Award Data

NanoSD, Inc. with its partners will develop a transparent, nanostructured thermally insulating film that can be applied to existing single-pane windows to reduce heat loss. To produce the nanostructured film, the team will create hollow ceramic or polymer nanobubbles and consolidate them into a dense lattice structure using heat and compression. Because it is mostly air, the resulting nanobubble s ...

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 ...

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 ...

Infrared spectroscopy is the most widely used technique for chemical characterization with a worldwide market of over $1B annually. Conventional infrared spectroscopy suffers, however, from fundamental spatial resolution limits that prohibit its application at the nanoscale. This has prevented widespread use of IR spectroscopy in the growing field of nanoscale materials. The atomic force microsc ...

The economical use of hydrogen as a transportation and stationary power fuel remains a long-term DOE objective. Energy storage applications in Europe such as wind capture and improved biogas conversion efficiency are also driving significant interest in hydrogen production from renewable sources. New and efficient catalytic processes for hydrogen generation are therefore needed to achieve produc ...

The DOEs & quot;Monitoring Verification and Accounting (MVA) program goal is to confirm permanent storage of CO2 in geologic formations by real-time monitoring should CO2 leak. Remote technologies, effective for atmospheric or above ground CO2 monitoring, are ineffective for subsurface, and it is where leakage can be detected first. By the time leaked CO2 slowly appears on the surface, CO2 may hav ...

Density functional theory is used by many researchers funded by the Department of Energy as a method for predicting the behavior of chemicals and materials used in energy applications. However, results of these calculations are often not standardized and, even when they are, expert-level understand of the methods is needed in order to properly perform a simulation. The energy research community a ...

The state of computational chemistry software is in fragmented. Excellent and trusted academic software, which contains advanced molecular simulation code, exists but is seldom used in industry. Industrial software is closed, expensive and has not proven to be as good a foundation as academic software for developing advanced methods where machine learning can be used to design new molecules and ma ...

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