Award Data

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 hardness limit of silicon falls far short of requirements in future high ener ...

Traditional means for production of electricity from geothermal (GT heat use hot water naturally occurring in some locations at or near Earths surface or hot water obtained from deep wells. The former limits geothermally produced electricity to very few locations in areas of significant volcanic activity. The latter offers more application sites but the extreme cost of the required deep, high-tem ...

Ethylene and propylene are the primary feedstocks for the manufacture of polyethylene and polypropylene, respectively. These olefins represent a major component of the polymer manufacturing cost. Consequently, there is significant economic benefit in minimizing losses of unreacted olefin from the process. Some olefin loss is a result of the need to remove paraffin from the polymerization reactor ...

The United States Department of Energy is developing several devices to advance the development of fusion energy. Key components of these systems are the large, complex magnet systems used to shape and confine the plasma. Electrical insulations are needed to ensure that these magnets operate reliably over long periods of time, and improvements in shear strength and radiation resistance will be c ...

Up to 2700 terawatt-hours per year of geothermal electricity generation capacity has been shown to be available within North America, typically with wells drilled into geologically active regions of the earths crust where this energy is concentrated (Huttrer, 2001). Of this potential, about half is considered to have temperatures high enough for conventional (steam-based) power production, while ...

Synchrotron-based science has had a great scientific impact and will continue to have great impact going forward. In spite of the large investment in the 3rd generation light sources, most beam lines do not preserve the sources phase profile or brightness all the way to the sample. For these high brightness light sources, errors are almost completely due to distortion in the front-end optics cau ...

Mixed phase clouds, i.e. those that contain water droplets and ice crystals, make up a large fraction of the clouds that are found over the Arctic region. The radiative impact of these clouds on climate modulation is highly sensitive to the relative mix of water and ice, the size distribution of these hydrometeors and the shape and optical properties of the ice crystals. The properties of mixed ph ...

Current energy storage devices have energy densities that are barely sufficient for low cost electric-vehicles and rely on lithium ion batteries that use flammable, unsafe, liquid electrolytes. However, in order to replace liquid electrolyes in lithium batteries for hybrid electric power train systems, solid polymer electrolytes, which have the advantages of safety and flexibility, must attain con ...

The native format of netCDF generated from regional climate models (RCMs) is not readily accessible or useable by the general public who may not have analytical tools to plot, visualize, or analyze the data. In response to this need, the overall long term objective of this study is to make high resolution climate change simulations model results in the North American Regional Climate Change Assess ...

This proposed work addresses the needs of a short pulse, tunable and monochromatic extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray beamline that is table-top, low cost and easy-to-use for advanced material and nano- device studies using photoemission spectroscopy and nano-imaging techniques. The short-pulse and short- wavelength nature of this source enables capturing ultrafast dynamics in materials and nano-d ...