Award Data

Annular extruded plastics are in everything from fuel lines, hoses, pipes, and wires to catheters, medical tubing, and stents and makes up about ? of the $200B extruded plastics market. Extrusion manufacturing is a major processor of the $600B raw plastics industry, which produces 380 million metric tons of material each year. The production of these materials accounts for 4% of oil consumption an ...

The conventional nitric acid manufacturing method uses natural gas as a feedstock for hydrogen and an energy intensive thermal process that emits a large amount of carbon dioxide. A new low-temperature plasma system, which can be driven electrically by a renewable or nuclear energy source, could reduce the energy consumed by the synthesis of nitric acid while eliminating the emission of greenhouse ...

Nitric acid (HNO3) is used to produce fertilizers, explosives, nylons, polyurethanes, and a variety of other industrial chemicals. The state-of-the-art manufacturing method uses methane (CH4) as a feedstock for hydrogen and an energy intensive thermal process that emits a large amount of carbon dioxide. A new low-temperature plasma system, which can be driven electrically by a renewable or nuclear ...

Every year, the global wind industry loses an estimated $100M or more to damage caused by lightning. A new proprietary blade coating will reduce the damage to wind turbine blades caused by lightning by promoting the formation of ionization channels over the surface of the turbine blades. These channels promote surface flashovers, providing a safe external path for lightning energy to connect to th ...

Every year, the global wind industry loses an estimated $100M or more to damage caused by lightning.A new blade coating will reduce the damage to wind turbine blades caused by lightning by promoting the formation of ionization channels over the surface of the turbine blades, providing a safe external path for lightning energy to reach ground and preventing damaging blade punctures.The coating cons ...

With development of shale gas fracking, large amounts of methane and ethane have now become available at low cost. With this low cost ethane it is desirable to convert low cost ethane to high value ethylene. Oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) for low cost conversion of ethane to ethylene is a potentially attractive route. ODH is an exothermic process for converting ethane to ethylene. By contrast pro ...

We will develop an acoustically-telemetered, frequency-multiplexed, gamma-heated thermoacoustic sensors that can simultaneously monitor local gamma flux and coolant temperature at multiple locations in the core of an operating commercial nuclear reactor. These sensors will require no external power source and will telemeter temperature encoded as the frequency of the sound radiated by the sensor a ...

Lightning strikes and near-strikes on wind turbine blades cost wind farm operators millions of dollars every year, representing one of their largest O&M risks and expenses, as well as a primary cause of turbine downtime (resulting in lost power production). These negative effects increase the levelized cost of wind energy. With the incidence of lightning strikes increasing as turbines get larger, ...

Inefficient use of energy wastes capital that could be more productively invested in other segments of the U.S. economy. At the same time, the reinsurance industry is eager to reduce property losses arising from increasingly severe weather. But existing reinsurance loss models do not take into consideration the resiliency benefits of energy efficiency measures. The objective of the Phase I SBIR re ...

Electric vehicles are creating unprecedented demand for lithium. Most lithium is produced from brine resources. Conventional methods for extracting lithium from brines suffer from low lithium recovery and cannot access the expanded resources needed for mass adoption of electric vehicles. The Department of Energy has supported a great variety of projects relate ...