Award Data

Plastics are indispensable materials for the modern life and global economy, but current practices in the generation and disposal of commodity plastics are largely unsustainable and causing severe worldwide plastics pollution and enormous materials' energy and value losses to the economy. In particular, plastics are a material of choice in packaging applications but they are currently designed for ...

Managing the flow of water, nutrients, and contaminants in watersheds is vital to addressing pressing issues related to water scarcity, access to clean drinking water, energy production, resilience to natural and anthropogenic perturbations, and ecological restoration. Decisions about the management of watersheds critically depend on the accuracy with which the flow of water and chemicals through ...

The Neutron Spin Echo (NSE) method has provided unique information about the dynamics of soft materials, including confirmation of the de Gennes model of polymer reptation, and quantitative measurement of the bending moduli of various membranes. In almost all cases these measurements have been made at small neutron scattering angles, where structural correlations with length scales between 10 nm a ...

One of grand challenges in nanoscience and nanotechnology is to achieve fundamental under- standing of the dynamic evolution of materials in actual operating environment, non-equilibrium conditions, or undergoing chemical reactions at the nanoscale. This requires forefront advances in imaging and analysis techniques that combine nanometer-scale spatial resolution, optical excitation and spectrosco ...

The composition of atmospheric particulate matter (“aerosols”) strongly influences health and environmental impacts, but there exist few time-resolved, long-term records of particle-phase chemical composition due to lack of appropriate monitoring tools. Needed is an instrument that is robust, easy-to-operate, with automated calibrations and data reduction, to provide operationally-inexpensive ...

During altitude-induced hypoxia, operator cognitive and physical capacity degrades, compromising individual and team performance. Cognitive degradation is linked to falling brain energy levels, increased reliance on anaerobic energy production and lactate accumulation. Ketones are the evolutionary alternative substrate to glucose for brain metabolic requirements; previous studies demonstrated that ...

Special OperationsForces (SOF)are an integral aspect of the US military. SOF operators are among the most elite and highly qualified individuals in the U.S.military. As such, extraordinary physical and mental demands are placed upon them to excel in extreme environments for extended periods of time. This unrelenting cycle of combat deployments and intense pre-deployment training shortens the funct ...

Computer-aided Engineering software that apply the Finite Element Method to perform a multi-physics analysis have received widespread acceptance for traditional macro-scale material systems. Challenges persist in the modeling of complex coupled processes in environmental/thermal barrier coatings (E/TBCs) used to protect substrate material against the corrosive environment in the hot section parts ...

Understanding the genomic basis of economically important plants for growth time, crop yield, responses to drought and disease resistance is of critical importance to sustaining and improving food supplies for humans and livestock, as well as insuring sufficient raw material availability for industries that depend on plant materials, such as biofuel manufacture. Current computational methods for a ...

Development of Li-ion conducting membranes capable of supporting Li-metal anode to enable high- performance Li-metal batteries (LiMB) is a priority for the Department of Energy (DOE). State-of- the-art membranes used for Li-ion batteries (LiB) are not suitable for LiMB and have a number of disadvantages including poor cycling performance, low Li-ion conductivity, and electrochemical stability with ...