Award Data

The SBIR solicitation expressed the need for tools to process data from disparate sources in various formats and generate drought-relevant data products. NIDIS also recognizes a need to span organizational boundaries to provide access to integrated drought information for use in water management. The Phase I SBIR project resulted in prototype Climate Information Management Toolkit (CIMT) software ...

An operational optical particle counter will be built, extensively characterized and evaluated that measures the size and shape of aerosol particles with optical diameter from 0.1 to 10 μm. This instrument will distinguish different species of dust and volcanic ash from other types of aerosol particles, and provide an estimate of the aerosol optical properties and produce compositional informati ...

Concentrating Solar (CS) technologies intend to overcome the prohibitive price/performance of solar energy by focusing sunlight down to small, manageable areas. However, tracking the suns movement across the sky mandates the use of expensive, large, pivoting structures to effectively capture all angles of the suns path. Unfortunately, this necessity greatly hinders the employment of CS technologie ...

CO2 is a plentiful potential feedstock for the synthesis of a number of fuels and chemicals. Unfortunately, reactions utilizing CO2 are often slow, equilibrium limited, and energy consuming. Furthermore, the production of some chemicals and polymer precursors may require multiple process steps. Thus, selection of candidate chemistries and approaches for implementing them is important. In any of th ...

Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) systems have emerged as one of the most viable power generation technologies that enable carbon capture and sequestration. However, technological improvements in supporting subsystems are still needed to reduce the capital and operating costs of IGCC plants. The carbon capture system is one of the most expensive components of the IGCC plants; these two ...

The electricity produced from fossil fuels is essential to the prosperity and security of the world. On the other hand, increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by the fossil fuel combustion are causing concerns regarding global warming. Although there are several methods for separating CO2 from the flue gases at existing coal-fired power plants, all of them have significant drawbacks, inc ...

Development of new, more efficient gas turbine engines is a lengthy process of engine test iterations to maximize performance. This engine development cycle time is driven to a large extent by the manufacturing process used to produce the engine hot section turbine components. Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) proposes combining a newly developing rapid manufacturing process technology Electron Beam Melti ...

Light sources for X-Ray science have typically been synchrotrons and accosiated Free Electron Lasers (FEL). While these X-Ray light sources are some of the most versitile and powerful tools for a miriad of scientific study in the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology, they tend to be $100M + facilities. This makes it difficult to do science with coherent X-Rays in ones own laboratory. However, ...

High-brightness x-ray sources are essential tools of scientific discovery in a wide variety of fields, including biology, chemistry, and materials science. These sources rely on high-energy electron beams to generate x-rays, traditionally requiring large, expensive synchrotron facilities. Laser plasma acceleration (LPA) of electrons is characterized by ultra-high gradients, showing great promise f ...

The successful operation of the Department of Energy (DOE) X-ray light sources, free electron laser (FEL), and linear accelerator facilities depends on providing reliable photocathodes for generation of low emittance, high-brightness electron beams using conventional lasers. Experiments on GaAs-based photocathodes have demonstrated the potential to generate high-brightness, unpolarized and polariz ...