Award Data

Reactive absorption-based carbon dioxide capture processes using solvents is the preferred technology for large scale capture of carbon dioxide in flue gases from coal-fired power plants. This Small Business Innovation Research project targets the development of mitigation strategies to decrease the quantity of aerosols that are formed from such post-combustion capture systems in the presence of s ...

With 27% of the world’s coal reserves located in the United States, development of a clean, efficient, and economically viable pathway to coal utilization is of strategic importance. Development of advanced coal-to-liquids technologies provides this direct pathway, while improving energy security, reducing coal environmental footprint, and promoting economic development directly in the communiti ...

This SBIR/STTR project targets the development of a validated modeling/design tool for predicting the behavior of spouted fluidizied beds for chemical looping combustion/gasification applications of coal and biomass fuels and fuel blends. Chemical looping is an advanced energy conversion technology for generating a pure CO2 effluent, which can then be sequestered or utilized. A spouted fluidized b ...

Despite incremental improvements in the technology, polyfluorosulfonic acid (PFSA) membranes are still not an ideal fuel cell membrane material and their drawbacks (e.g., high cost and low mechanical strength at high temperature) require development of alternative polymer electrolyte membranes (PEMs) for successful adoption of fuel cells as reliable and inexpensive energy conversion devices. The g ...

The rate of climate change in the Arctic is larger than elsewhere on Earth. The Arctic has unique and complex couplings and feedbacks between the surface and the atmosphere that in turn modify the radiative balance there differently than elsewhere. Current understanding holds that an increase in downwelling long wave radiative flux, driven by increased water vapor and clouds, may be accelerating c ...

This Phase II Small Business Innovation Research project targets the development of a technology for segregating fuelbased contaminants (char and ash) from oxygen carrier material in the context of chemical looping combustion application. In chemical looping, the wellmixed solids that flow from the fuel reactor consisting of char, ash, and oxygen carrier particles cannot be completely separated in ...

Current methods for manufacturing carbon fiber rely on high temperature ovens for the stabilization/oxidation and carbonization steps, which tend to be slow and energy intensive. As such, carbon fiber composites are expensive then steel, which limits their use in costsensitive, highvolume industrial applications such as automobiles, oil and gas, and infrastructure. To reduce energy consumption and ...

Combining information from disparate sensors can lead to better situational awareness and improved inference performance; unfortunately, traditional multi-sensor fusion cannot capture complex dependencies among different objects in a scene, nor can it exploit context to further boost performance. Integrating context information within a fusion architecture to reason cohesively about scenes of inte ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to design, develop, and demonstrate a portable, non-invasive, real-time sensor to assess the chemical and physical health of solid rocket motors as a function of age without affecting the motors integrity nor having direct contact with the propellant. In Phase II, a sensor to monitor specific gas species that are markers of the chemical and mechanical aging pr ...

The MDA is in need of a robust, holistic Electronics Health Monitoring (EHM) solution that can address mission readiness concerns. Nokomis solution to this problem provides unique information to operators and maintainers and a more complete picture of component readiness. Nokomis novel methodologies for determining device health, whereby changes in unintended RF emissions signatures are leverage ...