Award Data

Transportable energy storage systems are emerging products for grid-tied applications. High voltage pulse power systems are planned for assembly in standard shipping containers to allow for easy transportability. Unfortunately, the current capabilities of these systems are considered inadequate due to the excessive size of the required power souce. Compact, high voltage capacitors are necessary ...

It is extremely important to understand the temporal characteristics of electron beams at accelerator photoinjectors. Measuring and setting the electron bunchlength is critical to the operation of the accelerator, and can ultimately determine if physics experiments at user-based accelerators can be successfully performed. Many parameters affect the temporal characteristics of electron bunches at ...

Sensing of greenhouse gases including, but not limited, to carbon dioxide and methane, throughout the atmosphere are needed to verify gas fluxes and concentrations in order to understand the terrestrial carbon cycle. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) can provide the speed, range, and steering needed for rapid, measurements; but, UAVs have limited payload capacity. New gas sensors are needed that c ...

Ambient methane makes a substantial contribution to the greenhouse gas effect. Rapid, widespread accurate measurements of ambient methane concentration are needed to include in environmental models. D.O.E. is particularly interested in methane measurements in the Arctic where rapid climatic change is occurring. Southwest Sciences proposes to develop a compact, lightweight diode laser sensor for m ...

Knowing atmospheric 13CO2/12CO2 ratios precisely is important to understanding biogenic and anthroprogenic sources and sinks for carbon. However, instruments currently available have attributes that are not favorable for distributed UAV deployment; they are large, require a lot of power, are very expensive, do not have fast response and/or do not sufficiently correct for temperature and pressur ...

Monitoring the root systems of plants is essential to improving models of crop productivity, soil carbon sequestration and biogeochemical cycling. Fine roots (considered to be smaller than 1-2 mm in diameter) are the dominant component of this system, with roots & lt;0.2 mm in diameter often representing 50% to 95% of total root length. The plasticity and dynamism of fine root development must be ...

Aerosol research remains a priority area and requires strong efforts to resolve the very complex processes that occur in the atmosphere. To understand aerosol formation and their implications on climate the study of precursors provides very valuable information. Ammonia is one of the most important precursor molecules and plays a major role in the chemistry of the atmosphere. High-performance se ...

A large body of historic paper- and film-based seismograms are in storage, containing within them significant stores of seismological information. This information is unavailable for analysis because it needs to be extracted from its analog form and put into modern digital formats. National security needs in nuclear non-proliferation, earthquake modeling, and oil and gas extraction will all benefi ...

Past industrial practices have resulted in groundwater that is contaminated by heavy metals. Long-term monitoring and maintenance is one of the largest costs of environmental management. This project is developing a compact analyzer for measuring chromium ions in ground water that should significantly reduce the cost of monitoring the presence of this metal. The Phase I project investigated a n ...

GaN-based devices are the basis of a variety of modern electronics applications, especially in optoelectronics and high-frequency / high-power electronics. These devices are based on epitaxial films grown on single-crystal wafers. The single-crystal wafer substrates are limiting because of their size, expense, mechanical properties and availability. If one could make GaN-based devices over large a ...