Award Data

The composition of atmospheric particulate matter (“aerosols”) strongly influences health and environmental impacts, but there exist few time-resolved, long-term records of particle-phase chemical composition due to lack of appropriate monitoring tools. Needed is an instrument that is robust, easy-to-operate, with automated calibrations and data reduction, to provide operationally-inexpensive ...

The problem/situation that is being addressed concerns the development of ultrafast coatings that will meet the specifications of the DoE solicitation: “broad-bandwidth, laser damage threshold of 0.5 J/cm2 (1 ps), engineered using a process that is scalable to large areas.” Development of interference coatings (ICs) with superior laser damage is strongly motivated by the needs to scale near in ...

Ultra-high power, ultrashort pulse lasers systems are the central tool driving many of the recent advances in high energy density plasma science. They enable the generation of high energy density relativistic plasmas, bright x-ray and gamma–ray bursts, energetics particle beams and neutrons, and drive applications such as shadowgraphy of inertial confinement fusion targets and fast ignition. How ...

The objective of this program is to develop low cost, high efficiency lightweight solar cells to provide renewable electrical power to stand‐alone electrical systems and the nation’s power grid. Perovskite solar cells have recently shown significant increases in their power conversion efficiency but suffer from environmental degradation that limits their performance lifetime, manufacturing pro ...

Plastics are indispensable materials for modern life and the global economy, but current practices in the generation, use, and disposal of commodity plastics are largely unsustainable, causing severe worldwide plastics pollution and enormous energy and materials value loss in the economy. In particular, plastics are a material of choice in packaging applications, but they are currently designed fo ...

There is a critical need for electrification of transportation systems. The proposed technology enables the development of very high-power density permanent magnet motors, which when coupled to an integrated SiC drive allows for an overall specific power beyond 12 kW/kg. The proposed concept relies on the tight integration of a high-power density dual-rotor permanent magnet motor, high power densi ...

Considerable progress has been made in developing promising subsystems for muon beam cooling channels to provide the great reduction of emittances required for an Energy-Frontier Muon Collider; but an end-to-end design is lacking. Meanwhile, the recent discovery of a Higgs-like boson has created interest in the high-energy physics community for a Higgs Factory to investigate whether its propertie ...

"The next generation of very high field accelerator magnets (20 T or more) are expected to be made with high-temperature superconductors (HTS) along with conventional low-temperature superconductors (LTS) to reduce cost. The operation and protection of these magnets becomes very challenging particularly if the HTS coils are made with the tapes and operate at a much lower current than the LTS coils ...

To increase the utilization of electric vehicles, the US Department of Energy is seeking to reduce the cost of electric vehicle batteries to less than $125/kWh by 2022. To achieve this goal, the costs of cathode materials, which account for approximately 30% of the cost of vehicle batteries, must be reduced significantly. To address the challenge of lowering the costs of advanced lithium battery c ...

Nuclear fusion has great potential for supplying global energy needs with a clean, abundant energy source. Advanced superconducting magnets will be used to contain the plasma at the center of the reactor. To operate these magnets, new sensors are needed to monitor the superconductors in real-time to detect the signs that the superconductor may quench (lose superconducting properties), so that corr ...