Award Data

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 ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project will develop a new system for fabrication and manipulation of carbon nanotube (CNT) composites. The system will use holographic optical trapping (HOT) with a spatial light modulator (SLM) and a new form of nano-controlled photo-polymerization. This tool will allow the creation of a new class of carbon-nanotube polymer composite materials wit ...

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

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 ...

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

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project shall develop and model phase separating materials for passively-driven graphical displays, which are needed for smart cards that can display graphic images. Nearly all consumer credit cards used today have no functional display. Since the numbers and security codes on the cards cannot be changed, fraudulent use is estimated to be as high as ...

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 ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project will address the critical need for low driving voltage, adaptive materials providing large phase retardation (for ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths) within a sub-millisecond time frame. Two technologically innovative tasks will be pursued in parallel and then merged, resulting in the creation of a new class of optical materials - ...

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 ...

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 ...