Award Data

Ensuring adequate agricultural productivity in the face of an increasing human population is a major concern with implications for both production of bioenergy products (Jones and Hinsinger, 2008) and global food security. Increasing agricultural productivity requires a stronger understanding of soil biogeochemical processes that impact plant nutrient availability. We propose development of an inn ...

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 ...

Software and hardware flaws can be exploited to make programs perform unintended computations or leak sensitive data. We propose to counter these threats by isolating libraries and other program units inside a single process. The developer will insert source-level annotations that i) map code and data units to compartments and ii) capture how each compartment is intended to interact with others, i ...

CONCUR develops a computational framework for assessing and characterizing urban environments stability or fragility in response to volatility and stress, identifying specific weaknesses as well as key tipping points which could lead to rapid systemic failure. CONCUR explicitly models urban environments as emergent complex systems, focusing attention on the critical triggers that could lead to rap ...

Methods for interconversion between cell types (cellular reprogramming) are currently discovered through resource intensive trial and error. Experiments may test a multitude of transcription factors to identify correct combinations that influence cell fate. In addition, reprogramming approaches commonly use stem cell intermediates such as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are generated ...

Silicon wafers are the single largest cost component within solar photovoltaic modules. To maintain the cost reduction targets outlined in industrial roadmaps, wafer costs need to be significantly reduced. Reducing the cost of wafers requires reducing the kerf-loss and wafer thickness while increasing throughput in tools for processing silicon ingots into wafers. The proposed technology augments t ...

Nutrient pollution of lakes, estuaries, coastal areas and other water bodies frequently results in algae blooms, sometimes toxic, and often leading to anoxia, fish kills and dead zones. Efforts to reign-in nutrient pollution, in particular of phosphorus, P, have been lagging and noxious algae blooms make headlines almost daily all over the US and world. This is a problem attracting increasing atte ...

Electrical power is scarce at most offshore locations, so oceanographers design buoy systems to consume very little power in order to reduce the frequency of ship voyages to replace batteries. These expensive voyages can cost several tens of thousands of dollars per day. Solar and wind power can recharge batteries, but harvested power is limited and each source has shortcomings. Wave energy operat ...

Wind and solar electricity are gaining traction in the marketplace, but the electricity available from these sources is out of synch with demand Protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (PCECs) operating at intermediate temperatures (400 - 650°C) have enormous potential for electricity storage and delivery by reversible operation between electrolysis and fuel cell modes and therefore stand to addre ...

The spatiotemporal quantification of coupled hydro-biogeochemical processes between soil, plant, and atmosphere requires advances in remote sensing technologies and in understanding the link between the measured signals (ie spectral traits) and the hydro-biochemical properties While current UAV-based remote sensing technologies provide spectral reflectance in the visible- short wave infrared (VSWI ...