Award Data

Copper is a commodity essential to modern society and its production is very energy intensive. Half of U.S. copper consumption goes to electrical, heating, and plumbing infrastructure in building construction and energy use for copper production topped 43 trillion BTUs in the early 1990s. Currently the U.S. imports about 1/3 of the 2.6 billion pounds of copper used annually. This opens our economy ...

Vacuum glazing requires a scratch-resistant Low-E coating. Microscopic pane spacers are required to prevent the two panes from touching under external pressure, but create high contact stresses which can scratch glass and existing Low-E coatings during pane movement with temperature change. Hard pyrolytic coatings can be used, but allow four times more radiant heat loss than sputtered coatings, co ...

Topic 20c of DOEs SBIR solicitation seeks grant applications to develop technologies for the assessment and mitigation of materials degradation in Light Water Reactors in order to extend the service life including methods that can mitigate or predict irradiation and aging effects An important degradation phenomenon that limits the service life and energy production of Light Water Reactor (LWR) ...

Increasing the steam temperature of supercritical boilers from 1,000F to 1,400F can raise the operating efficiency of next-generation AUSC coal-fired power plants from about 32% to about 42% and address compelling environmental issues, while also enhancing national security, domestic employment, economic stability, balance of trade and U.S. GDP through increased use of domestic coal. Low Cr conten ...

Conventional Li-ion cells/batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles have difficulty meeting USABC goals for performance/cost that are required for commercially-viable EV. The prevailing large format pouch/prismatic has the advantage of low packaging weight/volume, 10% at cell level, but is doubled (100% increase) in transitioning to the battery. Aside from the reduced energy density (accommodatio ...

Accelerators used in synchrotron light sources require megawatts of radio-frequency energy. They currently employ vacuum-tube power amplifiers or conventional solid-state amplifiers that are inefficient and therefore consume a great deal of prime electrical power. We will review available transistors, analyze high-efficiency power-amplifier techniques, and experimentally evaluate candidate amplifi ...

Near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM) offers the use of a nano-dimension light energy source with a diameter much smaller than the wavelength of light to achieve resolutions significantly (around 10 times) better than that of the usual optical microscope. NSOM has found wide usages and become an important measurement instrument for nano-technologies, nano-manufacturing, optical technologie ...

It is becoming increasingly apparent that we, as a nation, need to quickly develop smarter solutions to control the overall generation and distribution of electrical energy as power demand across the grid expands in response to the increasing population and the growing prospect of energy intensive technologies coming online. Peak demand spikes occurring regularly throughout the power grid have rea ...

Measurement and efficient control of power consumption of High Performance Computing (HPC) and HVAC subsystems within facilities are less than adequate for meeting newly developing and improving efficiency standards. Energy management systems, including sensors, signal processing, feedback and control are needed to increase efficiency, operational cost and intelligence of facilities. Additionall ...

A Light Water Reactor (LWR) is equipped with control and shutdown rods that are inserted into and withdrawn from the core to control the power level in the reactor. The positioning of the control and shutdown rods is performed via the plants rod control system, which in a typical Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) includes a number of subsystems and components such as the Control Rod Drive Mechanism ...