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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The cost of dewatering particles is inversely proportional to particle size. Costs dramatically increase as particle size approaches 10

Hydrogen produced today from coal, natural gas, or biomass must be separated and purified outside the reactors using pressure swing absorption (PSA), a process that requires significant additional space and energy. Placing hydrogen-permeable membranes inside the reactors themselves would allow hydrogen to diffuse out, thereby reducing the cost of hydrogen production. In this Phase I effort, Mainst ...

Accurate measurement of consumption profiles for utility services like electricity, water, and gas consumed in their buildings is essential to understand and optimize energy consumption, detect and solve equipment failures and problems, and facilitate predictive maintenance of various utility loads. Currently, multiple sensors and wiring and extensive tracking and monitoring is required to obtain ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...