Award Data

A spray vacuum freezing desalination process is proposed to meet the required seawater desalination cost, with water subcooling suppression at freezing. The cost of the proposed desalination method is low, with low energy requirement and minimum carbon emission. General statement of how this problem is being addressed: Nucleating agents will be used to suppress subcooling of freezing the sprayed s ...

An increasingly developed global population necessitates an increased demand for inexpensive energy, which must be clean, efficient, and renewable in order to prevent adverse effects on future resources and the climate. Biodiesel has emerged as a renewably-produced, potentially carbon-neutral hydrocarbon, making it an attractive alternative to conventionally-obtained fossil fuels. Nevertheless, st ...

The development of a permanent national repository for storing the spent nuclear fuel generated by our nuclear power plants has taken longer than initially predicted by the US DoE. As a result, the licensees have been required to keep their spent fuel in the spent fuel pools or in an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI). The ISFSI contents are externally monitored for changes, but t ...

The SCO2 Brayton cycle is gaining interest across a variety of power generation applications due to its potential for providing higher efficiencies. The range of industrial applications include: industrial waste and heat recovery, coal and nuclear power plants, and renewable energy sources such as solar thermal and fuel cells. All of these cycle loops require compressors that operate near the crit ...

To monitor for compliance with nonproliferation treaties such as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), several hundred ground stations around the world collect radionuclide aerosols from the atmosphere and measure the isotopic composition to detect, locate, and characterize nuclear events. These stations must process enormous volumes of air to collect minute amounts of the radioactive ...

New types of nuclear power plants under development that to enable nuclear power to provide a large-scale source of environmentally benign power generation while improving safety and minimizing proliferation risks. For best performance, these reactors will require large numbers of uranium alloy fuel pins made with unique geometries. No method currently exists for producing large numbers of fuel pi ...

FPoliSolutions, LLC (FPS) proposes to develop and commercialize an integrated data and simulation management framework. FPS would build from the current RAVEN technology developed by INL for the purposes of commercializing an integrated data and simulation management framework for design optimization studies. RAVEN is essentially a workflow engine with the capability to drive simulators and model ...

Actionable understanding of system behavior in the subsurface is required for a wide spectrum of societal and engineering needs by both commercial firms and government entities. These needs include, for example, water resource management, precision agriculture, contaminant remediation, unconventional energy production, CO2 sequestration monitoring and climate studies. Such actionable understanding ...

This Small Business Innovation Research project proposes the design, construction and testing of a tunable focusing quadrupole and defocusing permanent magnet system for particle accelerators. The main application of the proposed system will be the new concept electron accelerator proposed to be constructed for electron ion collision research. The new concept is a non-scaling F ...

Advances in small satellite and sensor technology are revolutionizing the Earth observation industry, but the development of new raster processing tools to harness this growing stream of nearly real-time data has not kept pace. Storing and processing such data is currently cumbersome or even impossible for many individuals and organizations that could otherwise benefit from its use. The proposed ...