Award Data

Toyon proposes to research and develop algorithms for generalized salient change detection, and to incorporate these algorithms into software tools implemented on the cloud. Our approach leverages the two most promising methods from Phase I, both based on supervised learning. The first method is the entropy-based feature vector and corresponding neural network, which we will apply at a coarse sear ...

One of the gravest threats the United States and international community face is that terrorists or rogue nations acquire nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.Even worse is that some type of device is detonated.The ability to know if material is enriched or the identification of device debris relies significantly on chemical analysis; what is the elemental and isotopic content of a ...

Chemical composition of feedstock petroleum affects the refining methods to produce fuels and other products.Intermediate and final refinery products as well as petrochemical products must be analyzed to meet regulations, required specifications and to provide certificates.Today petroleum refinery management requires analyzing the collected data hourly as opposite to monthly analysis used in the p ...

The DOE’s mission includes helping maximize the benefit and value of America’s petroleum resources while minimizing potential impacts on the environment and human health.Highway vehicles in the U.S.produce 11.6 billion lbs.of NOx and 400 million lbs.of particulates resulting in 22,000 deaths/year12.Even with the projected growth in electric vehicle purchases, our auto industry expects more tha ...

Current bioconversion technologies for producing fuels and chemicals from biomass suffer from significant carbon losses in the form of carbon dioxide.This is a fundamental property of the chemical states of the inputs and outputs, and it results in low carbon efficiency.If recaptured, this excess carbon could be upgraded into additional fuels and chemicals.Industrial Microbes and Opus 12 have deve ...

Improved battery technology is indispensable in electric vehicles (EVs) and grid-scale storage if the United States is to realize the benefits to national security and reduction of carbonaceous emissions that come of energy independence.The economic opportunity is immense; the market for the current state of the art rechargeable battery, lithium-ion (Li-ion), is already approaching $50 billion per ...

The Department of Energy is seeking an effective and versatile alternative to water for dust suppression at hazardous sites during demolition, construction, soil/sediment excavation and trucking.While water is abundant and cheap, frequent applications are required.Water is also ineffective to lock-down the loose surface contaminants in place.Consequently, wind and rain disperse hazardous contamina ...

The proliferation of nuclear weapons presents unparalleled danger.Critical to preventing the spread of such weapons of mass destruction is the detection and characterization of both the production and movement of special nuclear materials.Neutron interrogation techniques, including Associated Particle Imaging (API), are valuable tools in this effort, but the limited capability of portable neutron ...

High performance parabolic trough solar collectors are well-suited to generating industrial solar steam.Their thermal efficiency is greatly determined by the accuracy with which they are assembled.State-of-the-art designs require placement of dozens of mirror panels to sub-millimeter accuracy so that the focused reflected light hits its narrow target.That painstaking mirror placement is performed ...

High-energy particle experiments as well as other types of low-light, scientific imaging experiments typically require specialized, high-performance photodetectors that utilize costly manufacturing processes.As a result, a novel detector structure that can realize these highperformance specifications, such as photon-counting sensitivity, and a fast response time, using a high-volume manufacturing ...