Award Data

The conversion of corn and other biomass to fuel grade ethanol not only would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources but also would be a major industrial application for agricultural products. However, the process of drying the ethanol to fuel grade consumes significant amounts of energy, incurring costs that continue to increase as cost of natural gas increases. This project will deve ...

The need for natural gas continues to grow, and recent increases in petroleum prices have been paralleled by large increases in the price of natural gas. However, natural gas at the source often has high concentrations of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, which must be removed. Although existing commercial polymeric membranes (e.g. cellulose acetate and polysulfone) do a good job of sweetenin ...

Distillation is a major chemical unit operation and consumer of significant energy. Often, water or another intermediate boiling component can become trapped within the distillation column and accumulate. This causes various operating difficulties such as flooding, slugging, cycling, instability, and an off-spec product. This project will develop a chemically resistant, non-porous water-venting ...

Catalysis plays a substantial role in the synthesis of the most U.S. commodity chemicals, with huge implications for energy usage. Membrane reactors have been proposed for a number of these syntheses. However, to be competitive with conventional technologies, membrane reactors must demonstrate better selectivity, permeability, and/or stability. This project will develop a novel platform with ke ...

The use of ethanol as a fuel would impact U.S. reliance on foreign oil. However, among the economic obstacles to it widespread use are the costs of shipping fuel-grade ethanol by truck. Shipping ethanol by pipeline would be significantly less expensive, but, unfortunately, pipeline ethanol is hydroscopic, which causes too much water to be present in the fuel. This project will develop a simple, ...

Lateral flow strip immunoassay technology is one of the easiest to use for mobile applications because much of the sample preparation and fluid handling stages are built in. These assays are widely used, easy to read, and generally accepted. There are also many analytes that can be detected using immunological and ligand-based techniques. The sensitivity (limit of detection) of these assays, howev ...

The treatment of waste water consumes a significant amount of energy, in order to reduce the organic matter to levels safe for environmental discharge. This project will develop a novel microbial-based approach to convert the organic matter in waste water into a valuable commodity, namely hydrogen. This approach would simultaneously clean the waste water and produce a fuel that can be sold to he ...

The objective of this research is to develop beta versions of tools for automatically migrating radiation effects predicted in TCAD level tools to compact modeling tools. This transition will enable compact models that possess radiation effects to be quickly generated, which can then be used in circuit design activity. This approach is a substantial improvement over the current ad hoc approaches. ...

The current project will develop and demonstrate a prototype compact, power-efficient all-fiber lidar unit for wind profiling on board UAV's and other aircraft. The system leverages Oceanit's current fiber-laser based lidar development efforts. A unique design provides a rugged system with no moving parts and little maintenance requirements. Efforts in the current project will include prototype s ...

In the mining industry, dewatering, screening, and size separations may not be the most energy intensive processes, but they are often the major bottleneck in the whole system.. Improvements would provide tremendous potential in both energy savings and production yield. This project will develop Intelligently Vibrating Dewatering Machinery with miniaturized, ceramic-based, smart motors. The tech ...