Award Data

C56-12c-272445Carbon fiber composites (CFCs) exhibit superior properties and combined with part consolidation, reduce system weight significantly compared to metal approaches. But CFCs have high embodied energy (~230MJ/kg) and the virgin carbon fiber (vCF) feedstock is expensive (>$20/kg). Recycling of CFCs has the potential to recapture the material value at a much lower cost, reduce the embodied ...

Perfluorosulfonic acid (PFSA) polymers are the primary membrane material used in the manufacturing of water electrolyzers and fuel cells for the hydrogen economy. The discarding of these materials, especially when they are combined with precious metals, presents an unwanted introduction of these materials into the environment. Thus, the opportunity being addressed by this SBIR proposal is the deve ...

C56-25e-272785The emission of carbon dioxide gases from industrial facilities can be harmful to the environment and contribute to global warming. By using existing technologies to capture and store these gases in deep underground reservoirs, industry can meet emissions goals while still satisfying energy demand. To ensure permanence and prevent environmental impact, the carbon dioxide storage site ...

Radioactive noble gases (i.e., krypton and xenon) are produced in significant quantities during the fission of nuclear material and pose a challenging problem for containment due to their inert nature. Delayed, temporary storage in combination with environmental dilution/release into the atmosphere has been one of the primary historical methods for dealing with radioactive noble gases. However, sh ...

Nuclear safety and public acceptance of nuclear energy are of paramount importance for the government to establish and expand the nuclear power program. Although nuclear accidents are rare, they can lead to catastrophic consequences and severe damages in the public confidence and acceptance in nuclear energy. To improve the safety, one of the main tasks is to provide various reliable diagnostic or ...

The US Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development agency has an objective to reduce reliance on high-activity commercial and industrial radioactive sources used in calibration systems. One approach to achieve this goal is by use of novel electron accelerators to produce x-rays that can reach the needed gamma-ray dose rate, repeatability, and stability for calibration, while reducing ...

C56-26e-273790The proposed SBIR phase I project aims to develop a new class of low cost nanoarray based monolithic contaminant filter for Clean Hydrogen Production and Separation from Coal Waste, Biomass, MSW and Plastics produced syngas. It is anticipated that the contaminant filter can capture > 95 % of the heavy metal particulate matter (PM) with submicron size and remove > 95 % of NH3 in the s ...

C56-40a-273805The Office of Nuclear Energy has developed powerful computer modeling and simulation tools for nuclear reactor design and testing. Their flagship multiphysics platform is ideal for simulating both light-water and non-light water reactors, but it cannot run on the graphics processing units (GPUs) that are increasingly used in high performance computers. Also, non-light-water reactors ...

Statement of the Problem: In a reactor environment, plasma material interaction (PMI) issues associated with radio frequency (RF) coupling structures are similar to those for the first wall and have been identified as a potential problem. A primary challenge is to obtain high power, breakdown resistant density couplers with low loss compatible with fusion plasmas. Advanced manufacturing techniques ...

Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) systems produce data at very high throughputs (~100 MB/s) that quickly accumulate to unmanageable data volumes (~10 TB/day). These data throughputs lead to difficulty in establishing a distributed seismic observatory integrating DAS nodes at the network edge because data cannot be transferred and interpreted in a real-time fashion. The problem can be addressed by ...