Award Data

This novel approach to making cement at ambient temperature uses 55% Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) incinerator ash AND adds chemicals and wastes to sequester environmentally problematic combustion gases, chemicals and heavy metals during incineration, that in turn eliminates undesired chemicals in the final product leachate. The main project objective is the development of a novel cement product bas ...

New capabilities of modern synchrotron x-ray sources enable unprecedented science and insight into the natural world. Unfortunately, the ability to detect x-rays from light source experiments has been continually surpassed by upgraded sources. A key deficiency is the lack of detectors that can image at very fast rates while maintaining single x-ray sensitivity, high instantaneous count rate, and w ...

Reliable low-cost, grid-scale, and high-efficiency electrical energy storage is needed to accommodate the rapid growth in solar and wind-based intermittent renewable electricity generation. While batteries are well suited for short-term (hourly or daily) energy storage, they are less suited for longer-term (seasonal) electrical energy storage due to self-discharge challenges and economic constrain ...

Advanced instrumentation and sensing methods are the key factor in the determination of many climate science research problems. Current sensing instrumentation is not fast enough to solve the problem of measuring temperature and water vapor properties on airborne platforms where small spatial scale sensing is needed due to turbulent fluctuations in the atmosphere. The opportunity exploited in this ...

Hydrogen has been widely used in many applications from aerospace and chemicals to fuel cells and satellite power supply. Although hydrogen is not toxic, it has a very broad flammability range (4%-74% concentration in air and 4%-94% in oxygen), leading to explosion in the presence of heat source. Thus, hydrogen monitoring is of paramount importance during the processes of hydrogen production, tran ...

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 ...

Currently, electric motors used in electric vehicles currently rely on critical materials like neodymium and dysprosium. These materials are subject to wide price swings, and as demand increases for electric vehicles, availability and price may become prohibitive. Additionally, no domestic suppliers or manufacturers of these materials currently exist in north America, and 90% of supply is from Chi ...

Achieving sustainable, resilient building operation means there must be a balance between energy efficiency and indoor air quality. To promote national health and be stewarts of our limited resources, exploring the connection between energy efficiency and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and applying the best practices defines the nexus. Integrating state-of-the-art technology and available information, r ...

Approximately 6,300 Mt of plastic waste had been generated as of 2015. However, only ~9 % of these polymers had been recycled as of 2015 in US, and ~79% of them ended up in landfills and natural environment. Almost all different types of plastics are thermodynamically immiscible, and their simple blends have poor mechanical performance. Complete sorting of these polymers present in plastic waste s ...

The team of Signature Research, Inc. and Michigan Technological University will develop and demonstrate methods and metrics to evaluate the performance of machine learning-based computer vision algorithms with low numbers of samples of labeled EO imagery. We will use the existing xView panchromatic dataset to demonstrate a proof-of-concept set of tools. If successful, in Phase II, we will extend t ...