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 ...

Oxide dispersion strengthened (ODS) steels are desired for Generation IV reactor core applications such as thin-walled claddings due to their improved elevated temperature strength and radiation properties. The high temperature resistance of the ODS steels is a result of uniformly dispersed oxide nanoparticles in a ferritic matrix. The oxide nanoparticles prevent grain boundary movement and pin di ...

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 ...

Commercial-scale geothermal reservoirs are thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface, so scientists rely on indirect measurements to reconstruct 3D subsurface reservoir maps from seismic vibrations, electromagnetic waves, or gravity measurements. Geothermal operators typically use electromagnetic or gravity surveys, but seismic surveys are preferable because they enable higher-resolution 3D su ...

NASA's long range goals of reducing the fuel consumption by 30% and increasing fuel efficiency by 35% can be partially accomplished through increasing engine operation temperatures. As a result, the disk section is desired to operate in increasingly higher temperatures, which will subject it to additional degradation mechanisms of oxidation and hot corrosion. One approach to enhance the tem ...

The gas sensor in the PLSS of the ISS EMU will meet its projected life in 2020, and NASA is planning to replace it. At present, only high TRL devices based on infrared absorption are candidate replacements, because of their proven long-term stability, despite their size and power consumption and failures in the presence of liquid water. No current compact sensor has the tolerance for liquid water ...

NASA seeks to develop high specific energy primary batteries that are safe and capable of performing under a wide temperature range, for manned space missions. To meet this goal, CFX Battery Inc. proposes to develop, characterize, and establish technological feasibility of a new Li/SF-CFx based high capacity lithium primary battery that offers higher rate capability and enhanced safety than conven ...

Wind power has an important role in satisfying the power needs of the United States. Since wind power is a clean renewable source of energy, it also serves an important role in reducing dependence on fossil fuels, in particular foreign oil supplies, as well as reducing greenhouse gas and carbon emissions. Unfortunately, significant maintenance costs, recently highlighted by a series of blade failu ...

The innovation proposed here is a high-performance, high-fidelity framework in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code called Loci-STREAM to enable accurate, fast and robust simulations of unsteady multiphase flows such as combustion involving liquid-gas phases in liquid rocket injectors and solid-gas phases in solid rocket motors, and cryogenic cavitation in delivery systems of liquid rocket ...

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 ...