Award Data

The primary challenges for creating renewable fuels are the ability to process inexpensive non-food feedstocks into biofuels that meet all quality specification, perform indistinguishably from petroleum-based fuels and are compatible with current infrastructure.Our Phase I project demonstrated the feasibility of producing biofuels from waste greases using a novel hydrothermal, continuous-flow cata ...

In topic 11.b, Dispatchable Geothermal Operations, DOE seeks to enable more widespread deployment of geothermal as a dispatchable energy source.TerraCOH’s CO2 Plume Geothermal (CPG™) and Earth Battery™ technologies are ideally suited to meet DOE’s needs.Conventional geothermal power technology has generally been limited to use as a baseload power source, but with increasing penetration of ...

Rural areas in the United States have under-developed solar power capabilities relative to urban areas due to challenges matching energy demand centers with underutilized land and consequent cost challenges related to smaller installations that lack economies of scale. This project addresses these problems by proposing solar installations that operate synergistically with livestock production oper ...

Automobiles (cars and trucks for instance) are the predominant mode of transportation in the United States. These vehicles are powered by internal combustion engines that consume fossil fuels such as gasoline. Improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines is an ongoing challenge of enormous impact to energy consumption in the world. In order to improve engine efficiency and thus fuel eco ...

Materials behavior is often dominated by highly localized phenomena, and the ability to probe those properties for engineering devices is critical. Often these devices are operating in environments with large differences in temperature and pressure: from the high vacuum and cold of space to the high temperature and high pressure inside a deep water oil well. Here, a transducer capable of measuring ...

The ages of men have been defined by the materials that make up the tools we use, from the ancient stone and iron ages to the modern nuclear and silicon ages. Over these ages, man’s knowledge has been built upon previous observations. The base of this materials knowledge is understanding the relationships between structure- processing-properties-performance. The top of this pyramid is systematic ...

Concerns over global warming due to carbon emissions have spurred an interest in such renewable energy alternatives as hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass. Of all of these, hydroelectric power offers perhaps the greatest potential for supplying a significant portion of our nation's energy needs. To realize this potential, however, this technology needs to expand beyond traditional ...

This proposal addresses a pressing need in the detector development community within experimental high energy physics (HEP). The HEP community has been involved in the development of highly segmented and miniaturized detection elements ever since silicon strip detectors were first invented in the late 1970s. Various experiments have employed silicon detectors in a variety of readout configurations ...

Current catalytic routes to surfactants used in the $32 billion detergents industry are energy intensive and inefficient, with chemical processes that yield desired products with only 30-40% selectivity, giving poor detergency at high energy cost. There exists an opportunity to significantly reduce the energy intensity of laundry detergents production through the design of a hierarchical catalyst ...

The Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is a high-speed computer network serving United States Department of Energy (DOE) scientists and their HPC collaborators worldwide. The ESnet is a multi- domain network over virtual circuits guaranteeing end-to-end data transfer performance and security on the network. This network structure built using VPN connections and IPSEC tunnels is very similar to milita ...