Award Data

Carbon dioxide capture systems are currently being considered to mitigate the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration caused by fossil fuel combustion. The costs to implement and operate these systems must be reasonable to minimize economic impacts. In particular, the required compression systems will consume significant power, and they will require large capital investment. Advanced technol ...

New Generation IV nuclear power plants are being developed that promise to enable nuclear power to achieve its potential as a large scale source of environmentally benign power generation while improving safety and minimizing proliferation risks. These reactors will need large numbers of metallic fuel pins made from uranium alloys, but existing methods for casting these fuel pins are very costly. ...

There are over 350 thousand contaminated sites in the US which will require cleanup by both government and private industry in the next twenty years. The total cost of this environmental site cleanup is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Amongst federal agencies the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Department of Defense (DoD) have the largest cleanup liabilities which amount ...

The negative-electron-affinity (NEA) photocathodes which produce polarized electrons are a vital component of electron accelerators such as that at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and DoE Jefferson Lab. Future systems, such as the International Linear Collider (ILC), will require a polarized electron beam intensity at least 20 times greater than produced by strained GaAs, which is us ...

The proposed SBIR research (Phase I and II) is devoted to developing a laser-based acousto-ultrasonic system for inspection of sealed containers. The system represents a promising technology for improving safety management in anti-terrorism and treaty compliance operations. The system will use a pulsed laser to excite the container and a laser Doppler vibrometer for long stand-off vibratory (ult ...

In ballistic missile defense (BMD), sensor placement and sensor-to-target assignment are daunting tasks; even one missed threat has devastating consequences. The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) seeks innovative algorithms for sensor coordination that recommend placement and response options in near-real time to provide maximum coverage against multiple BMD threats using a minimum number of land and s ...

Diode-Pumped Alkali Laser Systems (DPALS) have great potential for missile defense and other applications. These systems require a uniform, steady, flowing mixture of helium and rubidium vapor at elevated pressure and temperature. Significant challenges exist because rubidium is a very reactive material. In response, our team proposes to develop a contamination-free, all-metal, hermetic, circul ...

Next generation aircraft systems will include weapons, sensors and actuators requiring large amplitude pulse power capability which will exceed the continuous power delivery capacity of most aircraft. Compact, lightweight and efficient power conversion and thermal management systems are required to provide a suitable interface between the aircraft power supply and these pulse power loads. We will ...

The proposed technology: GROK (Generating Reports On Knowledge) combines existing open source research tools to automatically generate reports from a dynamically changing set of documents. GROK presents the generated reports with a novel, uncluttered interface designed to save the analyst time in consuming the knowledge in the report, and finding the next piece of knowledge they need. The approach ...

To accelerate advances in cognitive science, and to facilitate the invention of novel brain-centered technologies, tremendous benefit would be gained by expanding the accessibility of Electroencephalography (EEG) to non-traditional users. A key driver for expanding accessibility is lowering cost while improving ease of use. Recently released systems have lowered cost, but at the expense of reduc ...