Award Data

Ineffective fracture design and practices in unconventional oil and natural gas wells present environmental risks and reduce the production efficiency of hydraulic fracturing, largely due to the inability to measure propped fracture geometry and behavior using current proppants and available tools. In this project, a unique proppant detection technology based on acoustic metamaterials is being dev ...

Power outages from natural disasters not only result in billions of dollars of losses, associated health and safety impacts can result in significant loss of life. After a disaster, damage assessments of electrical grid infrastructure are critical for developing a strategy for power restoration including the optimal allocation of resources. Despite improvements, the damage assessment process is st ...

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 ...

The detection of individual charged particles, photons and neutrons and estimation of their properties, momentum and direction of arrival is the basis for a wide range of scientific and commercial applications from high-energy, nuclear and astro-physics to medical imaging and diagnosis. We are targeting the data acquisition market for medium to large size scientific experiments in High Energy Phys ...

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 ...

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 ...

Orora Design Technologies proposes to develop electronic design automation (EDA) tools employing minimally invasive circuit design-based methods to mitigate single event effects (SEEs) for next generation Ultra-DSM CMOS (