Award Data

Past industrial practices have resulted in groundwater that is contaminated by heavy metals. Long-term monitoring and maintenance is one of the largest costs of environmental management. This project is developing a compact analyzer for measuring chromium ions in ground water that should significantly reduce the cost of monitoring the presence of this metal. The Phase I project investigated a n ...

Available 2D multi-wire proportional counters (MWPC) are limited by their low global count-rate capability and are insufficient for imaging X-raycrystal spectroscopy (XCS) experiments. Solid state X-ray pixilated array detectors have been shown to overcome this problem. However, large area solid state 2D detectors with higher performance, increased functionality, and programmable, dual-threshold ...

A large body of historic paper- and film-based seismograms are in storage, containing within them significant stores of seismological information. This information is unavailable for analysis because it needs to be extracted from its analog form and put into modern digital formats. National security needs in nuclear non-proliferation, earthquake modeling, and oil and gas extraction will all benefi ...

Ethylene and propylene are the primary feedstocks for the manufacture of polyethylene and polypropylene, respectively. These olefins represent a major component of the polymer manufacturing cost. Consequently, there is significant economic benefit in minimizing losses of unreacted olefin from the process. Some olefin loss is a result of the need to remove paraffin from the polymerization reactor ...

Novel, inline measurement techniques are needed to improve the quality and performance of new solar cells. Manufacturers today measure cell performance inline under white light conditions, but are unable to obtain the cell response as a function of wavelength without extensive offline testing. They are also unable to extract detailed spatial maps of full-spectrum spectral response. This informatio ...

Rare isotope facilities serve a critical need for a rapidly expanding area of nuclear physics research. Existing rare isotope facilities already provide enough intensity that conventional detector systems have trouble with counting rates while future rare isotope facilities, like the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), will provide particle beams with unprecedented intensities and rates. Cle ...

This proposal outlines a project aimed at providing a radical improvement in ion source technology that can be applied to the mass spectrometric analysis of actinides. The state-of-the-art secondary ion mass spectrometers (SIMS) employ the duoplasmatron ion source to create the primary ion beam for actinide analysis. The duoplasmatron only has sufficient brightness and a small enough energy spre ...

X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy is a widely used and extremely sensitive analytical technique for qualitative and quantitative chemical analysis. Superconducting Transition Edge Sensor (TES) microcalorimeter detectors have now been developed that achieve an energy resolution of 2 eV for 1.5 keV X-rays, which is sufficient to enable the measurement of the small shift of the X-ray line position that ...

To ensure safe and reliable power production by nuclear power plants, a wide variety of materials and components need to undergo inspections and maintenances at pre-determined intervals. Condition based maintenance is highly desirable because it can potentially avoid unnecessarily costly maintenance actions and associated error induced failures. Consequently, it can help achieve nearly all the mai ...

GaN-based devices are the basis of a variety of modern electronics applications, especially in optoelectronics and high-frequency / high-power electronics. These devices are based on epitaxial films grown on single-crystal wafers. The single-crystal wafer substrates are limiting because of their size, expense, mechanical properties and availability. If one could make GaN-based devices over large a ...