Award Data

Recently, the Generation IV International Forum has established a set of nuclear reactors (advanced nuclear reactors), with main objectives to improve overall reactor safety, efficiency, sustainability, and proliferation resistance for economically viable nuclear energy. These advanced reactor technologies rely on novel fuels and materials that are resistant to radiation damage and corrosive envir ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program aims at development and demonstration of an integrated theoretically/experimentally combinatorial method for the accurate prediction of rheological behaviors of special polymer solutions. In-depth understandings of dynamic responses of the polymer solutions under external shear are essential for development of the “smart” polymer-based add ...

Modern quantum information systems employ optical photons for long distance communication, operating at ambient temperature, between microwave cavities, which house microwave photons used in quantum computing and microwave detection. These optical photons, carried by fiber-optic or free-space links, offer a low-cost, uncooled alternative to bulky, expensive microwave coaxial cables, which are loss ...

For economically viable large-scale production of microalgae based food and biofuel to become a reality, significant improvements in algal productivity need to be achieved. With current regulatory guidelines, large scale outdoor cultivation of microalgae for these products restricts the use of transgenic algal strains, which in the laboratory, have thus far been the primary strategy taken to effec ...

To advance a strong and economical biofuels and bioproducts industry, tools are needed for breeding microalgae to improve phenotypes of commercial interest, including biomass yield, culture stability, harvestability, and accumulation of valuable compounds. This project aims to increase biomass feedstock yields by the phototrophic green alga Scenedesmus obliquus by using classical breeding approach ...

Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) is a powerful and unique approach to characterize the chemical, physical and potentially biochemical properties of materials with the nanometer scale resolution in real-time. A key element for NSOM systems that combine optical spectroscopy with scanning probe microscopy, is the actual probe itself. While many commercial vendors offer off-the-shelf meta ...

A recent report by the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee entitled “Challenges at the Frontiers of Matter and Energy” pointed to the need to better understand hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, often at the mesoscopic scale. Such structures can be studied by x-ray and neutron scattering techniques, but they do not generally yield narrow signals in momentum or energy space. The nat ...

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is one of the primary tools for biological and materials characterization; however, there is an overarching need to push TEM temporal resolution into a ps-range to study physical processes on their fundamental spatial and temporal scales. With state-of-the-art TEM, however, it is not possible to capture a single image with a temporal resolution better than 10 ...

In the setting of altitude-induced hypoxia, operator cognitive capacity degrades and can compromise both individual and team performance. This degradation is linked to falling brain energy (ATP) levels and an increased reliance on anaerobic energy production from glucose. Ketone bodies are the evolutionary alternative substrate to glucose for brain metabolic requirements; previous studies have sho ...

Society at large and DOE in particular have an interest in the continued development and refinement of a smart grid infrastructure that more efficiently and reliably matches electrical resources to demands. While technological advances in recent years have improved the smart grid, these advances have been limited by a lack of granularity of data (e.g. environmental conditions at multiple locations ...