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 ...

A recent report by the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee entitled “Challenges at the Frontiers of Matter and Energy” pointed to the need to better understand hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, often at the mesoscopic scale. Such structures can be studied by x-ray and neutron scattering techniques, but they do not generally yield narrow signals in momentum or energy space. The nat ...

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) uses low efficiency klystrons in the CEBAF machine. In the older portion they operate at 30% efficiency with a tube mean time between failure (MTBF) of five to six years. A highly efficient source (>55-60%) must provide a high degree of backwards compatibility, both in size and voltage requirements, to replace the klystron presently used at JLa ...

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 ...

Plasma facing components have significant challenges for fusion reactors and commercial uses of fusion energy, e.g. compact neutron generators. Economical systems have very high power densities with enormous particle flux loadings that exceed capabilities for conventional static materials, e.g. W, Mo, Cu and stainless steels. The proposed solution uses flowing liquid metal layers to transport heat ...

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 ...

"The next generation of very high field accelerator magnets (20 T or more) are expected to be made with high-temperature superconductors (HTS) along with conventional low-temperature superconductors (LTS) to reduce cost. The operation and protection of these magnets becomes very challenging particularly if the HTS coils are made with the tapes and operate at a much lower current than the LTS coils ...

To increase the utilization of electric vehicles, the US Department of Energy is seeking to reduce the cost of electric vehicle batteries to less than $125/kWh by 2022. To achieve this goal, the costs of cathode materials, which account for approximately 30% of the cost of vehicle batteries, must be reduced significantly. To address the challenge of lowering the costs of advanced lithium battery c ...

One daunting challenge facing future plasma burning fusion reactors is the extreme conditions that plasma facing components are exposed to. Extreme particle and heat fluxes exceeding 10-20 MW/m2 drive traditional material surfaces out of equilibrium and induce topographical and compositional changes that can have deleterious effects on the plasma edge and, ultimately, the confinement of fusion pla ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program aims at development and demonstration of an integrated theoretically/experimentally combinatorial method for the accurate prediction of rheological behaviors of special polymer solutions. In-depth understandings of dynamic responses of the polymer solutions under external shear are essential for development of the “smart” polymer-based add ...