Award Data

PFAS coatings have been widely used for producing consumable food-related packaging paper and tableware because of their good water and oil resistance. However, the potential risks associated with PFAS leaking during packaging usage and recycling threaten food safety and human health. The Creekside Environmental Products-Mississippi State University (MSU) Team proposes the development of PFAS-free ...

This project will develop and prototype a new class of lightweight, high-performance wave energy converters for short-duration deployment and installation in smaller-scale applications. It is anticipated that the size of the wave energy converter will be in meter or submeter scale, the weight is in kilogram level or less, while the output power will be 5~10 W/m3 or 50~100 mW/kg. The novel energy h ...

Iron (Fe) & steel production accounts for 7% of total industry CO2 emission. Currently, blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) route produces 71% of global crude steel production. However, this process uses carbon (usually coke) as the reductant, which binds with oxygen in Fe ore and generates CO2. Direction reduction of ore (DRI) routes reduces Fe ore to sponge Fe via a solid-state process u ...

In order to accelerate widespread electric vehicle adoption, improving battery energy densities, charge rates, manufacturing costs, and safety is imperative. Herein, we propose a scalable manufacturing process to improve LIB cell design using 3-D electrode architectures which will minimize inactive material (30% decrease) leading to a 15% increase in cell energy density (330 Wh/kg) and a 10% decre ...

There is a growing need for a commercially available high-density superconducting flex cable for a variety of ultra-sensitive, high pixel count instruments/focal plane arrays for the study of space as well as quantum computing and quantum information processing. However, traditional flex circuit manufacturing techniques and tools cannot achieve the high channel density necessary for these customer ...

Approximately 21 billion barrels of produced water are generated each year in the United States. A lot of produced waters contain significant concentrations of sodium, magnesium, calcium, and other cations. A sufficient treatment will not only harvest the metals, but also provide freshwater for irrigation, municipal demands, mining, livestock, and manufacturing. The currently mature technologies f ...

"To enable the future needs of efficient computing for edge data centers, Flexnode and its partners, the University of Maryland (UMD), Boeing, Iceotope, SHoP Architects, and Arup, propose to develop a prefabricated modular micro data center with unprecedented energy efficiency and power density. The proposed system leverages four key component and system-level technology advancements: (a) a novel, ...

Current farmland scouting methods, mainly including manual scouting and sporadic low-resolution imaging techniques, fail to provide near-real-time, unmanned and precisely-localized detection of biofuel crop stressors, such as herbivores and weeds attacks, ultimately causing significant losses in crop yields up to 50% and leading to overspray of chemicals everywhere. General statement of how this p ...

Statement of the problem or situation that is being addressed At the initial phase of a carbon storage project, there is a strong need to understand natural seismicity risks prior to any CO2 injection, preferably prior to making large investments in developing the storage project. Current processes to understand seismicity risks are highly specialized, labor intensive, time constrained, and expens ...

This proposal primarily targets a well-rounded approach of ‘design for manufacturing’ and ‘design for reliability’ for photovoltaic (PV) microinverters by leveraging the fast-switching and low-loss properties of the emerging wide band gap (WBG) Silicon Carbide (SiC) and Gallium Nitride (GaN) power semiconductors. It is aimed at substantially reducing the cost of bill of material (BOM) from ...