Award Data

Thermal desorption systems are being utilized to remove toxic mercury compounds from coal. However, high moisture level, poor mixing, and unsuitable heating rate reduce the efficiency of thermal desorption units. Spouted bed reactor, which have been used in various physical operations such as drying, presents a possible solution in reducing moisture level and increasing particles mixing. The propo ...

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. Direct fired SCO2 cycle loops require combustors that operate beyond th ...

Drilling is equally important for survey purposes, for oil and natural gas exploration, and in searches for water in arid areas. Drill bits with extended service lives are needed to improve the economics of today’s drilling systems, particularly in high temperature, high pressure and erosive gases environments encountered in deep wells close to sources of hot magma. We will develop diamond-hard ...

Over the past decade, the growth of unconventional oil and gas has resulted in discovery and availability of vast quantities of natural gas across the United States. In many regions, lack or deficit of adequate infrastructure results in gas being stranded, or, in case of oil-associated gas, wastefully vented or flared, needlessly contributing to GHG emissions and global warming. Although manufactu ...

The proposed project, “High Performance Computer Modeling of Electrostatic Discharge Testing,” addresses topic 2c of DOE Solicitation DE-FOA-0001618 requesting the development of easy-to-use, high performance computational tools for the engineering and manufacturing industries. Historically, scientists and engineers have spent many man-hours developing custom computational codes and algorithms ...

A surface coating technology has been developed to improve the power plant cooling system efficiency. It is anticipated that more than 10% of both capital and operational cost saving can be achieved with the proposed coating technology.

Searching for street parking, a behavior known as cruising for parking, leads to excess congestion and pollution. Many recent smart parking interventions have attempted to address this issue, but the problem of effectively detecting and measuring cruising remains largely unsolved. The goal of this work is to develop methods to detect and measure cruising for parking and its effects on congestion u ...

The United States chemical market relies on many petroleum based chemicals, such as ethylene, benzene, or toluene, as building blocks for other chemical products. Recently, the United States has put much effort into recovering the abundant amounts of shale gas. The Department of Energy is seeking novel catalytic processes to help produce from natural gas the same chemicals that historically have h ...

Low-temperature plasma has many applications including its use for ozone production. Ozone is a very strong oxidizer (only second to fluorine) and used in widely diverse systems, some of which include ignition control and performance improvement for combustion systems, NOx reduction from power plants, and water treatment and disinfection. While these systems span a broad range of scales, all requ ...

Solid oxide fuel cells offer an alternative source of energy with efficiencies which are significantly better than current fossil fuel based systems. This is accomplished in part by utilizing ceramic materials which can operate at high temperature > 800°C. One factor preventing wide scale adoption of these fuel cells is the cost of manufacturing and the inability to manufacture the ceramic materi ...