Award Data

To increase the utilization of electric vehicles, the US Department of Energy is seeking to reduce the cost of electric vehicle batteries to less than $125/kWh by 2022. To achieve this goal, the costs of cathode materials, which account for approximately 30% of the cost of vehicle batteries, must be reduced significantly. To address the challenge of lowering the costs of advanced lithium battery c ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program aims at development and demonstration of an integrated theoretically/experimentally combinatorial method for the accurate prediction of rheological behaviors of special polymer solutions. In-depth understandings of dynamic responses of the polymer solutions under external shear are essential for development of the “smart” polymer-based add ...

"The next generation of very high field accelerator magnets (20 T or more) are expected to be made with high-temperature superconductors (HTS) along with conventional low-temperature superconductors (LTS) to reduce cost. The operation and protection of these magnets becomes very challenging particularly if the HTS coils are made with the tapes and operate at a much lower current than the LTS coils ...

Neutron scattering is one of the most useful methods of studying the structure and dynamics of matter. These methods require large installations at national laboratories, such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and other facilities constructed or planned in the US and around the world. These facilities serve a large and diverse community ...

Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) is a powerful and unique approach to characterize the chemical, physical and potentially biochemical properties of materials with the nanometer scale resolution in real-time. A key element for NSOM systems that combine optical spectroscopy with scanning probe microscopy, is the actual probe itself. While many commercial vendors offer off-the-shelf meta ...

A recent report by the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee entitled “Challenges at the Frontiers of Matter and Energy” pointed to the need to better understand hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, often at the mesoscopic scale. Such structures can be studied by x-ray and neutron scattering techniques, but they do not generally yield narrow signals in momentum or energy space. The nat ...

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is one of the primary tools for biological and materials characterization; however, there is an overarching need to push TEM temporal resolution into a ps-range to study physical processes on their fundamental spatial and temporal scales. With state-of-the-art TEM, however, it is not possible to capture a single image with a temporal resolution better than 10 ...

Accurate simulation of nuclear power plant behavior is necessary for both engineering and training applications. An engineering grade simulator, used for design, safety analysis and operations, is characterized by high fidelity, computational power, lack of real-time capability, and user non-interactive environment. By contrast, a training grade simulator, used for operator training and education, ...

Tall towers and foundations for modern offshore and land-based wind turbines are too large to transport over roads or rail due to their extremely large dimensions. Existing “one-off” on-site construction methods are too expensive, and are too slow for manufacturing foundations and towers in the large numbers needed, especially for offshore components manufactured in ports with limited lay-down ...

The Neutron Spin Echo (NSE) method has provided unique information about the dynamics of soft materials, including confirmation of the de Gennes model of polymer reptation, and quantitative measurement of the bending constants of various membranes. In almost all cases these measurements have been made at small neutron scattering angles, where structural correlations with length scales between 10 n ...