Award Data

Despite the growth in Simulation tools and methods over the past two decades, the ability to access this technology is still outside the reach of many small and medium sized engineering companies the so called missing middle. The National Center for Manufacturing Science (NCMS) report that access to these technologies can reduce product design cycles by as much as 66%, with lab testing costs redu ...

Gasification technologies convert coal and biomass into synthesis gas feed streams that can either be used as a fuel for highly efficient power generation cycles or converted into value-added chemicals and transportation fuels. However, coal-derived synthesis gas contains a myriad of contaminants that may be regulated in power plant emissions and act as poisons for the catalysts used in downstrea ...

Aerosol particles have important impacts on visibility, acid deposition, climate, and human health, although large uncertainties remain in quantifying their chemical composition and atmospheric transformations. A large fraction of the anthropogenic aerosol is generated from energy-related activities, and organic compounds are known to constitute a significant fraction of ambient aerosol mass. Re ...

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 ...

Neutron scattering techniques provide exceptional tools for studying the structure and dynamics of materials at the molecular level. High energy neutrons are obtained when high energy protons are accelerated into a heavy-metal target. At Neutron Spallation Source (SNS), ORNL, a scheme of three-step has been developed to obtain high energy protons. First, H-atoms are converted to H0 by stripping an ...

Simulation tools that physically model daylight and electric lighting systems show promise in planning energy efficient lighting systems. There are still many barriers for these tools to reach the market. This research examines using bring high performance computing and user-centered design to the creation of an innovative lighting simulation and analysis software system. During Phase I of this ...

U.S. automakers have invested significant resources in the research and development of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. However, to enable their widespread use, an additional major investment will be required to construct an infrastructure for hydrogen production and delivery to fueling stations. In order to facilitate this transition, the DOE has recommended that high-pressure hydrogen generation fo ...

The recovery of oil and natural gas in the United States, especially from unconventional sources, is often limited by economic and environmental impacts of water co-produced during the extraction process. Innovative and cost-effective produced water treatment methods are needed to improve the economic viability of unconventional reserves, particularly for removing salts and organic contaminants so ...

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 ...

This proposal outlines a project aimed at providing a radical improvement in ion source technology that can be applied to the mass spectrometric analysis of actinides. The state-of-the-art secondary ion mass spectrometers (SIMS) employ the duoplasmatron ion source to create the primary ion beam for actinide analysis. The duoplasmatron only has sufficient brightness and a small enough energy spre ...