NETL’s Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES), a center of excellence for the identification, synthesis, optimization and analysis of innovations to meet the nation’s growing energy needs, is the winner of the prestigious 2020 R&D 100 award, which recognizes the developers of the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace in the last year.

IDAES received the recognition in the Software/Services category. Also this week, C2G: NETL’s Low-Cost Coal-to-Graphene Manufacturing Process received an R&D 100 awards in the Mechanical/Materials category.

Led by NETL’s Senior Fellow for Process Systems Engineering and Analysis, David Miller, IDAES is a collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, West Virginia University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Notre Dame. The IDAES Integrated Platform optimizes the design and operation of complex, interacting technologies and systems by providing rigorous modeling capabilities to increase efficiency, lower costs, increase revenue and improve sustainability.

IDAES provides revolutionary new capabilities for Process Systems Engineering that exceed existing tools and approaches. After years of development, IDAES has established an extensive modeling library integrated with a suite of advanced machine learning, uncertainty quantification and optimization techniques that enable process optimization, parameter estimation, advanced process control and multi-scale analysis across various levels of implementation.

The IDAES Integrated Platform helps energy and process companies, technology developers, academic researchers and the U.S. Department of Energy design, develop, scale-up and analyze new and potential technologies and processes to accelerate advances and apply them to address existing and future demand for abundant and reliable energy.

With its equation-oriented modeling approach, IDAES uniquely supports the process modeling lifecycle, from conceptual design to dynamic optimization and control. IDAES has cultivated an active, growing user community from multiple industries. This open-source Integrated Platform is available from Github.

The R&D 100 Awards competition received entries from 19 countries and regions for the 2020 competition. A full list of the 2020 winners is available at the R&D World website.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory develops and commercializes advanced technologies that provide reliable and affordable solutions to America’s energy challenges. NETL’s work supports DOE’s mission to advance the national, economic and energy security of the United States.