Award Data

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Scientific research and public service require ground-based measurements of precipitation density, type and rate. But the sought-after accuracy remains elusive and measurements tend to be too sparse to represent high spatial variability or rapidly evolving storms. Existing ground-based weather stations remain bulky and expensive, composed of assemblages of instruments, each dedicated to a specific ...

There is a significant need for lower cost and reliable sensors to continuously monitor indoor and outdoor environmental quality. Such monitoring is critical for evaluating the state and integrity of natural and man-made systems, including groundwater, atmosphere, vadose zone/soil composition, and a variety of emission sources including volcanoes, industrial sites, landfills, oil/gas production. E ...

Commercial sources of rare earth elements include bastnaesite (La, Ce)FCO3, monazite, (Ce, La, Y, Th)PO4, and xenotime, YPO4. However, the processing of these materials to extract and recover the rare earth elements is challenging and very process intensive. However, there are numerous domestic sources of rare earth elements, from waste materials such as coal fly ash, which could be extracted bene ...

To meet performance and cost targets for electric vehicles, substantial improvement is still required in lithium-ion batteries. A low-cost, high-capacity silicon anode will greatly aid in this effort, but current methods for generating functional nano-silicon for anodes use expensive metallurgical, templating, gaseous, or other top-down engineering processes. This project proposes to use the natur ...

The monitoring of gaseous exhaust (e,g., NOx, NH3) and particulate matters (PMs) has been critical in the automotive diesel engine combustion emission control, for which various catalytic converters need be operated efficiently and environment-friendly, including diesel oxidation catalysts (DOC), diesel particulate filters (DPF), and selective catalytic reduction (SCR). For instance, in the DPF, t ...

Metal mesh filters are used to control the transmission of infrared through terahertz radiation in a variety of systems including sensors, cameras, and high-performance telescopes. Currently, high-performance metal mesh infrared filters are fabricated using photolithography but this is a costly and time consuming process and it is limited to filter diameters of 300 mm or less (the largest size tha ...

Rare earth metals and alloys that contain them are a key modern-day material used in many applications such as consumer electronics, computer memory, DVDs, rechargeable batteries, catalytic converters, magnets, and fluorescent lighting. The use of rare earth elements are vital for modern life, but the end products are rarely recycled. Recycling often requires the use of very aggressive solvents or ...