Award Data

Boulder Nonlinear Systems proposes to improve the manufacturability of adaptive polymer lenses (APLs) specifically as they pertain to rifle scopes. Phase II deliverables include: Polymer Lens Cores Design, tooling specifications and process procedures for Membrane Transfer Fixture (from cure release clamp) Design, tooling specifications and process procedures for Membrane Clamping Fix ...

The Department of Energy is interested in increasing the performance and cost-effectiveness of thermoelectric generator modules intended for waste heat recovery systems. Although high-efficiency small-scale thermoelectric materials have been demonstrated in the laboratory, scaling to production-level devices has proven difficult. A team of researchers from Plasma Controls, LLC, Colorado State Univ ...

ITER will depend on high power CW gyrotrons to deliver power to the plasma at ECR frequencies. However, gyrotrons can suffer from undesirable low frequency oscillations (LFOs) which are known to interfere with the gun-region diagnostics and data collection, and are also expected to produce undesirable energy and velocity spread in the beam. The origins and processes leading to these oscillations a ...

The United States contributions to ITER include the design, development, and construction of the Central Solenoid magnet system. A key challenge in the fabrication of this device is providing electrically insulating the penetrations through which helium enters the magnet system. The proposed program seeks to demonstrate materials and processes to insulation these portions of the device. The propo ...

The BELLA project at LBNL seeks to develop ~10 GeV laser-plasma accelerator stages that will produce ultra-short, low-divergence electron bunches with energy spread of ~1%, slice energy spread of ~0.1%. A beam of sufficient brightness for collider applications can be used to drive a free electron laser and so this is a near-term experimental goal. Simulation support is required to reduce technica ...

To elucidate the mysterious origins of nuclear spin, the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) has identied the science of electron-ion colliders, and specically the proposed polarized electron and ion collider, as absolutely central to U.S. science. These machines, estimated to cost as much as 500M 1B, will require highly polarized particle beams. To reduce the risk associated with building t ...

It is often found that seemingly distinct, scientic codes in elds such as biology, engineering, and physics are faced with the same computational problemthey require the solution of sparse-linear systems arising from the discretization of elliptic and/or parabolic partial dierential equations. This bottleneck can severely hinder the application scientists ability to solve the most challenging prob ...

New atmospheric sampling technology is needed to monitor the impact of energy production by the combustion of fossil fuels. The new technologies should enable the much higher monitoring densities that are appropriate for building models of climate change, for judging attempts of urban remediation and for validation of global coverage by the CO2 satellite. We are projecting the CO2 radiosonde as a ...

Co-feeding biomass with coal in a gasification-based synthetic fuels plant has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by 50% or more. Unfortunately, the catalysts currently used to convert the syngas from the coal-biomass gasifier are poisoned by compounds that originate in the biomass and coal. Thus, the development of poison-resistant catalysts will advance coal-biomass-to-liquids (CBTL) technol ...

Although means currently exist to capture CO2 from combustion and other sources, capture at atmospheric levels is difficult. Once captured, CO2 needs to be released in concentrated form and sequestered: e.g., it can be buried under ocean water or in underground vaults, or it can be reacted with basic metal oxides to form metal carbonates. It may also be reduced to methane (another greenhouse gas), ...