Award Data

Inexpensive biofuels are essential to the national economic and environmental stability of the United States. Pathways are well established to ferment sugars derived from biomass into fuels and bioproducts. However, there is a massive gap between the physical form of raw cellulosic biomass and the form of the feedstock required for biofuels conversion. Low energy mechanical size reduction to sub-m ...

The U.S. DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) was created in 1989 to manage the cleanup of large areas of environmentally contaminated sites. Since the closure of many of these sites, U.S. taxpayers have spent about $220 billion at 74 cleanup sites. However, these sites were the smallest and most manageable sites to clean. There are still over 40 sites that are deemed as eno ...

The DOE is evaluating deep borehole disposal of nuclear waste, where waste packages are emplaced in the lower sections of holes drilled 3 to 5 km deep in crystalline rock. A variety of plug and backfill materials are placed in the boreholes above the waste packages as structural and sealing members. This Phase I projectl will develop an approach to forming high performance plugs of molten metal a ...

Ocean wave energy has the potential to support approximately 10% of domestic and global electricity demand. Despite considerable investment over the past decade, however, wave energy is unlikely to make a material contribution to domestic or global energy supplies unless new technologies with significantly lower capital costs and higher reliability than todays leading technologies can be developed ...

This is a proposal for the development of a geothermal-solar thermal pilot plant to be built on the Oregon Institute of Technology campus, a solar thermal array supplementing the geothermal power facilities. The recent award to ENEL for a geothermal-solar PV hybrid system had come to my attention and rekindled my hope for a hybrid system such as I had conceived many years ago. Hearing the papers a ...

In modern fusion concepts, inductive pickup loops are one of the primary magnetic diagnostics in tokamaks and small-scale concept exploration experiments. They are used in industries and laboratories that utilize and study low-temperature plasmas. Inductive pickup loops are capable of extremely high bandwidths, allowing for the measurements of both high frequency magnetic perturbations (requires ...

Observing solid-liquid interfaces with high resolution is important for comprehension of physical, chemical and biological interactions between material and fluid. A more detailed knowledge of these interactions can substantially improve our understanding of the processes that occur during operation of catalysts and degradation of materials inside battery, as well as the operation of ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop a microfluidic in-situ TEM specimen holder with accurate environmental parameter monitoring capabilities; The inability to dynamically image materials at atomic resolutions in changing liquid environments is a significant impediment to the advancement of physical, chemical, materials, biological and medical sciences. Currently, none of the results acquir ...

This SBIR project will be devoted to the development and demonstration of high-power X- band switches to operate with the two resonant delay lines of the SLED-II pulse compression system. Each switch is triggered with an intense electron beam drawn from a diamond-coated molybdenum cold cathode. Preliminary tests of prototype X-band switches using the Omega- P/NRL X-band magnicon have already sho ...

The development of an APC Nb3Sn superconductor with tin-pin artificial pinning centers by the proposed approach in the Phase I program, is anticipated to have a significant impact on cost and performance in applications for undulator magnets. The overall technical approach for the Phase I project will be to develop and demonstrate an Nb3Sn superconductor with tin-Al2O3 pins for HEP magnets. The ...