Award Data

Approximately 21 billion barrels of produced water are generated each year in the United States. A lot of produced waters contain significant concentrations of sodium, magnesium, calcium, and other cations. A sufficient treatment will not only harvest the metals, but also provide freshwater for irrigation, municipal demands, mining, livestock, and manufacturing. The currently mature technologies f ...

There is a national need for a comprehensive energy portfolio to build a sustainable energy economy while addressing the climate crisis. The Department of Energy’s goals to achieve carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035, and further, to achieve net-zero emission by 2050, will rely on the development of electrochemically driven membrane technologies. Among these technologies is anion exchange ...

There is a growing need for a commercially available high-density superconducting flex cable for a variety of ultra-sensitive, high pixel count instruments/focal plane arrays for the study of space as well as quantum computing and quantum information processing. However, traditional flex circuit manufacturing techniques and tools cannot achieve the high channel density necessary for these customer ...

In order to accelerate widespread electric vehicle adoption, improving battery energy densities, charge rates, manufacturing costs, and safety is imperative. Herein, we propose a scalable manufacturing process to improve LIB cell design using 3-D electrode architectures which will minimize inactive material (30% decrease) leading to a 15% increase in cell energy density (330 Wh/kg) and a 10% decre ...

This project will develop and prototype a new class of lightweight, high-performance wave energy converters for short-duration deployment and installation in smaller-scale applications. It is anticipated that the size of the wave energy converter will be in meter or submeter scale, the weight is in kilogram level or less, while the output power will be 5~10 W/m3 or 50~100 mW/kg. The novel energy h ...

Continued use of nuclear power is critical to meeting carbon emissions goals, and the safe operation of these facilities will require advanced sensors capable of operating in the harsh, high temperature irradiated environment of a reactor core. Power distribution is a critical reactor measurement, and the current approach of using Local Power Range Monitors (LPRMs) requires periodic calibration vi ...

Continued use of nuclear power is critical to meeting carbon emission goals and ensuring national security. Nuclear power production continually generates spent nuclear fuel (SNF) that needs to be stored in robust storage units called dry casks. The development and deployment a self-contained structural health monitoring system of these dry casks will enhance the safety and security of the payload ...

Problem Statement: A prevailing approach to monitoring carbon storage sites is to adapt sensing technologies currently utilized in the oil & gas industry to optimize drilling and production. Specifically, taking advantage of traditional electromagnetic techniques to track subsurface carbon dioxide plume movements has been elusive due to an inability to achieve the necessary spatial resolution and ...

Iron (Fe) & steel production accounts for 7% of total industry CO2 emission. Currently, blast furnace-basic oxygen furnace (BF-BOF) route produces 71% of global crude steel production. However, this process uses carbon (usually coke) as the reductant, which binds with oxygen in Fe ore and generates CO2. Direction reduction of ore (DRI) routes reduces Fe ore to sponge Fe via a solid-state process u ...

FC Renew has discovered a novel process to remove and recover platinum group metals (PGMs) from assembled end-of-life fuel cells that can be performed at room temperature that does not leach PFSA into the environment to obtain a high-yield recovery of platinum unlike conventional pyrolysis recycling methods that require costly labor to dissemble the cells and leach PFSA into the environment upon p ...