Award Data

Statement of Problem: The US DOE has set a goal to advance photovoltaics (PV) technology to reach installed costs of less than $1/Watt. This requires module costs below $0.50/ Watt. Thin film PV provides the lowest documented production cost per watt ($0.67) of any PV technology. Module reliability has a direct impact on the levalized cost of energy (LCOE), or the cost of the energy produced by ...

Improved ignition methods are needed for advanced vehicle combustion systems, in particular those that allow reliable ignition of lean mixtures in gasoline engines at elevated pressures. Laser ignition is a candidate technology having the potential to address these needs. However, despite more than 40 years of laser ignition research, the technology is not yet in commercial use. A critical proble ...

Electrons play a very key role in plasma chemistry and dynamics of low temperature plasmas. Improved capability for measuring electron number density, ne, and electron energy distribution function, EEDF, in weakly ionized low temperature plasmas would benefit both fundamental study and application areas. For example, the capability would directly benefit emerging research targeted at modifying and ...

The feasibility for fusion as a practical energy source needs to be enhanced significantly by removing some of the restrictions that low-temperature superconductors put on the fusion magnet systems. This can be done by using high-temperature superconductors, allowing for much larger temperature margins, a higher magnet performance and less mechanical degradation during operation. There are curren ...

There is significant opportunity for energy efficiency improvements in the industrial and manufacturing sectors in the U.S., both from the production and consumption perspective. Higher energy density battery materials will play a role in both, through improved storage of electricity from renewable sources, the enabling of electric vehicles, and through the development of longer lasting, higher po ...

Wind power has an important role in satisfying the power needs of the United States. Since wind power is a clean renewable source of energy, it also serves an important role in reducing dependence on fossil fuels, in particular foreign oil supplies, as well as reducing greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. Unfortunately, significant maintenance costs, recently highlighted by a series of blade failu ...

Ice crystals can form spontaneously from the freezing of water droplets at temperatures colder than -38

This SBIR/STTR project delivers an ultra-low power structural health monitoring (SHM) system that uses autonomous, wirelessly embedded sensors to monitor and assess structural integrity in wind turbine blades. EASE features impedance-based active SHM, which is highly sensitive to damage like cracks, delimitations, mass variations, fastener failures and stiffness changes. Blades are the only wind t ...

Long term stable and cost effective distribution of precision timing signals with better than 100-fs precision has been a challenging task for many years in fundamental and applied science. With the dawn of fourth generation light sources, such as seeded X-ray Free Electron Lasers (X-FEL), which are currently in design and construction in the US and around the world femtosecond timing distribution ...

Bright coherent light sources in the soft x-ray region of the spectrum are useful for a variety of applications of interest to DOE in the basic sciences, nanoscience and biology, and for technological applications. At Free-Electron Laser Facilities, peak power output of the x-ray pulses is enhanced by using a mid-infrared laser pulse instead of a near-infrared pulse. The current front end for mid- ...