Award Data

Aerodyne Research Inc. (ARI) and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) propose to design a high- pressure slurry pump for the delivery of biomass solids into a high-pressure hydrothermal reactor for biofuel production. Biomass conversion techniques involving a hydrothermal phase have many advantages over other biomass conversion methods: they do not require the costly sugar release pre- ...

Statement of Problem: The US DOE has set a goal to advance photovoltaics (PV) technology to reach installed costs of less than $1/Watt. This requires module costs below $0.50/ Watt. Thin film PV provides the lowest documented production cost per watt ($0.67) of any PV technology. Module reliability has a direct impact on the levalized cost of energy (LCOE), or the cost of the energy produced by ...

Improved ignition methods are needed for advanced vehicle combustion systems, in particular those that allow reliable ignition of lean mixtures in gasoline engines at elevated pressures. Laser ignition is a candidate technology having the potential to address these needs. However, despite more than 40 years of laser ignition research, the technology is not yet in commercial use. A critical proble ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR/STTR) project targets the development of a novel ultra-high capacity sorbents and technology for CO2 capture and separation from combustion-derived flue gas. In the US, coal-fired power plants represent about 42% of the electricity generated but contribute about 75% of the CO2 emissions. DOE is supporting development of sorbent technologies that will d ...

The remediation of underground nuclear waste storage tanks and associated disposal cribs and trenches at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear waste storage facilities, together with the associated needs to characterize and monitor the chemical compositions of the contaminants, presents a major scientific challenge. Several of these storage tanks are leaking, and significant quantities of w ...

The combination of X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) with x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) provides unique diagnostic analysis of both the structure and chemical composition of complex heterogeneous materials. The penetration of X-rays make this method ideal for studying and optimizing material properties under realistic, real time reaction conditions with simultaneous analysis of reaction pr ...

The high energy physics (HEP) community, scientific and medical communities and the public at large, will benefit from the availability of high sensitivity photo- sensors with improved spatial and temporal resolution that scaled to large areas, and manufactured in a robust, durable compact package at low cost. The Phase I program will address this need, demonstrating feasibility of commercial pro ...

A number of unique non-destructive testing techniques and fundamental research studies are enabled by the modern bright pulsed neutron sources. In addition to all the methods previously developed at continuous neutron sources the pulsed structure of neutron beam enables a number of novel methods with the measurement of neutron energy through the time of flight technique. Despite the fact ...

Development of a solid with high conductivity of Mg2+ cations will allow application of that substance as membrane in magnesium-air batteries. These batteries will be much cheaper, safer, and at the same time store much more energy than lead-, lithium- or sodium batteries with the same weight. Such batteries would be ideal for electric vehicles and for the off-peak storage of renewable elect ...

Due to huge levels of computing parallelism and higher performance per watt, comuting accelerators are crucial for increasing HPC efficiency. This is economically significant for small and medium size manufacturing companies (SMMs) and essential for transition to Exascale computing. However, due to high procurement costs, in-house maintenance of an accelerated HPC cluster is prohibitive for many ...