Award Data

To monitor for compliance with nonproliferation treaties such as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), several hundred ground stations around the world collect radionuclide aerosols from the atmosphere and measure the isotopic composition to detect, locate, and characterize nuclear events. These stations must process enormous volumes of air to collect minute amounts of the radioactive ...

New types of nuclear power plants under development that to enable nuclear power to provide a large-scale source of environmentally benign power generation while improving safety and minimizing proliferation risks. For best performance, these reactors will require large numbers of uranium alloy fuel pins made with unique geometries. No method currently exists for producing large numbers of fuel pi ...

Detectors and radiation monitors for future high energy and nuclear physics experiments must be able to withstand radiation environments several orders of magnitude harsher than those of any current device. At present, most radiation detectors are based on silicon technology, however, the practical radiation tolerance of silicon falls far short of requirements in future experiments and silicon mus ...

Oxygen enriched air (OEA) is a valuable tool to enhance combustion processes and improve the energy efficiency. OEA reduces the presence of parasitic nitrogen and therefore flame temperature and associated heat transfer is higher with OEA. A membrane process is the most energy efficient way to make low end OEA (25-35%). Studies show that using 35% OEA reduces fuel consumption and CO2 generation by ...

Actionable understanding of system behavior in the subsurface is required for a wide spectrum of societal and engineering needs by both commercial firms and government entities. These needs include, for example, water resource management, precision agriculture, contaminant remediation, unconventional energy production, CO2 sequestration monitoring and climate studies. Such actionable understanding ...

The subsurface plays a critical, multifaceted role in USA energy security. The subsurface contains energy resources (conventional and unconventional hydrocarbons as well as geothermal) and provides hundreds of years of safe storage capacity for carbon dioxide (CO2). As demonstrated by the impact of domestic non-conventional hydrocarbon production over the past ten years both USA energy security an ...

Ethylene and propylene are major chemical industry raw materials and consume a great deal of energy related to their production. It is estimated that 250 trillion BTU/yr are consumed in olefin/paraffin separations. In 2011 worldwide ethylene and propylene production was about 140 and 70 million tons respectively. Historically, membrane processes for separating olefins and paraffins have been demon ...

Future nuclear power plant designs call for large numbers of metallic fuel pins made from uranium alloys. Existing methods for casting these pins are very slow and costly. This project aims to enable largescale production of metallic nuclear fuel by developing an innovative continuous casting process. We are developing a continuous casting method that uses innovative process equipment, instrumenta ...

The problem being addressed in this proposal is the current extensive use of energy hungry hot water heaters in both residential and commercial building in the United States. To date, attempts to create a low energy hybrid hot water heater (HWH) have resulted in hot water heaters that have high differential prices and significant noise and maintenance issues resulting in low sales and low value pe ...

Increased electricity demand amid infrastructure development restrictions continues to foster innovation for distributed generation. Whereas pumped hydro installations are fixed locations, battery, thermal, compressed air, and flywheel storage can be mobile and competitive if they are cost effective, reliable, and safe, and have regulatory approvals and industry acceptance. Improvements to effici ...