Award Data

Purpose: The need for all students to be well prepared in science has been well documented. The purpose of this project is to develop a solar learning lab platform to apply learning in the area of energy science. Project Activities: The researchers will design curricula materials, multi-media video clips, lesson plans, student activities, assessments, and a back-end system to house data generated ...

This project develops and evaluates a software interface into the social media website Facebook that is independently usable by individuals with intellectual disabilities, including those with limited or no literacy skills. The software system provides a multimedia (e.g., voice recording, icons, text-to-speech) interface, a customizable filtering tool to limit screen features, and computer-generat ...

This project develops and tests the utility of Schedule Manager, a remote schedule management and monitoring prototype designed to use mobile technology to enable real-time, “on-the-fly” changes to an individual’s schedule from remote locations and to monitor adherence to scheduled activities by individuals with intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Difficulty with time management is one ...

This project develops an Internet-based system for managing and delivering “on demand” activity prompts to individuals with intellectual disabilities. This product users “cloud” (web based) technology to deliver visual and audio prompts to individuals with cognitive disabilities via a thin-client prompting application that can run on iOS or Android mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad, ...

This project develops a small mobile personal cooling system that can be worn conveniently by individuals with heat-related disabilities. The successful development of this mobile technology: (1) supports access, promotes integration, and facilitates the independence of individuals with disabilities in the workplace and educational settings, and during recreational activities; (2) provides increas ...

Aerodyne Research Inc. (ARI) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) plan to develop an efficient catalytic system to convert biomass into olefins for the production of hydrocarbons in the gasoline, diesel, and/or jet fuel range by way of catalytic fast pyrolysis. Conversion of lignocellulosic feedstocks from resources as varied as corn stover, grasses, wood, and sugar cane bagasse is ...

Current efforts of DOE to create future lightweight systems in order to attain significant energy saving, cost reduction and improved efficiency requires development of advanced nanostructured lightweight composite materials with improved ductility and high tensile strength. Magnesium (Mg) with a density of approximately two-thirds of aluminum is the lightest structural material. Despite this adva ...

Concentrating Solar (CS) technologies intend to overcome the prohibitive price/performance of solar energy by focusing sunlight down to small, manageable areas. However, tracking the suns movement across the sky mandates the use of expensive, large, pivoting structures to effectively capture all angles of the suns path. Unfortunately, this necessity greatly hinders the employment of CS technologie ...

Large-scale wind turbine designs are significantly constrained by transportation limits. As utility scale wind turbines have developed, they have steadily increased in size and have seen a steady decrease in cost of energy. However, further increases in on-shore turbine size beyond 3MW are prohibited by hard limits in the size of components that can be economically transported to the wind farm sit ...

The capability to efficiently remove carbon dioxide from industrial gas streams is desirable for a wide variety of applications. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a byproduct of many industrial processes associated with the transformation of fossil fuels into usable products such as heat, electricity, and chemicals. In addition to being a greenhouse gas pollutant, the presence of carbon dioxide in chemical ...