Award Data

The main focus of this STTR is to design, develop, and evaluate high temperature capacitors using novel thermal spray coating processes, which will allow the devices to meet the performance requirements. Multilayer coating architecture will be adopted and the electrodes and dielectric material selections will be screened in Phase I to note material compatibility and high temperature performance. ...

Aerodyne Research Inc. (ARI) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) propose to design a high- pressure slurry pump for the delivery of biomass solids into a high-pressure hydrothermal reactor for biofuel production. Biomass conversion techniques involving a hydrothermal phase have many advantages over other biomass conversion methods: they do not require the costly sugar release pre- ...

Statement of Problem: The US DOE has set a goal to advance photovoltaics (PV) technology to reach installed costs of less than $1/Watt. This requires module costs below $0.50/ Watt. Thin film PV provides the lowest documented production cost per watt ($0.67) of any PV technology. Module reliability has a direct impact on the levalized cost of energy (LCOE), or the cost of the energy produced by ...

Improved ignition methods are needed for advanced vehicle combustion systems, in particular those that allow reliable ignition of lean mixtures in gasoline engines at elevated pressures. Laser ignition is a candidate technology having the potential to address these needs. However, despite more than 40 years of laser ignition research, the technology is not yet in commercial use. A critical proble ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR/STTR) project targets the development of a novel ultra-high capacity sorbents and technology for CO2 capture and separation from combustion-derived flue gas. In the US, coal-fired power plants represent about 42% of the electricity generated but contribute about 75% of the CO2 emissions. DOE is supporting development of sorbent technologies that will d ...

Small Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) has been an extremely productive materials science probe for several decades and is used extensively by researchers studying a wide range of subjects, including polymers, ceramics, metals and biological macromolecules and functions. However, it is limited to length scales from 1 to 100 nm and requires highly collimated and relatively monochromatic neutron beam ...

This project will develop position-sensitive liquid argon detectors for a range of nuclear physics experiments. A particular need is for large area detectors with good energy, spatial and time resolution. Originally developed for calorimetry and the detection of neutrinos, weakly interacting massive particles and neutrinoless double beta decay, liquefied noble gas (LNG) detectors have ...

The remediation of underground nuclear waste storage tanks and associated disposal cribs and trenches at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear waste storage facilities, together with the associated needs to characterize and monitor the chemical compositions of the contaminants, presents a major scientific challenge. Several of these storage tanks are leaking, and significant quantities of w ...

The combination of X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) with x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) provides unique diagnostic analysis of both the structure and chemical composition of complex heterogeneous materials. The penetration of X-rays make this method ideal for studying and optimizing material properties under realistic, real time reaction conditions with simultaneous analysis of reaction pr ...

The high energy physics (HEP) community, scientific and medical communities and the public at large, will benefit from the availability of high sensitivity photo- sensors with improved spatial and temporal resolution that scaled to large areas, and manufactured in a robust, durable compact package at low cost. The Phase I program will address this need, demonstrating feasibility of commercial pro ...