Award Data

Seawater contains about 3 parts per billion of uranium. With a total ocean volume of approximately 1.3109 km3, there is at least 4.5 billion tons of uranium in seawater which is about 1000 times the amount of uranium known to exist in terrestrial ores. Mining uranium from seawater is economically feasibility if an efficient, reusable and low-cost adsorbent could be developed. In the past year, ...

There is a clear and unmet need for technologies to improve power generation flexibility to enable cost effective and reliable high renewable energy fractions in modern grids. Specifically, gas turbine generator turndown ratio may be improved by extending combustion lean flammability limits. This project will deliver a prototype plasma reformer system integrated with gas turbine combustors to allo ...

Upcoming HEP projects require physical and electrical bonds between opposite points of thin parallel circuit faces which areless than 50 microns in pitch, but current methods, such as bump-soldering and anisotropic conductive adhesives (ACA) and films (ACF) cannot reach these resolution limits and furthermore require heat and pressure that damage delicate circuitry. SunRay ZTACH™ is an anisotrop ...

Tethers Unlimited, Inc. (TUI) proposes to develop the Metal Advanced Manufacturing Bot-Assisted Assembly (MAMBA) Process, a robotically managed metal press and milling system used to create precision parts on orbit. This manufacturing process provides an alternative to 3D printing metals in space, which is difficult due to space environment, feedstock safety concerns, and print quality issues. I ...

Many of NASA’s future space science missions will utilize small spacecraft, and many of these missions will require cryocoolers for cooling detectors, sensors, shields, and telescopes. For Class C and D missions, the cryocooler technical requirements for performance, size, and mass, coupled with the programmatic requirements for minimal cost and development time, are extremely challenging. Fli ...

This proposal addresses the challenge of measuring the hydrogeologic response of geologic formations in-situ and at high-resolution to determine flow and storage parameters governing groundwater availability, contaminant fate, and other dynamic subsurface processes. How this problem is being addressed: We will develop direct-push and borehole instrumentation and methods for efficiently acquiring h ...

Development of high performance downhole components and materials is necessary to enable geothermal exploration and production capabilities in high pressure and high temperature applications. Conventional well materials are poorly suited for corrosive environments. Steel casing, screens, and other wellbore components are susceptible to corrosion in extreme geothermal conditions. An ideal replaceme ...

A significant problem in automotive, defense, and other industries is the complexity of setting up and running simulations for various aspects of a design to ensure accuracy, assess failings, and predetermine fatal and non-fatal errors. A high-prole and increasingly important type of simulation is the modeling of crash phenomena, where today's best methods require millions of dollars of manual lab ...

NASA’s future remote sensing science missions require advanced thermal management technologies to maintain multiple instruments at very stable temperatures and utilize waste heat to keep other critical subsystems above minimum operational temperatures. Two-phase pumped loops are an ideal solution for these applications. A critical need for these pumped loops is a microgravity-compatible evaporat ...

The proposed effort will integrate identified performance optimization approaches to produce a tunable laser module exhibiting cost and performance characteristics appropriate for NASA’s needs. The technology will considerably improve NASA's flight test measurement and in-situ monitoring capability over the current state of the art, opening up new distributed sensing possibilities for real-t ...