Award Data

Refrigeration and air conditioning in buildings, industry, and transportation account for approximately 10 quads of U.S. primary energy consumption. In addition, current mass marketed air conditioning and refrigeration cycles utilize environmentally harmful refrigerants that are strong green house gases. This subtopic seeks innovative approaches to achieve high efficiencies and net-zero direct GHG ...

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 ...

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 ...

Increased use of hydrogen as a fuel can provide benefits to our nations energy security, the environment and economic growth. Toward hydrogen economy, an innovation in hydrogen separation technology is needed in the production of hydrogen. Current separation technologies for industrial hydrogen production mainly include pressure swing adsorption process and the cryogenic separation process, which ...

SelfPowered wireless sensors are needed on hightemperature rotating turbine engine components for real time sensing of component health. Conventional temperature, pressure and strain sensors use wired connections and slip rings which are not desired. Conventional wireless technology uses transmitters containing active semiconductors which degrade upon high temperature exposure. Although numerous w ...

Consumption of coal and other fossil fuels is a major contributor to emission of carbon dioxide and criteria pollutants. Coal gasification technologies equipped with carbon capture and sequestration (CC & amp;S) technology can help address both these problems. However, current coal gasification concepts suffer from a combination of low efficiency and high capital cost. TIAX proposes to investigate ...

Recent developments in synchrotron radiation sources have generated an urgent need for high performance X-ray detectors. While new imaging devices have been developed that employ high performance CCD sensors, what is currently lacking in these detectors is an adequate X-ray-to-light converter that will provide high performance in terms of spatial resolution, high efficiency and, perhaps most impor ...

Measurement of the longitudinal charge distribution of short electron bunches moving with relativistic velocities is among the major challenges in the domain of accelerator diagnostics. The strict control of the longitudinal distribution is critical for the operation of X-ray Free Electron Lasers (FELs) and Energy Recovery Linacs (ERLs). Several techniques are presently employed; however, none of ...