Award Data

High-quality, defect free, and consistent thickness Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) films are required to ensure maximum efficiency and longevity over the life of hydrogen fuel cells or electrolyzers utilizing this technology. The current technologies of PEM film Quality Assurance (QA) and defect detection rely on human inspection, which can be subjective and labor intensive, or measurement technol ...

Annular extruded plastics are in everything from fuel lines, hoses, pipes, and wires to catheters, medical tubing, and stents and makes up about ? of the $200B extruded plastics market. Extrusion manufacturing is a major processor of the $600B raw plastics industry, which produces 380 million metric tons of material each year. The production of these materials accounts for 4% of oil consumption an ...

Nitric acid (HNO3) is used to produce fertilizers, explosives, nylons, polyurethanes, and a variety of other industrial chemicals. The state-of-the-art manufacturing method uses methane (CH4) as a feedstock for hydrogen and an energy intensive thermal process that emits a large amount of carbon dioxide. A new low-temperature plasma system, which can be driven electrically by a renewable or nuclear ...

Cloud cover is an important but poorly characterized component of current climate models. In particular, there is a need to detect and quantify cloud cover in a physically meaningful manner. This need has led to the development of infrared cloud imagers. This system uses long-wave infrared cameras to observe the thermal emission from the clouds and produces a measurement of spatially distributed c ...

Squeezed light sources are a critical component of continuous variable quantum networking and quantum computing systems. Periodically poled nonlinear optical waveguides are a promising technology for squeezed light sources due to high conversion efficiency, long interaction length, robust fiber coupling, and integration potential. While these waveguides are available commercially, they are not opt ...

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Many freshwater lakes suffer from Harmful Algal Blooms driven largely by nutrient pollution, leading to widespread loss of aquatic life through oxygen deprivation. An associated issue is generation of methane in such lakes, contributing a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Both of these situations urgently need complete water column aeration as part of prevention ...

Modern deep learning-based face recognition systems perform at or above human levels on high quality frontal imagery, but their performance suffers significantly on more operationally relevant imagery with confounding factors such as extreme pose.  This performance degradation is based on two primary shortcomings: poor match between training and test-time image data, and failure to model inherent ...

Fiber-based quantum networks can utilize existing infrastructure and heavily optimized fiber optic-based systems in the telecommunications band; however, the quantum information to be transported across the quantum network is often generated or manipulated outside of the telecom range. Quantum frequency conversion, or tailoring the wavelength of a photonic qubit, can be utilized to transfer inform ...

Resodyn has developed the novel Resonant Acoustic Continuous Crystallizer (RACC) concept which is specifically configured for the recrystallization of energetic nitramines. This technology employs the Resonant Acoustic Mixing technology, which results in a uniform shear field throughout the mixing vessel. Radial mixing is accomplished to such a significant degree that true plug flow is achieved. C ...