Award Data

Laser plasma accelerators (LPA) enabled by the Tm laser driver to be developed by this project offer much reduced size and cost compared to conventional accelerators of the same energy. This would drastically cut the cost of highenergy particle research on colliderbased facilities and advanced light sources. Planned conventional accelerators (e.g., for the proposed International Linear Collider) w ...

There is a present and growing emphasis on reducing or maintaining the water use footprint in the energy sector. One of the requirements for effectively managing water is monitoring through reliable, real time, measurement based data of water quality/composition within treatment systems and bodies of water associated with power generation facilities. Many existing water quality sensor technologies ...

inhibits utilities’ ability to deploy a network of such sensors. What is needed is the development of an integrated water sensor package that is low cost, rapidly deployable, wireless, and self-powered, that can relay real time relevant insitu water measurements. Ideally, such hardware would simultaneously monitor multiple water quality factors and contaminants at a reduced overall cost. How thi ...

Gasification technologies convert coal and biomass into synthesis gas feed streams that can either be used as a fuel for highly efficient power generation cycles or converted into value added chemicals and transportation fuels. However, coal derived synthesis gas contains a myriad of contaminants that may be egulated in power plant emissions and act as poisons for the catalysts used in downstream ...

A 2008 DOE report [1] indicated that up to 903 terrabtu per year of unrecovered low level industrial waste heat (IWH) in the US is available for conversion to electricity. Converting this heat to electricity at 30% conversion efficiency would produce ~9 GW of electric power, an equivalent to about 4.5 Hoover Dam outputs. Efficient low cost recovery of low level IWH at significant scale could displ ...

The feasibility of fusion as a practical energy source needs to be improved significantly by removing some of the restrictions that low temperature superconductors put on the fusion magnet systems. One method to simplify the magnet system is by using high temperature superconductors (HTS) that allow for a higher magnet performance and much larger temperature margins. Successful application of HTS ...

A commonly noted sensor need for nuclear power systems is flow sensing in the various heat transfer mediums and to monitor medium velocities and characterize mixing and/or cooling. This is particularly needed for small modular reactors designs where coolant flow is driven by natural convection, not by pumps. Such sensors must be able to tolerate high temperature, high pressure, and radiation (neut ...

The Groundbased Nuclear Detonation Detection Research and Development office seeks advanced technology for the monitoring of explosion events using infrasonic signatures. Silicon Audio, Inc. and The University of Texas at Austin are working together to develop a microelectromechanicalsystem (MEMS) based piezoelectric infrasonicsensor technology. The sensor aims to exceed all of the threshold speci ...

Next generations of scanning probe microscopy tools will have enhanced operational capabilities, such as improved variable pressure/temperature/atmosphere systems, including reactive cells. Several technologies exist to enable components of these next-gen capabilities, but most rely on optical detection of probe deflection. In many situations, providing optical access to the sample is not readily ...

Driven by bandwidth hungry technologies such as online video and cloud computing, the skyrocketing growth of global data traffic has no sign of halting. The total amount of content passing through the world’s networks will increase from 800,000 petabytes in 2009 to 35 zettabytes in 2020. To meet the world’s endless appetite for bandwidth, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) system wi ...