ERIS Shopping Notice - Thermal Management

DARPA's Defense Sciences Office is conducting an active shopping search through the ERIS Marketplace for foundational thermal management mechanisms capable of disrupting legacy thermodynamic limits across diverse DoD applications, with submissions accepted through September 30, 2026 on a rolling review basis.

DARPA seeks game-changing solutions—not modular, integrated cooling packages or incremental improvements—addressing material-level thermal instability and fabrication constraints, structural-level thermal-stress concentration and delamination, and thermodynamic constraints such as capillary dry-out in heat pipes and phase-change loops. Current state-of-the-art approaches rely on parasitic fluid pumping and forced convection, imposing unacceptable penalties in Size, Weight, Power, Cost, and Cooling (SWaP-C2) and creating manufacturability and structural integration bottlenecks. Applications span hypersonic vehicles, directed energy weapons, and high-performance tactical computing.

Qualifying submissions must demonstrate deep understanding of the problem space, aggressive performance metrics backed by rigorous physics-based evidence, multidisciplinary team expertise in materials science and thermodynamics, and broad applicability across multiple operational domains and commercial sectors. Existing awardable ERIS Marketplace solutions should be flagged via email to ERIS@darpa.mil. New solutions must be submitted to the Strategic Systems Topic Area via the ERIS portal with video titles formatted as "DARPA-SN-26-103: [Solution Title]," followed by notification email to ERIS@darpa.mil. Solutions meeting awardable standards through standard ERIS assessment will be considered by DSO. Additional resources are available on the ERIS Master Solicitation on SAM.gov and DARPAConnect.us.