Award Data

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of High Energy Physics (HEP) in collaboration with the US National Laboratories is engaged in an ongoing R&D program to develop Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) cavities for assembly into CryoModules (CMs) with higher accelerating gradients (Eacc) and higher Q’s, while simultaneously lowering fabrication costs. State of the art SRF cavities manufactu ...

Residential/commercial buildings account for >40% of US energy demand 70% of electricity use, costing >$430 billion/year. If auto-darkening windows were available for building windows in warmer US regions, energy for cooling could be greatly reduced without effect on visibility. Now in ongoing and prior work, this firm has developed novel, auto-darkening electrochromic sunglasses based on unique, ...

Radio-frequency cavities are at the heart of particle accelerators used for nuclear and high-energy physics research, medical treatment, pollution control, clean energy production, development of new materials, and national security. The most advanced accelerators utilize cavities that are made from superconducting materials. However, the performance of these cavities is reaching a fundamental lim ...

As new and alternative energy sources as added to the energy grid, efficient and low-loss power converters are essential to the storage of energy from these intermittent power sources. However, current magnetic cores limit the efficiency of power converters due to high losses and/or low magnetic flux saturation. Mainstream Engineering Corporation will develop a new magnetic material which exhibits ...

An important challenge electric utilities will face in the foreseeable future is a workforce that is rapidly retiring and the resulting loss of institutional knowledge. This will also create a vulnerability in the electric grid, especially during widespread power outages where recovery efforts rely on a team of well-trained and experienced personnel. Disasters like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico h ...

Extremely good timing resolution is becoming more and more important in both high energy collider detectors and for commercial industry applications such as LIDAR for self-driving cars. The needs have grown such that resolutions at the 1 ps level are desired, since better resolutions leads to better performance. Unfortunately, the electronics capable of 1 ps resolution, and the ability to send a s ...

Dispatchable generation refers to sources of electricity that can be turned on or off, or can adjust their power output accordingly to an order. Geothermal plants are usually used for base-load power rather than dispatchable power. The 8 MW Puna Expansion Facility in Hawaii is the first fully dispatchable geothermal power plant (Nordquist et al., GRC Transactions, Vol. 37, 2013). As described by t ...

As new commercial applications arise for supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) power generation, and higher efficiencies are achieved through higher turbine inlet pressures and temperatures, the need to advance technologies on the component level becomes essential. Power cycles using sCO2 as the working fluid are gaining increasing interest as reductions in CO2 emissions from power plants are sought ...

The neutral density in magnetically confined fusion experiments is an important parameter, affecting plasma stability and confinement and providing fuel for the plasma. Despite this importance, few diagnostics exist to directly measure the neutral density. One diagnostic is two-photon absorption laser induced fluorescence (TALIF). Current TALIF systems rely on large, dye laser based systems to pro ...

Superconducting magnets are used to manipulate particles in high energy physics. The windings of superconducting magnets must be monitored to ensure that temperature does not rise above the superconducting transition. Such a “quenching” accident caused $10M damage and shut down the large hadron collider at CERN for a year. A method for monitoring temperature that is immune to electrical noise ...