Award Data

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 ...

Metal casting is an important manufacturing process and most castings are made by small to mid-sized foundries. Sand molded castings account for 85% of all iron and steel castings produced and approximately 5 out of 30 major casting defects including gas blows and sand burn-on are related to poor sand mold atmosphere control. Mold atmosphere control should become more crucial in the coming years a ...

Additive Manufacturing (AM), where three-dimensional (3D) objects are created from a digital model by depositing and fusing successive layers of material, provides the ability to produce low-volume, customized products with complex geometries relatively quickly at a moderate cost. However, AM processes sometimes fail to produce acceptable parts, due to either geometric in- accuracy (e.g., shrinkag ...

Metrology is a multi-billion dollar industry that is an indispensable part of science and manufacturing. A variety of techniques including interferometric microscopes, scanning electron microscopes (SEM), X-ray, and atomic force microscopes (AFM) are used in X- ray mirror manufacturing. The performance of any tool directly depends on the ability to characterize and tune it. Modulation Transfer Fun ...

Neutron scattering is one of the most useful methods of studying the structure and dynamics of matter. Therefore, a number of new large neutron facilities have recently being constructed, upgraded or planned around the world. Examples include the new, 1.4 billion-dollars Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at DOEs Oak Ridge National Laboratory and upgrades of ORNLs High- Flux Isotope Reactor and N ...

In this phase-I proposal, the effect of terrestrial cosmic rays on the failure rate of commercial 1200V SiC power MOSFETs will be studied. The goal of the study is to quantify the appropriate breakdown voltage de-rating needed for SiC MOSFETs subject to cosmic rays. The failure rate of SiC power MOSFETs as a function of the reverse blocking voltage will be determined and compared to failure rate o ...

The reaction catalyzed by dihydroxyacid dehydratase is a key bottleneck in the biosynthesis of isobutanol from glucose, caused in part by extremely inefficient maturation of the catalytically essential Fe-S cofactor (~1%) when the dehydratase is recombinantly expressed. One strategy to relieve this bottleneck is to replace this complicated, energetically expensive enzyme with a simpler one that us ...

Development of new instrumentation for measuring volatile organic compounds (VOC) and intermediate volatility organic compounds (IVOC) that may react to form secondary organic aerosols (SOA) has been identified as a vital need by DOE. Revealing the detailed mechanisms leading to SOA formation from gas phase precursors is best achieved by measuring both phases with sufficient temporal resolution to ...

Generating and screening multiple combinations of genes, enzymes, and other biological parts has become vital to next generation biofuel development and production. This currently requires large personnel costs and sizeable capital investments in robotics equipment. Commercial adoption of the synthetic biology technology will require high throughput capabilities, low cost, product reliability, and ...

There is an ongoing effort to replace high activity radioactive sources that could pose a risk for use as terrorist weapons with non-radioisotope based technologies. Currently radioactive sources serve a number of critical needs including the treatment and diagnosis of disease, inspection and certification of critical mechanical structures, the sterilization of food and medical products, ...