Award Data

This project supports the ARPA-E Mission Area of “improving management, clean-up and disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel”. A series of tests and demonstrations for deep borehole disposal canisters at the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center in Cameron, Texas - coupled with development of a US supply chain and global tech-to-market partnerships - will mature the canister to Techn ...

Biomimetic CO2 to Fuel Enabled by Scalable Catalyst Development and Synthetic Electrochemistry Methane is a primary source of national energy, often in the form of liquid natural gas (LNG), accounting for up to 30% of all energy produced in the United States. Further, LNG boasts a number of benefits over other chemical energy storage methods: it has a higher volumetric energy density than alternat ...

ThinSiC proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of making ultra-thin silicon carbide (SiC) Junction Barrier Schottky Diodes (JBSD) with vastly improved thermal conduction, lower defect density, lower cost of production, and eliminating the need to waste SiC substrates, as done in standard manufacturing methods. Here, ThinSiC will also identify failure modes and unanticipated hurdles in production ...

Water reservoirs often produce methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming. With more reservoirs being constructed to produce electricity, it is important to determine how much methane gas reservoirs emit into the atmosphere. The eddy covariance devices that are frequently used to measure the quantity of methane gas that reservoirs produce are severely limited in the number of loc ...

Problem Statement: The Department of Energy recognizes the importance of advanced and small nuclear reactors for the future of nuclear energy in the United States but acknowledges that the physical protection costs associated with these reactors pose a significant challenge to their deployment. To address this, the DOE is looking to improve nuclear reactor security and reduce physical protection c ...

We propose simulating and constructing a prototype and demonstration brassboard of a Secondary Emission Sensor Module (SESM) for ionizing radiation, as a proof of principle and guide to Phase II and beyond. The simulation and design studies will guide module construction and point to future uses. The module is anticipated to have ~30 stages of sheet dynode with an areal size ~15x15 cm. It will be ...

This project aims to advance and commercially translate technology that uses concentrated solar radiation to convert natural gas directly into high-quality graphite and hydrogen. The solar-driven pyrolysis process involves no catalyst and releases zero CO2 as it captures carbon in the form of high-value graphite in a scalable, roll-to-roll (R2R) process. The pyrolysis process also produces a high- ...

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 ...

Lookin, Inc., in collaboration with National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), proposes to develop a transformative quality control (QC) instrument, a high-throughput terahertz scanner, for in-line QC of fuel cell and electrolyzer membrane electrode assemblies (MEAs) at different stages of roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing. Hydrogen and fuel cell technologies provide clean, portable, high-density ...