Award Data

The economical use of hydrogen as a transportation and stationary power fuel remains a long-term DOE objective. Energy storage applications in Europe such as wind capture and improved biogas conversion efficiency are also driving significant interest in hydrogen production from renewable sources. New and efficient catalytic processes for hydrogen generation are therefore needed to achieve produc ...

The DOEs & quot;Monitoring Verification and Accounting (MVA) program goal is to confirm permanent storage of CO2 in geologic formations by real-time monitoring should CO2 leak. Remote technologies, effective for atmospheric or above ground CO2 monitoring, are ineffective for subsurface, and it is where leakage can be detected first. By the time leaked CO2 slowly appears on the surface, CO2 may hav ...

The main focus of this STTR is to design, develop, and evaluate high temperature capacitors using novel thermal spray coating processes, which will allow the devices to meet the performance requirements. Multilayer coating architecture will be adopted and the electrodes and dielectric material selections will be screened in Phase I to note material compatibility and high temperature performance. ...

Critical to determining the success of an EGS well is the measurement of the flow distribution along the open-hole length of that well. Knowledge of not only the depth but the spacing of intersected fractures is required in order to determine the sweep efficiency of fluids flowing through the reservoir. Currently, the only device available for measuring fluid flow within a geothermal wellbore is t ...

Many important technology challenges today such as the capacity and life time of batteries require new characterization techniques to understand and improve performance. In the STTR Phase II project, novel x-ray microscope techniques and software are developed to be able to image samples in three dimensions and determine chemical composition and function on a microscopic level. As known from ubi ...

Infrared spectroscopy is the most widely used technique for chemical characterization with a worldwide market of over $1B annually. Conventional infrared spectroscopy suffers, however, from fundamental spatial resolution limits that prohibit its application at the nanoscale. This has prevented widespread use of IR spectroscopy in the growing field of nanoscale materials. The atomic force microsc ...

The US Department of Energy has a stated goal to increase the energy efficiency of turbines, and one well recognized method of achieving this is through the use of ceramic thermal barrier coatings (TBCs). However, state of the art zirconia-based TBCs have a temperature limit of about 1200oC, and new TBC materials that can operate at elevated temperatures of 1300oC and above are needed to continue ...

Current state-of-the-art SRF accelerating cavities require the use of many complex and expensive techniques throughout their fabrication/performance cycle. This project will utilize a novel Additive Manufacturing (AM) process to produce nearly monolithic SRF niobium cavities of arbitrary shape with features such as optimized wall thickness and/or integrated stiffeners, greatly reducing the cost a ...

Small Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) has been an extremely productive materials science probe for several decades and is used extensively by researchers studying a wide range of subjects, including polymers, ceramics, metals and biological macromolecules and functions. However, it is limited to length scales from 1 to 100 nm and requires highly collimated and relatively monochromatic neutron beam ...

This project will develop position-sensitive liquid argon detectors for a range of nuclear physics experiments. A particular need is for large area detectors with good energy, spatial and time resolution. Originally developed for calorimetry and the detection of neutrinos, weakly interacting massive particles and neutrinoless double beta decay, liquefied noble gas (LNG) detectors have ...