Award Data

"As part of its mission to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is dedicated to developing and promoting innovative cleanup strategies that restore contaminated sites to productive use, reduce associated costs, and promote environmental stewardship. However, in adopting this strategy there will be an increasing need to implement a more cost effective, ...

"The environmental Protection Agency is soliciting innovations for the development of small unit drinking water systems that will inactivate contaminants including pesticides, organic pollutants, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and pathogens. In the US, 85% of all public water systems serve fewer than 3,300 people, thus these water systems are considered small. For providing these small ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop and ready for commercialization a scalable, low-cost process for purification of water containing Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs) using anodic oxidation with boron-doped ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD®) thin films. Resent research demonstrated that there is considerable potential for the development of electrochemica ...

Aerodyne Research Inc. (ARI) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) plan to develop an efficient catalytic system to convert biomass into olefins for the production of hydrocarbons in the gasoline, diesel, and/or jet fuel range by way of catalytic fast pyrolysis. Conversion of lignocellulosic feedstocks from resources as varied as corn stover, grasses, wood, and sugar cane bagasse is ...

One effective way to lower the weight, thus decreasing the carbon fiber usage and lowering the cost, of a CFRP tank is to improve the mechanical properties of the CFRP composite resin matrix using nano-reinforcement. Using the resin matrix itself as a source of composite strength, along with the carbon fiber reinforcement, results in a tank that requires less carbon fiber material. This solution d ...

Current efforts of DOE to create future lightweight systems in order to attain significant energy saving, cost reduction and improved efficiency requires development of advanced nanostructured lightweight composite materials with improved ductility and high tensile strength. Magnesium (Mg) with a density of approximately two-thirds of aluminum is the lightest structural material. Despite this adva ...

III-V semiconductors based solar cells display the highest sunlight conversion efficiency. Nevertheless, the material cost of current III-Vs and their fabrication process is very high which impedes their use for flat panel, large market applications. This project aims to explore, evaluate and implement defect tolerant high efficiency tandem solar cells based on more earth abundant III-V materials ...

Large-scale wind turbine designs are significantly constrained by transportation limits. As utility scale wind turbines have developed, they have steadily increased in size and have seen a steady decrease in cost of energy. However, further increases in on-shore turbine size beyond 3MW are prohibited by hard limits in the size of components that can be economically transported to the wind farm sit ...

The capability to efficiently remove carbon dioxide from industrial gas streams is desirable for a wide variety of applications. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a byproduct of many industrial processes associated with the transformation of fossil fuels into usable products such as heat, electricity, and chemicals. In addition to being a greenhouse gas pollutant, the presence of carbon dioxide in chemical ...

Increasing the steam temperature of supercritical boilers from 1,000F to 1,400F can raise the operating efficiency of next-generation AUSC coal-fired power plants from about 32% to about 42% and address compelling environmental issues, while also enhancing national security, domestic employment, economic stability, balance of trade and U.S. GDP through increased use of domestic coal. Low Cr conten ...