Read more about the new world-class SUNY discoveries that are available for licensing

BACKGROUND:

Buildings lose approximately 25 to 30% of heating and cooling energy through hidden envelope defects such as moisture infiltration, insulation voids, and thermal bridges. Existing inspection technologies, including infrared cameras, lidar, and contact-based heat flux meters, are limited to surface measurements or require invasive, time-consuming testing. As a result, there is currently no autonomous, non-contact method capable of mapping subsurface thermal conductivity throughout opaque building structures.

TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW:

mmHeat is an autonomous robotic inspection system that combines a 77-81 GHz millimeter-wave radar with a precision robotic scanning platform to generate volumetric 3D thermal conductivity maps of opaque building materials. The University at Buffalo system integrates a sensor motion co-design framework that constructs a synthetic aperture via controlled robotic movement, an adaptive coarse-to-fine scanning strategy that rapidly identifies regions requiring detailed inspection, and a physics-based perception pipeline that reconstructs refractive-index distributions and converts them into thermal-conductivity measurements. The platform produces millimeter-scale spatial resolution, requires only minimal material calibration, processes data on standard computing hardware, and is compatible with multiple robotic platforms, including Cartesian gantries and robotic manipulators.

ADVANTAGES:

The technology provides the first non-contact robotic solution for volumetric thermal conductivity mapping through opaque building materials. It significantly reduces inspection time through adaptive scanning while delivering millimeter-scale resolution that exceeds conventional ground penetrating radar and infrared thermography. The physics-based approach requires minimal calibration, generalizes across new material types without retraining, and detects hidden defects such as wet insulation, thermal bridges, and insulation voids that are invisible to existing robot-mounted inspection systems. The compact sensor package can also be integrated into a wide variety of robotic inspection platforms.

APPLICATIONS:

Potential applications include autonomous building energy audits, robotic inspection of bridges, tunnels, dams, and other infrastructure, non-destructive quality control for insulation manufacturers, insurance assessments following water damage, historic building preservation, industrial nondestructive testing of composite materials, cold storage facility inspection, and digital twin platforms for building thermal performance analytics.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY SUMMARY:

Patent pending.

STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT

TRL 5.

LICENSING STATUS:

Available for licensing or collaboration.