Award Data

NanoSD, Inc. with its partners will develop a transparent, nanostructured thermally insulating film that can be applied to existing single-pane windows to reduce heat loss. To produce the nanostructured film, the team will create hollow ceramic or polymer nanobubbles and consolidate them into a dense lattice structure using heat and compression. Because it is mostly air, the resulting nanobubble s ...

Density functional theory is used by many researchers funded by the Department of Energy as a method for predicting the behavior of chemicals and materials used in energy applications. However, results of these calculations are often not standardized and, even when they are, expert-level understand of the methods is needed in order to properly perform a simulation. The energy research community a ...

A critical aspect of exoskeleton control that has to date introduced a performance limitation is the ability of the exoskeleton to recognize the intent of the operator so it can apply assistance to their desired motion. This intent recognition effort is typically solved using ad-hoc methods where subject matter experts make design decisions and tune transitions to identify intended maneuvers as re ...

This Phase II Small Business Innovation Research project targets the development of a technology for segregating fuelbased contaminants (char and ash) from oxygen carrier material in the context of chemical looping combustion application. In chemical looping, the wellmixed solids that flow from the fuel reactor consisting of char, ash, and oxygen carrier particles cannot be completely separated in ...

Current methods for manufacturing carbon fiber rely on high temperature ovens for the stabilization/oxidation and carbonization steps, which tend to be slow and energy intensive. As such, carbon fiber composites are expensive then steel, which limits their use in costsensitive, highvolume industrial applications such as automobiles, oil and gas, and infrastructure. To reduce energy consumption and ...

Laser based advanced accelerators can achieve very high accelerating gradients, but their duty cycle is limited by the laser power availability and media recovery time. Inverse Free Electron Laser (IFEL) is a vacuum farfield laser accelerator scheme which does not rely on a medium (plasma) or a structure (metal or electric) and therefore is potentially capable of accelerating charged particles ver ...

A novel pressurized gasfilled multiRFcavity beam profile monitor has been studied that is simple and robust in highradiation environments. Charged particles passing through each RFcavity in the monitor produce intensitydependent ionized plasma, which changes the gas permittivity. Standard RF techniques to measure the change in quality factor (Q) and frequency (f) as a function of time are then use ...

A key requirement for microalgae biofuels production is a very low cost harvesting technology. Commercially available solidliquid separation technologies applicable to microalgae, such as chemical coagulation, membrane separations and centrifugation, are too costly for biofuels production or other lowcost microalgae processes, such as wastewater treatment. A low cost harvesting process is bio floc ...

Replacement of petroleum based vehicles with fuel cell electric vehicles operating on hydrogen produced from domestically available resources would dramatically decrease emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants as well as reduce dependence on oil from politically volatile regions of the world. One major inhibitor to a hydrogen society is the lack of infrastructure, which requires hydroge ...

Reactive absorption-based carbon dioxide capture processes using solvents is the preferred technology for large scale capture of carbon dioxide in flue gases from coal-fired power plants. This Small Business Innovation Research project targets the development of mitigation strategies to decrease the quantity of aerosols that are formed from such post-combustion capture systems in the presence of s ...