Award Data

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 ...

The development of radiation detection materials would benefit with greater access to computational models that relate physical traits seen in manufacture with complex energy transitions occurring in the material that control operating performance. However, the HPC requirements behind these models remain beyond the reach of most businesses involved in this small yet vital field impacting National ...

Society at large and DOE in particular have an interest in the continued development and refinement of a smart grid infrastructure that more efficiently and reliably matches electrical resources to demands. While technological advances in recent years have improved the smart grid, these advances have been limited by a lack of granularity of data (e.g. environmental conditions at multiple locations ...

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 ...

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, ...

Sn-doped In2O3 (ITO) is the industry standard and most widely used transparent conducting electrode (TCE) because of its good electrical and optical properties. However, ITO has a number of disadvantages: ITO is not a suitable TCE for next-generation, high-efficiency, flexible OLEDs, because of its inappropriate work function, difficulty in creating desired patterns, low stability, delaminantion d ...

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 power output of the high power lasers used in physics research is limited by the materials available for making the gain media in the laser. Future increases in power will require new and better materials. Operation at high power creates great thermal stresses that can lead to effects such as birefringence, thermal lensing or even physical fracture damage to the host itself. Effective cooling ...

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 ...

One of grand challenges in nanoscience and nanotechnology is to achieve fundamental under- standing of the dynamic evolution of materials in actual operating environment, non-equilibrium conditions, or undergoing chemical reactions at the nanoscale. This requires forefront advances in imaging and analysis techniques that combine nanometer-scale spatial resolution, optical excitation and spectrosco ...