Award Data

A key application of the technological breakthrough associated with decreased cost of DNA sequencing is metagenomics. Metagenomics is the process of sequencing DNA from whole ecosystems, rather than individuals or cultures. This approach has the potential to allow the dissection of microbial ecosystems in biofuel producing agricultural land, toxic contaminated sites and hydrocarbon recovery enviro ...

Current state-of-the-art SRF accelerating cavities require the use of many complex and expensive techniques throughout their fabrication/performance cycle. This project will utilize a novel Additive Manufacturing (AM) process to produce nearly monolithic SRF niobium cavities of arbitrary shape with features such as optimized wall thickness and/or integrated stiffeners, greatly reducing the cost a ...

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 ...

Many important technology challenges today such as the capacity and life time of batteries require new characterization techniques to understand and improve performance. In the STTR Phase II project, novel x-ray microscope techniques and software are developed to be able to image samples in three dimensions and determine chemical composition and function on a microscopic level. As known from ubi ...

Electrons play a very key role in plasma chemistry and dynamics of low temperature plasmas. Improved capability for measuring electron number density, ne, and electron energy distribution function, EEDF, in weakly ionized low temperature plasmas would benefit both fundamental study and application areas. For example, the capability would directly benefit emerging research targeted at modifying and ...

Due to the current oil crisis, the United States has begun to focus on alternative energy sources for transportation and other domestic applications. Methanol offers a renewable alternative to many fossil fuels that can be a raw material for the synthetic hydrocarbons and their products. ISL proposes to fabricate a photo-electrochemical cell that converts carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas which can ...

The fabrication of high-quality ultra thin (~20 micron) diamond crystals targets for 9 GeV highly polarized photon beams is an outstanding challenge. Current state of the art polishing/thinning techniques are not successful in thinning single crystal diamond to such dimension because of its extreme hardness and chemical inertness. These techniques create significant stresses surface and sub-surfac ...

X-Ray microscopy offers rich internal information of objects under study due to the highly penetrative nature of x-rays. Significant improvements in laboratory x-ray sources, synchrotrons and detector technologies in the past few years have pushed the frontiers of spatial and time resolution enabling time-lapse imaging of structures in the micron scale. Xradia, a US based small business founded in ...

Small Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) has been an extremely productive materials science probe for several decades and is used extensively by researchers studying a wide range of subjects, including polymers, ceramics, metals and biological macromolecules and functions. However, it is limited to length scales from 1 to 100 nm and requires highly collimated and relatively monochromatic neutron beam ...

In the coming generation of Very High Temperature Reactors (VHTRs), nuclear fuel is encapsulated into billions of small, tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) fuel pellets. To facilitate the licensing and economic competitiveness of the anticipated future generation of VHTRs, improved quality control of TRISO pellets (less than one bad coating in 105) is desired. Presently, characterization of fuel pel ...