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Concentrating Solar (CS) technologies intend to overcome the prohibitive price/performance of solar energy by focusing sunlight down to small, manageable areas. However, tracking the suns movement across the sky mandates the use of expensive, large, pivoting structures to effectively capture all angles of the suns path. Unfortunately, this necessity greatly hinders the employment of CS technologie ...

For many years, electrically driven heat pumps have proven to be an effective method of extracting heat from ambient air. As air temperature falls, however, heat pump performance falls off, essentially limiting their year round usefulness to warmer climates. In colder climates heat pump-equipped heating systems typically have a secondary means to provide heat, usually natural gas or electricity. ...

CO2 is a plentiful potential feedstock for the synthesis of a number of fuels and chemicals. Unfortunately, reactions utilizing CO2 are often slow, equilibrium limited, and energy consuming. Furthermore, the production of some chemicals and polymer precursors may require multiple process steps. Thus, selection of candidate chemistries and approaches for implementing them is important. In any of th ...

The recycling of CO2, primarily from flue gas, into useful materials is a major technological step towards stemming the damaging effects of burning fossil fuels. However, upgrading CO2 requires a significant input of energy, either directly through heating or indirectly by reacting it with a high-energy co-reactant. Making such a process truly carbon-neutral (or negative) requires the clever use o ...

The United States must import more than 50% of the oil the country consumes. Reliance on foreign oil creates an energy security problem for our country and contributes to trade imbalances. The United States and the rest of the world also face the threat climate change brought about by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. Liquid Light, Inc will conduct research and de ...

Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) systems have emerged as one of the most viable power generation technologies that enable carbon capture and sequestration. However, technological improvements in supporting subsystems are still needed to reduce the capital and operating costs of IGCC plants. The carbon capture system is one of the most expensive components of the IGCC plants; these two ...

The electricity produced from fossil fuels is essential to the prosperity and security of the world. On the other hand, increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations caused by the fossil fuel combustion are causing concerns regarding global warming. Although there are several methods for separating CO2 from the flue gases at existing coal-fired power plants, all of them have significant drawbacks, inc ...

Development of new, more efficient gas turbine engines is a lengthy process of engine test iterations to maximize performance. This engine development cycle time is driven to a large extent by the manufacturing process used to produce the engine hot section turbine components. Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) proposes combining a newly developing rapid manufacturing process technology Electron Beam Melti ...

Light sources for X-Ray science have typically been synchrotrons and accosiated Free Electron Lasers (FEL). While these X-Ray light sources are some of the most versitile and powerful tools for a miriad of scientific study in the fields of chemistry, physics, and biology, they tend to be $100M + facilities. This makes it difficult to do science with coherent X-Rays in ones own laboratory. However, ...

High-brightness x-ray sources are essential tools of scientific discovery in a wide variety of fields, including biology, chemistry, and materials science. These sources rely on high-energy electron beams to generate x-rays, traditionally requiring large, expensive synchrotron facilities. Laser plasma acceleration (LPA) of electrons is characterized by ultra-high gradients, showing great promise f ...