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

7. CONCLUSIONS

New photonics technologies have broad implications for U.S. industrial growth and productivity in the manufacturing, medical, entertainment, information technology, telecommunications, and homeland security sectors.

From the early days ATP has funded high-risk photonics projects to enhance U.S. competitiveness through the development of:

• Macrosystem miniaturization and functional integration
• Advanced metrologies for trace-level detection on a near-real-time basis
• Cost-efficient high-quality fabrication methods at scales approaching mass production

A cluster study approach was used to evaluate the retrospective and prospective benefits from several ATP-funded photonics projects, bringing together technical advances from optics and electronics to develop high-performance process, metrology, and product technologies.
The cluster consisted of five projects, spanning applications in industrial materials analysis, petroleum refining and distribution, medicine, and building controls.
These projects were selected for analysis based on the projects' technical success and degree of progress toward commercialization. Within this cluster, two projects were singled out as having achieved full commercialization and/or having highly probable, near-term prospects for commercial deployment and for generating substantial economic benefits:

• Capillary Optics for X-Ray Focusing and Collimating
• MEMS-Based Infrared (Photonic Crystal) Micro-Sensor for Gas Detection

Detailed case studies were conducted for these two projects, and higher level overview studies were conducted for the remaining three projects.

Quantitative analysis points to substantial public returns on ATP's investment, including:

• Estimated 112,000 prevented deaths of trauma victims and critically ill patients on their way to U.S. emergency rooms during the 2006-2015 period.
• Substantial cost savings, based on increasingly efficient industrial materials analysis, energy savings in petroleum refining and distribution, avoided medical treatment costs, and energy savings in commercial real estate. These cost savings are used to compute the following economic performance metrics for the cluster of five projects:
• For a base case, $33 of public benefits to U.S. industry, consumers, and the nation for every dollar of ATP's $7.47 million investment
• For a step-out scenario with somewhat more optimistic assumptions, $41 of public benefits for every dollar of ATP's investment
• Some benefits from ATP technology investments have already been realized, leading to $1.90 of realized public benefits for every dollar of ATP's $7.47 million investment in the cluster of five projects

An alternative, broader performance measure of total public and private (social) rate of return points to significant spillover gaps (the difference between the social rate of return and private rate of return), indicating that the value of the project to the general public is substantially greater than its value to the companies receiving public cost-share funding. Furthermore, these projects would not have been undertaken at all without public funding, so the funding made possible both the public and private benefits.

Levels of social returns ranging from 43 to 51 percent and spillover gaps ranging from 18 to 46 percent provide strong validation for testimonials by ATP industry partners as to the essential nature of ATP cost-shares for the successful completion of high-risk technology development efforts and the eventual commercialization of photonics technologies.

In addition to quantitative performance metrics for public and social returns, the cluster analysis also points to broad-based qualitative benefits including reduced risk of post-emergency room infections, reduced harmful diesel emissions, improved occupant productivity in commercial office space, and accelerated development of advanced materials for new industrial products.

The cluster analysis targeted only two ATP-funded projects with near-term benefits for quantitative analysis. It is likely that the remaining three photonics projects will also progress toward commercialization and lead to additional public and private benefits. Over time, these additional benefit cash flows can be expected to result in upward adjustment of performance metrics presented in this study.

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

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