Award Data

To advance a strong and economical biofuels and bioproducts industry, tools are needed for breeding microalgae to improve phenotypes of commercial interest, including biomass yield, culture stability, harvestability, and accumulation of valuable compounds. This project aims to increase biomass feedstock yields by the phototrophic green alga Scenedesmus obliquus by using classical breeding approach ...

The discovery of large shale gas reserves in recent years has resulted in the reduction of natural gas price and a need to develop new applications for the available resource. Upgrading shale gas to liquid fuels which are more easily transportable and have greater economic value can result in significant benefits to the US. Coupled with this challenging problem the DOE has a goal of further develo ...

Technologies for terrestrial ecosystem management – in the area of precision agriculture and ecosystem restoration – have made significant advances recently for more sustainable practices by optimizing water, nutrients, and fertilizers Many of these technologies include monitoring and imaging of plants, soil, and crop harvest as well as their interactions, using in situ sensors, remote sensing ...

Wind and solar electricity are gaining traction in the marketplace, but the electricity available from these sources is out of synch with demand Protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (PCECs) operating at intermediate temperatures (400 - 650°C) have enormous potential for electricity storage and delivery by reversible operation between electrolysis and fuel cell modes and therefore stand to addre ...

Although thermal and cold neutron scattering is widely used and is critical for success in many areas of materials science and engineering, relatively low neutron fluxes severely limit applications of not only laboratory neutrons generators, but also large national neutron facilities State-of-the-art thermal and cold neutron sources are large expensive national facilities, which serve diverse comm ...

Many energy conversion and transfer processes critically depend on the material nanostructure details and its response to external excitation fields Surface and volume defect formation and migration have a profound impact on the opto-electro-thermo-mechanical properties of materials Understanding these processes requires a unique combination of advanced atomic-scale imaging with controlled nanosca ...

Quantum information sciences started as a concept many years ago, transitioned to a subject of theoretical analysis, followed by experimental efforts mainly focused on controlling individual qubits Rather dramatically, the last couple of years have witnessed a significant milestone with the creation of nascent functioning quantum computers operating with tens of qubits Present quantum computers, r ...

Large size diffraction-grade diamond is needed for high scientific impact applications at synchrotron and Free-Electron Laser (FEL) X-ray sources, stemming from diamond’s unique physical properties in low atomic number and extremely high thermal diffusivity Sufficiently large diffraction-grade diamond crystals, similar in crystalline quality to that of silicon, are required for the fabrication o ...

The spatiotemporal quantification of coupled hydro-biogeochemical processes between soil, plant, and atmosphere requires advances in remote sensing technologies and in understanding the link between the measured signals (ie spectral traits) and the hydro-biochemical properties While current UAV-based remote sensing technologies provide spectral reflectance in the visible- short wave infrared (VSWI ...

Solar fuels production is necessary for the future of the global economy New highly conductive and stable polymer-electrolytes with low light absorption are required for efficient and cost- effective solar fuels generation Opus 12 will work with Prof Chulsung Bae at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to further develop the existing polymer-electrolyte chemistry to meet the demands of this chal ...