Award Data

Energy security comprises the foundation of the American standard of living, economy, and national security in the United States. While energy sources are becoming more diversified, fossil fuels are still the most prevalent and abundant source of energy, and will continue to account for a significant portion of the energy generated for the foreseeable future. A modest 1% heat rate improvement of t ...

Olefins are the most important building blocks of the petrochemical industry. Approximately 50 billion pounds of ethylene and 30 billion pounds of propylene (worth an estimated $27 billion) were produced in the United States in 2009. The ethylene and propylene must be separated from their close-boiling paraffins, currently achieved using traditional low-temperature distillation, and energy and ca ...

Many new advanced Li-ion battery systems being developed for large applications such as EVs and PHEVs are using Li-ion pouch cells in which the packaging in which the cell is encased is made from a thin aluminum laminate material. While providing an advantage in energy density and thermal characteristics, pouch cells pose unique safety problems because of the fact that they tend to balloon up rapi ...

Conventional Li-ion cells/batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles have difficulty meeting USABC goals for performance/cost that are required for commercially-viable EV. The prevailing large format pouch/prismatic has the advantage of low packaging weight/volume, 10% at cell level, but is doubled (100% increase) in transitioning to the battery. Aside from the reduced energy density (accommodatio ...

Anasys Instruments proposes to develop a high speed Wideband Infrared NanoSpectroscopy (WINS) platform that will dramatically extend the available capabilities for chemical characterization at the nanoscale. The proposed project will develop and demonstrate key technologies to overcome barriers that currently prevent widespread use of infrared nano-spectroscopy. The project will include demonstrat ...

During development of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), high-energy proton pulses were found to create high-intensity pressure pulses in the liquid mercury. These pulses damaged the mercury container because of cavitation damage erosion, which must be stopped or significantly reduced to enable the SNS to work, as intended, at full power. In previous work ...

In the last decades, there has been a concerted effort to find alternate acceleration mechanisms that can provide very high gradients. Such mechanisms could also be employed to build compact, inexpensive, and powerful accelerators; which could be used in a verity of fields from university research and medical industry to defense and security applications. Those mechanisms are often based on either ...

Radiofrequency (rf) power couplers are a critical and often troublesome component of superconducting accelerator systems. The couplers primary functions are power transfer and preserving the integrity of the cavitys cleanliness. Additional functions include loading the cavity to decrease the effective quality factor and extracting power that would otherwise excite unwanted resonant modes that coul ...

Accelerators used in synchrotron light sources require megawatts of radio-frequency energy. They currently employ vacuum-tube power amplifiers or conventional solid-state amplifiers that are inefficient and therefore consume a great deal of prime electrical power. We will review available transistors, analyze high-efficiency power-amplifier techniques, and experimentally evaluate candidate amplifi ...

There is a continuous interest in the synchrotron radiation community towards developing insertion devices with shorter periods and higher fields. Historically, this has been driven by the synchrotron radiation users demand for higher-brightness hard X-ray fluxes from 3rd Generation Light Sources. Recently, the emergence of X-ray FELs and growing interest towards ultrafast compact soft X-rays faci ...