Award Data

Recent advances in computing systems fundamentally changed and shaped almost every aspect of today’s society; from healthcare to finances and scientific discoveries, our everyday lives will depend more and more on computing and communication infrastructures and their capability to process and deliver critical information in real time. However, as high-performance-computing systems and datacenter ...

Organic chemicals comprise the dominant fraction of particulates found in atmospheric aerosols, and the largest proportions of these are secondary products formed in the atmosphere from oxidation of volatile organic compounds. Often these chemical transformations result from complex pathways involving species from different sources. To understand these processes, we need to be able to trace the ...

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 ...

Atomic structures of biomolecules (e.g., proteins) and biomolecular complexes facilitate detailed understanding of biomolecular function. They are key drivers of the ongoing revolution in molecular biology and of many areas of biotechnology, including development of pharmaceuticals and of enzymes and light harvesters for bioenergy. Most biomolecular structures are determined by X-ray crystallograp ...

GaN-based devices are the basis of a variety of modern electronics applications, especially in optoelectronics and high-frequency / high-power electronics. These devices are based on epitaxial films grown on single-crystal wafers. The single-crystal wafer substrates are limiting because of their size, expense, mechanical properties and availability. If one could make GaN-based devices over large a ...

The proposed research and development project addresses the need to improve the energy efficiency of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in residential buildings throughout the US. The project uses an innovative holistic approach to redesign key components of the air handling unit (AHU) in forced-air HVAC systems that are installed in at least 84 million residences, including ...

By 2050 43,400,000 metric tons of cumulative wind turbine blade waste is expected to exist and continue growing at 2,000,000 metric tons/year globally. Even in the near term, wind turbine blade waste generation is expected to approach 1,000,000 metric tons/year by 2029. In short, the amount of wind turbine blade waste needing disposal is growing rapidly while the status quo option of landfilling, ...

Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) is a powerful and unique approach to characterize the chemical, physical and potentially biochemical properties of materials with the nanometer scale resolution in real-time. A key element for NSOM systems that combine optical spectroscopy with scanning probe microscopy, is the actual probe itself. While many commercial vendors offer off-the-shelf meta ...

As computational density for high-performance computing and big-data services continues to scale, performance scalability of next generation computing systems is becoming increasingly constrained by limitations in memory access, power dissipation and chip packaging. The processor-memory communication bottleneck, a major challenge in current multicore processors due to limited pin-out and power bud ...

High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) materials have excellent mechanical and electrical properties that are attractive for various applications such as power cables and high field, high current superconducting magnets, particularly playing a key role in the commercialization of fusion energy machines. However, HTS materials have very slow normal zone propagation velocities (NZPV) (2-3 orders of ...