Award Data

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 ...

Atomically Precise Manufacturing will bring enormous energy savings through improved efficiency in power generation and use, via light weighting, reduced friction and wear, and a host of other improvements in materials and active mechanisms. Atomically Precise Manufacturing will bring considerable benefit to our technology, economy, and standard of living. However, significant technological develo ...

To increase the utilization of electric vehicles, the US Department of Energy is seeking to reduce the cost of electric vehicle batteries to less than $125/kWh by 2022. To achieve this goal, the costs of cathode materials, which account for approximately 30% of the cost of vehicle batteries, must be reduced significantly. To address the challenge of lowering the costs of advanced lithium battery c ...

As fossil fuels continue to serve as a major energy source, CO2 capture for utilization or sequestration is the only option to mitigate the CO2 emissions to the environment. However, the separation of CO2 from flue gas is an extremely costly proposition with existing technologies. Advanced membrane technology may address this challenge, if new membranes with CO2 permeance of 4,500 gpu and CO2/N2 s ...

Understanding the genomic basis of economically important plants for growth time, crop yield, responses to drought and disease resistance is of critical importance to sustaining and improving food supplies for humans and livestock, as well as insuring sufficient raw material availability for industries that depend on plant materials, such as biofuel manufacture. Current computational methods for a ...

The ultimate goal of the project is to demonstrate that the rotating liner engine (RLE) can increase fuel efficiency in heavy duty vehicles by about 3.5-4% at full load, about 25% at idle, and about 10% for an average duty cycle, can reduce CO2, NOx and PM and reduce engine wear. Design already completed. The face seal is the only technical challenge of the concept, and the main design features pe ...

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 ...

The demands of the solar energy market require the development of advanced photovoltaic technologies. The DOE is seeking to develop organic PV technologies that are more efficient, long lasting and cost competitive to traditional ones. Organic PV (OPVs) have become well recognizedas an important candidate for future solar power products, although their efficiency is not exceeding 6-7%. The overal ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project proposal focuses on attending to the need of photovoltaic power sources that can provide both high power and stability, be of low cost, low weight, flexible, and scalable to cover large areas. Organic photovoltaic (OPV) parallel tandem photovoltaic cells have a theoretical expected power conversion efficiency rivaling or even exceeding today

The unique properties of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWNTs) including exceptional mechanical strength, electron mobility and nanoscale dimensions make them excellent candidates for use in wide-ranging applications including polymer additives, transparent conductive films, nanoelectronics, sensing, nano-optics, transistors, filters, hydrogen storage, drug and gene delivery, oscillators, field e ...