Award Data

With the increase in the utilization of intermittent renewables such as wind and solar PV, integration of these resources into the existing grids requires a means of leveling the output. Batteries have been targeted as one possible means of achieving this, requiring increases in cycle and calendar life to ensure greater than 15 years of service. Altairnano has been developing large format batteri ...

Solvent extraction by hexane is the most common choice for extraction of oil/lipids from algae. However, hexane is not the best choice of solvent for algae oil extraction because of the need to market byproducts for human and animal consumption. Oil and hexane from the solvent extraction process are separated by distillation/evaporation which is an energy intensive operation. Presence of explosive ...

DOE-ITP Nanomanufacturing Initiative has given high priority to commercializing catalysts for chemical industries. There is ongoing need to develop low cost manufacturing infrastructure to support this objective. Using commercially available nanoparticles and related commercial materials, CMS will fabricate and demonstrate enhanced nanoparticle catalysis. Since all components are commercial scale- ...

This project will develop a unique membrane reactor system for the production of tetrahydrofuran. In 2004 about 200 million kg of tetrahydrofuran were produced. The most widely used industrial manufacturing process for this chemical involves the acid-catalyzed dehydration of 1,4-butanediol. In many applications tetrahydrofuran is used as a solvent, but is sought primarily as a precursor to polyte ...

Distillation is a very valuable chemical engineering unit operation but is energy intensive and capital intensive. This is especially true for removing water from organic and inorganic acids where components either form azeotropes or have small relative volatility differences. With a hybrid robust membrane process we can eliminate azeotropes and process pinch points. By using chemically and therm ...

In crude oil refining, asphaltenes are removed from heavy oil fractions to upgrade the quality of oil by solvent-deasphalting process. Solvents used in the solvent deasphalting process are recovered by either flash evaporation or super critical extraction. These conventional solvent recovery processes are highly energy intensive because of the phase change involved in the separation process. The c ...

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 t ...

Ethylene and propylene are major chemical industry raw materials and consume a great deal of energy related to their production. Significant energy consumption is employed when cryogenically separating ethane from ethylene and propane from propylene. These cryogenic separations are difficult and are both capital and energy intensive. Membrane processes have been previously evaluated for separating ...

Today's Web portals for science only provide sparse coverage of the communities they seek to serve, typically less than 5%, because comprehensive coverage is too hard to do. This project will develop a suite if tools (which we call the X-Portal technology, where X is the community to be served), to make comprehensive coverage workable. A number of clustering methods will be collected, tested and l ...

Luna has developed new class of acceptor materials based on exclusive Trimetasphere carbon nanomaterial (TMS) technology. Trimetasphere carbon nanomaterials, have a trimetallic nitride cluster enclosed within a C80 fullerene (see Figure 1). The metals captured within the cage can be changed allowing TMS-based acceptors to be tuned to more favorably align the molecular orbitals between acceptor and ...