Award Data

Nutrient pollution of lakes, estuaries, coastal areas and other water bodies frequently results in algae blooms, sometimes toxic, and often leading to anoxia, fish kills and dead zones. Efforts to reign-in nutrient pollution, in particular of phosphorus, P, have been lagging and noxious algae blooms make headlines almost daily all over the US and world. This is a problem attracting increasing atte ...

Electrical power is scarce at most offshore locations, so oceanographers design buoy systems to consume very little power in order to reduce the frequency of ship voyages to replace batteries. These expensive voyages can cost several tens of thousands of dollars per day. Solar and wind power can recharge batteries, but harvested power is limited and each source has shortcomings. Wave energy operat ...

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 ...

The monitoring of gaseous exhaust (e,g., NOx, NH3) and particulate matters (PMs) has been critical in the automotive diesel engine combustion emission control, for which various catalytic converters need be operated efficiently and environment-friendly, including diesel oxidation catalysts (DOC), diesel particulate filters (DPF), and selective catalytic reduction (SCR). For instance, in the DPF, t ...

DOE seeks development of optimized wind-compatible power converters for industry collaboration with potential cost savings, increased power performance, grid support and to move the grid connection power module from the wind turbine nacelle. Our project approach is to develop a much lower cost, smaller weight, smaller size solid state power converter (PFC PDK), utilizing commercial silicon carbide ...

At several workshops held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) over the past 5 years, members of several U.S. scientific communities stressed the need for an advanced capability for measuring slow molecular motions in complex fluids such as polymers and biomaterials. The technique preferred by these researchers is called Neutron Spin Echo (NSE). While there are two NSE spectrometers in the U.S. ...

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 ...

The DOE’s Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program has funded 2 software packages, LOGOS and SR2ML. One of the key goals of LWRS is to manage the aging of systems, structures, and components (SSCs) so nuclear power plants can continue to operate safely and cost-effectively. The Safety, Risk, Reliability Model Library (SR2ML) is a software package that contains a set of reliability model ...

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 ...