Award Data

The conversion of corn and other biomass to fuel grade ethanol not only would reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources but also would be a major industrial application for agricultural products. However, the process of drying the ethanol to fuel grade consumes significant amounts of energy, incurring costs that continue to increase as cost of natural gas increases. This project will deve ...

The need for natural gas continues to grow, and recent increases in petroleum prices have been paralleled by large increases in the price of natural gas. However, natural gas at the source often has high concentrations of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, which must be removed. Although existing commercial polymeric membranes (e.g. cellulose acetate and polysulfone) do a good job of sweetenin ...

In the electrical power, steel production, and aluminum production industries, flame retardant, phosphate-ester hydraulic fluids are used to minimize fires. Although these fluids accomplish the fire-minimization task, they are unstable, which causes performance to suffer with attendant losses in productivity. This project will develop novel, chemically-resistant high-flux membranes that can remo ...

Distillation is a major chemical unit operation and consumer of significant energy. Often, water or another intermediate boiling component can become trapped within the distillation column and accumulate. This causes various operating difficulties such as flooding, slugging, cycling, instability, and an off-spec product. This project will develop a chemically resistant, non-porous water-venting ...

Catalysis plays a substantial role in the synthesis of the most U.S. commodity chemicals, with huge implications for energy usage. Membrane reactors have been proposed for a number of these syntheses. However, to be competitive with conventional technologies, membrane reactors must demonstrate better selectivity, permeability, and/or stability. This project will develop a novel platform with ke ...

The use of ethanol as a fuel would impact U.S. reliance on foreign oil. However, among the economic obstacles to it widespread use are the costs of shipping fuel-grade ethanol by truck. Shipping ethanol by pipeline would be significantly less expensive, but, unfortunately, pipeline ethanol is hydroscopic, which causes too much water to be present in the fuel. This project will develop a simple, ...

The preservation of experimental data gathered by the nuclear physics community is being compromised by the dramatic increase in the rate of data generation. Physicists need to be able to easily archive the data, along with its experimental context and their current analysis procedures, in order to prepare for future breakthroughs in analysis technology and/or potential changes of the group perfo ...

Nitride-based, high-brightness, ultraviolet, visible, and white light emitting diodes are candidate devices for replacing incandescent light bulbs and fluorescent light fixtures in general illumination applications, due to their tremendous energy saving potential, long lifetime, and high efficiency. However, the poor crystalline quality of the nitride epilayers, resulting from severely lattice-mi ...

Tellurium-doped single-crystal ZnSe, or ZnSe(Te), is an important material for fabricating the radiation detectors needed for nuclear physics research. To date, there is no efficient crystal growth technique for producing high-quality, large-diameter, ZnSe single crystals. This project will investigate a novel high-temperature, physical-vapor-transport (HT-PVT) technique to grow large diameter, ...

¿Clean energy¿ is attracting more and more interest, which in turn exerts cost pressure on photovoltaic (PV) manufacturers for more efficient solar panel production. This project will develop a cost-effective technology to produce PV-grade silicon wafers. In Phase I, a non-oxide-based reuseable crucible was developed for the production of high purity, low oxygen content crystalline silicon ing ...