Award Data

Passive microwave sensors aboard satellites provide valuable information regarding weather conditions by measuring atmospheric attenuation over a broad range of frequencies from 0-200 GHz. Additional ground-based sensors are desirable to provide complementary upward looking measurements that can be used to refine existing attenuation models. Operating over such a large bandwidth, however, places ...

Industrial hydrogen production relies primarily on natural gas and hydrocarbon feedstocks to drive the various reaction chemistries that lead to hydrogen generation. Carbon dioxide, the ultimate co- product when such feedstocks and processes are employed, necessarily becomes a major contaminant of the generated hydrogen. Thus, carbon dioxide isolation and removal is an important process step in ...

Inductive pickup loops are one of the primary magnetic diagnostics in modern fusion concepts. To convert the voltage measurement from the inductive pickup loop to a measurement of magnetic field, the loop voltage must be integrated. While simple in principle, in practice several factors make the integration difficult, especially when there are large scale differences between the fast and slow magn ...

Advanced rotary shear technologies from this project will reduce the cost of reactor-ready feedstocks and improve the energy balance for advanced biofuels, thus moving the nation towards import oil independence.

This project will develop high performance sealing plugs for use in deep borehole disposal of nuclear waste and commercial wells. The technology provides a high strength, high corrosion resistant well sealing material superior to conventional cements.

With no moving parts other than a syringe pump, this tool will allow for the reliable measurement of flow rate as a function of depth within a geothermal wellbore and thus provide for improved reservoir management. By improving wellbore flow measurements, predictions of well performance will dramatically improve and EGS energy production will become more reliable and more cost effective.

A high energy density capacitor with superior life and reliability will be developed that is a key component of power semiconductor inverter circuits, used in automotive hybrid and electric vehicles, rail transit, wind power generators, photovoltaics, and transportable energy storage systems for grid applications.

The problem being addressed in this proposal is the existing extensive use of energy hungry hot water heaters in both residential and commercial building in the United States. In addition, any attempts to date to create a low energy hybrid hot water heater (HWH) have resulted in hot water heaters so loud that they cannot feasibly be used in residential applications. This project entails the develo ...

The development of large-area (m2) photodetectors with time resolutions of picoseconds (10-12 seconds) and submillimeter space resolutions would open new opportunities in collider detectors at the Energy Frontier, kaon and neutrino experiments at the Intensity Frontier, photon detection in detectors at the Cosmic Frontier, and applications with a large impact on societal issues such as low-dose-r ...

An improved method is needed for the detection of radiological materials for nuclear nonproliferation and safety. Current techniques using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), while robust, are limited in range due to pulse energy and diffraction. Furthermore, atmospheric broadening of the spectral lines reduces the sensitivity of the detection scheme, such as optical emission spectroscopy ...