $80,000 grant awarded in 2012 to Columbia Green Technologies through Oregon BEST‘s commercialization program. The state-funded nonprofit, which supports clean technology innovation, paired the company with now-retired PSU professor Graig Spolek. His research in the university’s Green Building Research Laboratory using a rain simulator above trays containing a typical green roof soil mixture produced hard data on how much water was retained or flowed out over a certain period of time. This information was used to create Columbia Green Technologies’ modeling tool.

The Oregon BEST facilitated partnership is paying off, said Ken Vaughn, director of the organization’s commercialization programs.

“Everybody is really interested in the aesthetics of green roofs,” he said. “But increasingly people think about them in practical terms and how they retain and detain stormwater … Up until this work, there was no way to model with that type of precision on how a green roof can perform in terms of stormwater treatment.”

Kearney traveled this week to Houston to give a presentation discussing the modeling tool at the American Society of Civil Engineers’ International Low Impact Development Conference and said the company’s research with PSU has broad ramifications for the industry. Civil engineers and architects are hungry for stormwater performance data to inform planning for green roofs and potentially combine them with other means of managing runoff, she said.

“A lot of the data that’s out there is on the retention of stormwater, and that’s the amount that stays in the green roof, (but) not a lot in detention, which is how long it stays in the green roof before it flows out,” she said.

The advantage of using the modeling tool is it produces graphs that compare the amount of rainwater that flows off a green roof during a larger storm compared to a conventional roof surface, Kearney said.

“You get this immediate graphic description,” she said. “That’s really valuable because the engineer can say I can count on this exact performance. It’s always been an unknown just being able to put data behind it to get a full picture. It’s basically information to help people make an informed decision.”

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Oregon BEST is gearing up to provide another round of grant funding to startups for development of green building products and other clean technologies.

The state-funded nonprofit supports clean technology innovation and is seeking environmentally conscious Oregon-based companies developing products that use fewer resources than conventional ones, recycled materials or a sustainable resource, said Ken Vaughn, Oregon BEST director of commercialization funding.

“Our goal is to grow jobs in Oregon in clean technology,” he said.

The exact amount commercialization funding available hasn’t been determined yet, but in the past few years Oregon BEST has given out more than $1 million for clean technology projects, Vaughn said. The money supports collaboration between startups and researchers from

Oregon State University, the University of Oregon or the Oregon Institute of Technology for studies to develop new products or validate their effectiveness, he said.

“That really helps with customers and investors when (companies) can show a university study,” he said. “These projects also build research capacity in the university setting.”

Oregon BEST’s commercialization program has helped support a number of Oregon companies developing green building products, Vaughn said. Some are: Puralytics, which developed a product to clean stormwater at construction sites; Indow, which produces thermal window inserts; and Columbia Green, which makes eco-roofs that help manage stormwater. Oregon BEST also recently funded efforts to produce cross-laminated timber at a Southern Oregon mill.

Companies can apply for commercialization funding on a rolling basis. Grant recipients are selected by the Oregon BEST board of directors.

More information about applying for Oregon BEST commercialization grant funding is available at .

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A new laboratory at Oregon State University attempts to mimic the forces of nature on river projects and identify potential impacts on migrating fish.

Researchers have rigged the $600,000 Multipurpose River Hydraulics Research Facility on OSU‘s Corvallis campus to imitate flows of up to 35 cubic feet per second and support experiments involving live fish. The aim is to boost research to improve fish passage, stream restoration, flood control and dam removal, said Arturo Leon, an assistant professor of water resources engineering in OSU’s School of Civil and Construction Engineering.

Leon is the director of the facility, which he says is also ideal for use by companies developing hydraulic structures such as dam turbines.

“If they come up with a new turbine they can come here and they can test the technology,” he said. “Basically any company, if they want to build something and they don’t know how it will perform, then we can make improvements to the performance.”

At the research facility, located behind OSU’s O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, two simultaneous and independent experiments can take place via recirculation of water through large, adjustable flumes. To further recreate a river setting, the facility can have sediment and fish swimming through it.

“You build the river and the water will be recirculating,” Leon said.

The system essentially acts like a treadmill for fish, said Guillermo Giannico, an associate professor and extension fisheries specialist with the OSU Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. This makes it perfect for tests to improve the design of fish ladders and culverts for migrating species to bypass dams and other obstacles while swimming to spawning grounds, he said.

“Despite all the research, we are finding out that passage isn’t as good as we thought,” he said. “The ultimate goal is passage with the littlest amount of stress.”

Giannico is hoping to perform experiments in the facility using mostly lab-bred rainbow trout, and monitor their vitals to assess whether they would survive the passage and be healthy enough to reproduce when they make it to the other side. This includes tracking oxygen consumption and the number of tail beats to see if the fish are exerting themselves too much.

“A˛Ô˛â energy allocated to migration is taken away from reproduction,” he said. “By being able to monitor in a controlled environment all the different vitals, we can predict passage.”

Computer modeling can help assess ways to modify or design a passage to minimize stress on fish, but nothing compares to an experiment that mimics real world factors, Giannico said. The same goes for projects that seek to return rivers and streams that have been channeled or dammed to a more natural state.

“There is a lot of modeling involved with these type of questions, but sometimes these models have black holes we do not understand,” he said. “(The facility) offers a great menu of options for fisheries research and restoration research.”

The research facility also has attracted attention from private companies, Leon said. Officials from Earth by Design, a Bend-based company that specializes in developing clean energy projects, have expressed interest in testing hydroelectric turbines in the lab, he said.

Leon said he’s spent the past two years on facility development and installation. Last month, OSU hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating its completion.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Oregon BEST and NorthWest Research Associates contributed money toward facility development.

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A Southern Oregon mill is slated to become the first U.S. manufacturer of an innovative wood product suitable for use in structures ranging from houses to high-rises.

Riddle-based DR Johnson Lumber Co. is partnering with Oregon State University researchers to pilot the commercial manufacture of structural-grade (CLT) with the support of grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Oregon BEST.

CLT panels are manufactured with lumber glued in opposite directions to form a solid slab for walls, floors or ceilings. The product has gained popularity in Europe and Canada over the past 20 years as a sustainable building material. But CLT is still relatively unused in the U.S. despite federal promotion of its benefits and growing interest from the design and build industries.

The emergence of a domestic manufacturer could catalyze greater use in Oregon and across the country because currently all CLT must be imported either from Canada or Europe, said Ken Vaughn, director of commercialization programs at Oregon BEST. The nonprofit provides money for clean technology innovation.

“The architects love it, but they can’t spec it in if there are no suppliers,” Vaughn said.

In Oregon, the product has attracted attention from architects and engineers as an environmentally friendly alternative to steel and concrete steel for high-rises.

The state’s long history as a timber producer and its established wood products industry makes it poised to capitalize on CLT production, said Lech Muszynski, an associate professor with OSU‘s Wood Science & Engineering Department. Oregon mills may eventually have a leg up over European manufacturers who are producing CLT using higher-priced timber, he said.

“The (Oregon) market is much more ready for innovations in wood,” he said. “There is a recognizable perspective for this industry booming here.”

A strong desire among design professionals in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest to use locally produced CLT and the support of OSU research helped convince DR Johnson President Valerie Johnson to pilot its manufacture. The company will invest in use of an existing mill for manufacturing glue-laminate wood products, Riddle Laminators, to produce CLT with the help of a $150,000 Oregon BEST grant.

“It doesn’t feel like a big leap for us,” Johnson said. “Our architects, especially in our region, in the Northwest, don’t want to import from Europe. They don’t want to truck in panels from Western Canada. That has come through very, very clear. We as a company have become convinced that there is a market.”

When DR Johnson officials last week announced during the 2014 Oregon Wood Solutions Fair in Portland the company’s plan to manufacture CLT, they were flooded with inquiries, Johnson said. Company officials hope to be ready to mass-produce CLT panels in 2016, but the effort could be fast-tracked to supply several projects next year, she said.

“The response at our exhibit was overwhelming,” she said. “We were talking nonstop.”

One project that could use DR Johnson-produced CLT is the new Western Oregon University College of Education building. The project is designated as a demonstration project under Gov. John Kitzhaber‘s ; it calls for state agencies to identify nonresidential capital construction projects that can showcase wood products in high-performance buildings.

Mahlum Architects‘ design team had initially considered using CLT in the building, but determined it would be too expensive, project architect Kim Olson said. Acquiring the product domestically through DR Johnson could make it feasible, she said.

With an Oregon-based manufacturer, CLT is likely to appear in more projects, Olson said.

“Having it … sourced here in Oregon is a huge deal,” she said. “I think it’s going to propel it into this market.”

The DR Johnson operation also will help projects gain points in green building certifications for using locally sourced building materials, Equilibrium Engineers associate JoMarie Farrell said. The Lake Oswego-based structural engineering firm is working on the Western Oregon University project and engineered the only CLT project approved in Portland – a small, single-story Oregon Zoo structure designed by SRG Partnership.

Gaining city approval for that 2,000-square-foot building with CLT in the roof required extra calculations for load capacity. Recent updates to Oregon’s structural codes with specifications for CLT will make it easier for building officials to sign off on projects that use the product, Farrell said.

An Oregon CLT manufacturer will also be advantageous for projects under construction, Farrell said.

“If you require the field fixes it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to get the guys down from Canada,” she said. “Just knowing that there is someone in Oregon a few hours away is huge.”

That proximity also will help the state’s design and build industry professionals as they experiment with the product, Vaughn said.

“The next key step will be finding pilot construction projects,” he said. “This will be a new product. It will be new for architects, new for engineers, new for general contractors.”

Although there will be an initial learning curve, contractors will soon find that the prefabricated CLT panels streamline the construction process, Vaughn said.

“Once they get the hang of it, they’re going to find it’s a lot faster, efficient way to build buildings,” he said.

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A rain garden completed recently near the Benton County Community Development Department in Corvallis does more than treat stormwater. It also serves as an outdoor laboratory.

The lab provides a rare field testing opportunity for Oregon State University researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of bio-swales and other green infrastructure to treat stormwater.

“You want to actually go and test them at the field scale,” said Meghna Babbar-Sebens, an assistant professor with the OSU School of Civil and Construction Engineering. “The main idea was to enable that kind of testing.”

Babbar-Sebens is leading research at the OSU-Benton County Stormwater Infrastructure Research Facility. Benton County contributed money and land for the $126,000 demonstration project, which will filter runoff from a 100,000-square-foot portion of a county industrial yard where equipment for parks and roads maintenance is stored. Other funders include Oregon BEST, the city of Corvallis and the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium.

Benton County officials were seeking an alternative to traditional piped stormwater treatment at the site and pleased to also offer a green infrastructure research opportunity in a public location, said Adam Stebbins, a county project coordinator.

“We don’t have a good idea how these things work. We just know they do good things,” he said. “We want to support and see what type of treatment is occurring, what the positive impacts are and share that with the community.”

The rain garden research facility has a weather station and is wired with sensors that monitor the flow and quality of stormwater as it moves through the plants and soil. Researchers can use the data collected to assess maintenance issues and test the effectiveness of different types of soils and plants at treating runoff, Babbar-Sebens said. The research facility is the only one in Oregon with a specific focus on field testing ground-level green infrastructure, she said.

“Really, the main goal, especially for publicly funded projects, is to have that data available to the public,” Babbar-Sebens said.

The stormwater lab is broken up into three 93-foot-long, 10-foot-wide sections with different soil mixtures and plants. Stormwater is pumped from the Benton County industrial yard into a storage tank before it is evenly distributed among the garden’s three sections. The garden is rigged so that researchers can control when runoff flows into it and for how long.

“We capture the stormwater, we run it through the facility, we monitor what’s going on and then we let it out,” Babbar-Sebens said. “So people can actually do controlled experiments. There are so many unknowns about how these systems perform, so this allows us to observe very carefully.”

Oregon BEST, which supports clean technology innovation, helped connect Beaverton-based Puralytics with OSU to test its LilyPad – a product being developed to treat stormwater on construction sites. One of the rain garden lab sections is dedicated to beta testing the LilyPad. Puralytics CEO Mark Owen said the field test will help the company assess the product’s effectiveness of treating runoff during varying levels of storm severity.

“The real benefit of it for a new technology in the water space is you need this third-party validation,” he said. “Having a well-designed (testing) system … is critical.”

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An Oregon product designed to provide clean drinking water in Third World countries may also hold the solution to a problem that plagues construction sites: how to clean stormwater.

Beaverton-based Puralytics first caught widespread attention when it unveiled the SolarBag. The bag, which uses sunlight to clean contaminated water, has been used in 60 countries around the world, according to Mark Owen, Puralytics’ CEO.

Owen’s company is now working on an overgrown version of the SolarBag. The new product, called the LilyPad, is in the spotlight for its potential to not only clean large sources of water in impoverished countries and disaster areas, but also serve commercially viable markets such as construction and agriculture.

Owen, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” started Puralytics seven and a half years ago with an eye toward using LED light to activate nanotechnology to purify water. That early search resulted in a product called the Shield, an LED-powered purification system designed for decentralized drinking water systems, multiunit housing or small-scale water stations.

Even as they developed Puralytics’ first product, Owen and his staff began to ponder whether they could replace LEDs with sunlight to purify contaminated water. Their search resulted in the creation of the SolarBag.

The SolarBag quickly caught the attention of the tech community and captured a string of awards for Puralytics, including a grand prize for best clean technology business at the 2010 CleanTech Open. But Puralytics wasn’t done noodling ideas for better – and bigger – ways to clean contaminated water.

With a 3.5-liter capacity, the SolarBag was limited to producing a maximum of 10.5 liters of clean water per day – enough for a single person. Owen and his staff wondered if they could make a larger version of the bag to clean a much larger volume of contaminated water.

“The question was: How big could we make it, and could we treat the water source?” Owen said.

At the time, Owen figured the product that would become the LilyPad would again find its main purpose in areas where pure drinking water is a problem. Owen envisioned it being used mainly in open-topped water tanks and ponds. But as he talked to people about the product, he soon realized it also might have commercial potential.

“There’s been tremendous interest from the (construction) industry,” Owen said. “We’re looking at its potential to clean stormwater, to clean water used on farms for crops.”

Creating a product for widespread use in a commercial market would be a big boost for Puralytics. The high costs associated with developing technology – the SolarBag and LilyPad both rely on a combination of five processes – require tech startups like Puralytics to rely on investors and funding from sources like Oregon BEST.

Money from Oregon BEST, which works to direct research revenue from multiple sources to companies in the state, helped Puralytics work with Oregon State University to conduct an initial phase of research on the LilyPad.

“The LilyPads are designed to float on the water surface,” said Tyler Radniecki, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at OSU. “We did some lab tests with (collected) stormwater and found that four inches of standing water is the ideal depth.”

Armed with that information and $94,000 more from Oregon BEST, Radniecki is ready to start a second phase of LilyPad testing for Puralytics.

The testing will be done in a rain garden area at the OSU-Benton County Green Stormwater Research Facility in Corvallis, which will allow Radniecki and one of his students to study how the LilyPad stormwater treatment technology performs in real-life conditions.

“(The facility) has all the bells and whistles as far as monitoring,” Radniecki said. “We can measure water flow, sunlight. For Mark’s technology that I’ll be testing, that will be critical – how the sunlight intensity affects the rate of contaminant absorption.

“(The LilyPad) is designed for more than one-time use, so we’ll (also) be looking at how long they last, how leaf debris that falls on top of it affects it.”

For Radniecki, the LilyPad testing results will provide material for papers for peer review in scientific journals and a topic for his assistant’s master’s thesis.

The tests also promise to provide civil engineers with information about ways to make it easier to maintain rain gardens, according to Radniecki. Rain gardens often are used to help clean stormwater, but they require a high degree of care.

“Maintenance is a big thing with rain gardens,” Radniecki said. “A rain garden needs the grass mowed. You have to clean the silt. You have to take care of the plants, but a lot of times that doesn’t happen.”

During the testing phase, Radniecki and his assistant will examine whether the presence of the LilyPad changes the amount of maintenance that needs to be done to keep the garden in proper working order.

As for Puralytics, if the testing upholds expectations, the company will be able to walk away with what it says is crucial for earning recognition – and commercial acceptance – for the LilyPad.

“One of the challenges is that you need third-party certification and a qualified lab to talk about results,” Owen said. “The industry really wants to see that.

“This is going to help us cross that gap for internal testing to formal field training with a well-monitored application in a public setting. It will give us the (real world) data. That’s essential.”

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People may not know current temperatures, but they know when they’re comfortable.

That theory is the basis for the climate chamber at the University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Building Laboratory in Portland. Researchers can control temperature, air speed and humidity in the chamber so that building products can be tested and retrofitted elements’ benefits can be demonstrated.

On Thursday, the chamber will make its public debut during an open house. The idea is to show how the tool can help architects and engineers design buildings with greater efficiency.

One of the uses of the chamber is demonstrating that high levels of indoor comfort can be achieved without air conditioning. It’s especially handy to provide a physical understanding of numerical readings that describe human comfort levels, said architecture professor G.Z. “Charlie” Brown, the lab’s director.

“That’s kind of where the idea started,” he said. “If you can feel it, you can believe it.”

The climate chamber was completed two years ago with financial assistance from Oregon BEST and the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance.

Researchers built the chamber from a walk-in refrigerator formerly used by a farmer for pickle storage. The temperature of every surface is controlled through radiant aluminum panels. Approximately one-half mile of plastic piping carries hot or cold water throughout the chamber, and adjustments can be made to heat or cool each individual panel.

This ability to control radiant heat throughout the chamber is part of what makes it unique, Brown said.
“There aren’t many that have all radiant surfaces, which is its claim to fame,” he said.

The lab, since it was founded 30 years ago, has helped reduce energy consumption in building space totaling more than 2 million square feet. Besides the climate chamber, the facility has many other research tools – including an artificial sky for shading and glare studies. Lab staffers, based both in Portland and Eugene, have served as energy efficiency consultants on numerous projects throughout Oregon and worked with many of the state’s major architecture and engineering firms.

“The more architects we can touch, the better we can be,” lab program manager Terry Blomquist said. “We were knocking on doors trying to get people to save energy for years. Then people were knocking on our door.”

In the Portland area, the lab’s researchers have offered input on SRG Partnership‘s design of a new student commons and library at Portland Community College’s Southeast Center and SERA Architects‘ design of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building remodel.

The earlier the lab is involved in a building’s conception, the better, lab research assistant Jason Stenson said.

“The energy savings is far greater if we’re involved in the design,” he said. “Often we’re looking at different design iterations and looking at the performance implications of those designs.”

Researchers have used the climate chamber to test the effectiveness of daylighting and thermal controls, heat pumps and water heaters, as well as compare single-pane versus double-pane windows.

A common finding has been that buildings don’t need air conditioning systems, even in summertime.

“It turns out you can expand the comfort zone by using ceiling fans,” Brown said. “As a consequence, we haven’t done a building (in) a while, consultant-wise, that doesn’t have ceiling fans on it.”

If you go

What: University of Oregon’s Energy Studies in Buildings Laboratory open house

When: Thursday from 4 to 7 p.m.

Where: White Stag Building, 70 N.W. Couch St., Portland

More information: 503-412-3656, or pdx.uoregon.edu/esbl

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