NIST GCR 05-879 —Photonics Technologies:Applications in Petroleum Refining, Building Controls, Emergency Medicine, and Industrial Materials Analysis

ABSTRACT

Photonics technologies bring together advances from optics and electronics to enhance U.S. competitiveness through high-performance manufacturing processes, metrologies, and new products. As an enabling technology, photonics facilitates new capabilities and cost savings with broad implications for future growth in manufacturing, energy, medicine, and other sectors.

While U.S. photonics companies tend to be successful in specialized, high-performance, niche markets, they have been less successful in markets requiring mass production. The Advanced Technology Program (ATP), recognizing the potential for broad-based economic benefits from enhancing the manufacturing capabilities of U.S. photonics companies, has provided cost-sharing funding for photonics projects since its inception in 1990. Projects focused on new design tools, metrologies, and fabrication methods for mass production.

To assess the economic benefits from the ATP-funded photonics projects, a cluster study approach was used to combine the methodological advantages of detailed case studies and of higher level overview studies. Five projects were selected for analysis, spanning applications in such sectors as industrial materials analysis, petroleum refining and distribution, medicine, and building controls. Two projects with the best near-term commercial prospects were selected for detailed case studies.

The cluster study was based on primary research and analysis and identified important benefits from ATP's investment in the five photonics projects. One important benefit includes preventing an estimated 112,000 deaths of trauma victims and of critically ill patients in transit to emergency rooms over a 10-year period. Other benefits include increasingly efficient industrial materials analysis, facilitating accelerated development of advanced materials for new industrial products, the near real-time detection of trace-level sulfur contaminants in petroleum refining and distribution, cost savings from avoided post-emergency medical treatment, and energy savings in commercial office buildings.

Performance metrics based on projected benefit cash flows are:

• Benefit-to-cost ratios on ATP's investment ranging from 33:1 to 41:1
• Net present value of ATP's investment ranging from $276 to $345 million
• Public (internal) rates of return on ATP's investment ranging from 48 to 51 percent

These measures reflect estimated benefits to industry users and the general public, excluding benefits to direct recipients of ATP funding.

There were additional qualitative benefits, including reduced risk of emergency room infections, reduced harmful diesel emissions, and improved occupant productivity in commercial office buildings.

It is clear from this research that ATP's industry partners would not have developed high-risk, low-cost photonics technologies without the ATP cost-share, and technological advances, associated market opportunities, and resultant public benefits would not have been realized.

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Date created: July 12, 2006
Last updated: September 14, 2006

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