Award Data

Selection of the Plasma-Facing Component (PFC) material composition is a primary consideration in future fusion reactor design. The PFC materials must not only withstand the harsh operating conditions of the reactor, but the amount of tritium uptake experienced by the PFC during operation is a significant factor. Proper operation, safety and environmental impact mandate that t ...

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 ...

The ultimate goal of the project is to demonstrate that the rotating liner engine (RLE) can increase fuel efficiency in heavy duty vehicles by about 3.5-4% at full load, about 25% at idle, and about 10% for an average duty cycle, can reduce CO2, NOx and PM and reduce engine wear. Design already completed. The face seal is the only technical challenge of the concept, and the main design features pe ...

Solar water heaters are a well-established renewable energy technology that has been widely adopted outside of the United States. Here we propose to significantly improve the evacuated solar tube collectors (ETC) by utilizing the dry-drawable carbon nanotube (CNT) sheets for solar energy absorption and CNT multifunctional nanocomposites with functional layers of heat accumulators and heat transpo ...

A significant portion of the waste heat from engine exhaust can be recovered using thermoelectric generators to achieve up to 10% gain in automotive mileage. There have been several efforts underway on this front but most have focused on demonstrating thermoelectric generators using bulk materials that consume significant amount of raw materials and are prone to failures due to thermal expansion, ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project proposal focuses on attending to the need of photovoltaic power sources that can provide both high power and stability, be of low cost, low weight, flexible, and scalable to cover large areas. Organic photovoltaic (OPV) parallel tandem photovoltaic cells have a theoretical expected power conversion efficiency rivaling or even exceeding today

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 ...

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 ...