Award Data

Coal is an abundant source of energy in the USA, but is not currently utilized effectively. Recently, the DOE has begun a carbon sequestration program is to develop advanced CO2 capture and compression technology for existing coal-fired plants with increased efficiency with no more than a 35% increase in the cost of electricity. This will require new approaches and technologies to be successful. N ...

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 fabrication of high-quality ultra thin (~20 micron) diamond crystals targets for 9 GeV highly polarized photon beams is an outstanding challenge. Current state of the art polishing/thinning techniques are not successful in thinning single crystal diamond to such dimension because of its extreme hardness and chemical inertness. These techniques create significant stresses surface and sub-surfac ...

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are emerging as attractive alternatives to traditional HDDs due to there reduced power consumption and potential for increased performance. SSDs have the potential to improve the performance of both Checkpoint Restart (CPR) and the Metadata Server (MDS) for high performance File Systems, e.g., Lustre. However, the write performance of SSDs is relatively poor (compared to ...

Providing a reliable, clean and economical energy source is a priority of the US government. The challenge is to use coal, a secured and economical energy source, to produce clean hydrogen fuel to support domestic and global green economy with near-zero emission. Conventional separation technology and even developmental technology do not satisfy all of the requirements for hydrogen production from ...

Higher operating temperature for the gas turbine engine is needed for enhanced efficiency, lower emission and increased performance goal. The current state-of-the-art thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) are not adequate to provide the needed protection for the metallic components of the turbine engine operating at higher TBC surface temperature (>1300

Energy consumption is quickly becoming one of the primary bottlenecks of compute clusters and supercomputers. The DOE is a primary developer and consumer of these power hungry supercomputers, however smaller cluster machines are also widely used through other government agencies and industries. Yet, there are few power profiling tools that allow application developers transparent insight into the ...

Solid state lighting is being promoted as the ultimate lamps of future. Though the internal quantum efficiency of OLED devices is almost 100%, external efficiency is a mere 36% mainly because of poor light out-coupling (~40%) from the device. Improvement in light out-coupling to >70% and further reducing the manufacturing cost will rapidly accelerate the commercialization of the OLED technology. T ...

Currently the commercially available technologies for H2 separation such as pressure swing adsorption and cryogenic distillation are very energy intensive. Membrane technologies can be very energy efficient; but for high selective membranes low flux and high cost are the major challenges that frustrate commercialization. Recently, cermet has shown promise because of less precious metal usage and m ...

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