Award Data

The Department of Energy has a mission to ensure America's prosperity and security by addressing energy and environmental challenges. This Phase I project aims to produce domestic, economic and environmentally responsible biodiesel fuel from brown grease, a waste that is currently disposed in landfills or incinerated. The conversion of "brown grease" from wastewater treatment plant’s fats oils a ...

There is a continuing need for high power circulators to protect the next generation of high power RF sources from waveguide reflections that can destroy the device. Currently, the power level of circulators is limited by the materials, specifically ferrites that provide the required non-reciprocal operation. New approaches are required that use materials capable of very high power operation. Stat ...

Renewable sources of energy including solar and wind are fast gaining ground on fossil fuels, in part because of their sustainability and environmental benefits. A major issue, however, has been finding efficient ways to store the energy that renewables generate for use when the demand for energy is high. Lithium-­‐sulfur batteries, which store electrical energy by transferring electrons to or ...

Replacement of petroleum based vehicles with fuel cell electric vehicles operating on hydrogen produced from domestically available resources would dramatically decrease emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants as well as reduce dependence on oil from politically volatile regions of the world. One major inhibitor to a hydrogen society is the lack of infrastructure, which requires hydroge ...

Many communities face water scarcity as a fundamental challenge to their economic and social development. Seawater is an abundant source which can be reached by most of the countries in the world. In order to utilize seawater as potable water, it is required to remove the high salinity. Desalination technologies are intended for the removal of dissolved salts that cannot be removed by conventional ...

Reactive absorption-based carbon dioxide capture processes using solvents is the preferred technology for large scale capture of carbon dioxide in flue gases from coal-fired power plants. This Small Business Innovation Research project targets the development of mitigation strategies to decrease the quantity of aerosols that are formed from such post-combustion capture systems in the presence of s ...

With 27% of the world’s coal reserves located in the United States, development of a clean, efficient, and economically viable pathway to coal utilization is of strategic importance. Development of advanced coal-to-liquids technologies provides this direct pathway, while improving energy security, reducing coal environmental footprint, and promoting economic development directly in the communiti ...

This SBIR/STTR project targets the development of a validated modeling/design tool for predicting the behavior of spouted fluidizied beds for chemical looping combustion/gasification applications of coal and biomass fuels and fuel blends. Chemical looping is an advanced energy conversion technology for generating a pure CO2 effluent, which can then be sequestered or utilized. A spouted fluidized b ...

The Brayton cycle for power generation offers significant advantages over the Rankin cycle typically used. Unfortunately, the Brayton cycle uses very high pressure and high temperature, supercritical CO2 (sCO2) as the heat transfer fluid. New materials that can handle the harsh environment of sCO2 are required to enable power generation and prevent issues with corrosion and erosion or efficiency d ...

Density functional theory is used by many researchers funded by the Department of Energy as a method for predicting the behavior of chemicals and materials used in energy applications. However, results of these calculations are often not standardized and, even when they are, expert-level understand of the methods is needed in order to properly perform a simulation. The energy research community a ...