Award Data

There is a growing demand for power electronics that can operate under the high temperature and high power conditions that will be encountered in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV). As the coolant temperature used to dissipate heat from electronics increases, the operation of power semiconductor devices such as Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs) becomes severely limited in order that the safe ...

Carbon dioxide is monitored with high precision at hundreds of monitoring stations, world-wide. Those measurements rely upon frequent calibration using high pressure gas cylinders, which must be certified and then shipped to remote locations. Current calibration procedures are both labor intensive and expensive. Continuous monitoring of CO2 at remote locations presents particularly difficult cali ...

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 ...

New solid-state photomultipliers (SSPMs) need compact integrated circuitry for readout if such photodetectors are going to be implemented in high-energy physics, nuclear physics, or nuclear medical imaging applications. The aim of this work is to significantly improve the bandwidth in reading out arrays of SSPMs by developing a custom ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). This ASIC will ...

The oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy conversion system has the highest potential of providing efficient renewable energy in the form of electric power but its efficiency to recover a wider range of wave energy frequency and amplitudes must be improved to make the system economics viable. The efficiency can be improved if the OWC wave energy systems can be

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

Stored nuclear waste must be retrieved from storage, treated, separated into low- and high-level waste streams, and finally put into a disposal form that effectively encapsulates the waste and isolates it from the environment for a long period of time. Before waste retrieval can be done, however, waste composition will need to be characterized so that proper safety precautions can be implemented ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR/STTR) project targets the development of a novel technology for CO2 capture and separation from combustion-derived flue gas. In the US, coal-fired power plants represent about 50% of the electricity generated but contribute about 80% of the CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions are responsible for climate change. The Department of Energy is supporting developme ...

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 ...

As the dimensions of fundamental scientific and technological structures and processes become smaller, research in these areas is often limited to a few very large and costly particle accelerator facilities. A revolutionary approach utilizing photonic band-gap (PBG) microstructures offers the opportunity to develop compact highgradient inexpensive accelerators. A unique opportunity of this proposa ...