Award Data

Replacement of petroleum based vehicles with fuel cell electric vehicles operating on hydrogen produced from domestically available resources would dramatically decrease emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants as well as reduce dependence on oil from politically volatile regions of the world. One major inhibitor to a hydrogen society is the lack of infrastructure, which requires hydroge ...

In order to make large scale commercial production of microalgae based commodity food and fuel products, significant strides in algal productivity need to be achieved. With current regulatory guidelines, large scale outdoor cultivation of microalgae for these products restricts the use of transgenic algal strains, which in the laboratory thus far have been the primary strategy taken to effectively ...

Vast amounts of impaired waters are produced in gas and oil wells. Energy-efficient desalination systems are needed to treat these waters to produce fresh water and concentrated brines. Mineral recovery systems can also yield valuable critical materials as byproducts. Savengy Technologies and University of Central Florida (UCF) will develop and commercialize an energy efficient system to treat sha ...

Tristructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel is a key component of advanced small modular nuclear fission reactors due to its inherent safety at high temperatures and irradiation levels and decreased proliferation risk relative to current reactor fuels. A more efficient cooling method for TRISO fuel compacts would increase heat transfer, allow for an increase in fuel density, and further improve accident ...

The next generation of Cosmic Ray Background detectors require large area filters in the microwave part of the spectrum between 100 to 300 Gigahertz. These filters are essential to the extremely sensitive detection of the cosmic background radiation at the level of one part in a billion and will require precise fabrication of metallic structures on a polymer substrate. These filters will be placed ...

Idaho National Laboratory (INL), under funding from the Critical Materials Institute, has developed a US patented technology to reclaim valuable metals from waste electronic equipment. The Electrochemical Recycling Electronic Constituents of Value (E-RECOV) method uses an electrochemical cell to efficiently recover the bulk of metals from discarded electronics, leading to more complete recycling o ...

High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) materials have excellent mechanical and electrical properties. They are very attractive for various industrial applications such as power cables and high field, high current superconducting magnets. Magnets made with these materials could play a key role in the commercialization of fusion energy machines. However, HTS materials have very slow normal zone prop ...

Managing the flow of water, nutrients, and contaminants in watersheds is vital to addressing pressing issues related to water scarcity, access to clean drinking water, energy production, resilience to natural and anthropogenic perturbations, and ecological restoration. Decisions about the management of watersheds critically depend on the accuracy with which the flow of water and chemicals through ...

The Neutron Spin Echo (NSE) method has provided unique information about the dynamics of soft materials, including confirmation of the de Gennes model of polymer reptation, and quantitative measurement of the bending moduli of various membranes. In almost all cases these measurements have been made at small neutron scattering angles, where structural correlations with length scales between 10 nm a ...

One of grand challenges in nanoscience and nanotechnology is to achieve fundamental under- standing of the dynamic evolution of materials in actual operating environment, non-equilibrium conditions, or undergoing chemical reactions at the nanoscale. This requires forefront advances in imaging and analysis techniques that combine nanometer-scale spatial resolution, optical excitation and spectrosco ...