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The structure of the electric utility business has long been a centralized model where an electric utility is the only authority selling electricity to, and buying excess rooftop PV generation, from customers. This is changing as utilities explore new business models including Distributed System Operator (DSO) models. On the other side of the meter, with the increasing penetration of rooftop solar ...

The mechanisms guiding nanocatalysis are poorly understood and extremely hard to model. Proposed effort attempts to provide a machine learning based platform that would guide the design of nanocatalytic materials for a variety of applications, beginning with the use of case of chloro-organic contaminant remediation. The current approaches either use conventional molecular dynamics coupled with ab ...

Fossil Energy (FE)-based modular power systems are a growing market that can meet the demand of rural and isolated areas both domestically and abroad. Many of these systems, also known as Radically Engineered Modular System (REMS), provide power and/or heat for farms, homes, and other industrial processes. The concept is to produce syngas (synthetic natural gas) from coal and readily available bio ...

Nuclear fusion has great potential for supplying global energy needs with a clean, abundant energy source. Advanced superconducting magnets will be used to contain the plasma at the center of the reactor. To operate these magnets, new sensors are needed to monitor the superconductors in real-time to detect the signs that the superconductor may quench (lose superconducting properties), so that corr ...

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) represent a growing segment of the U.S. passenger vehicle market. An increasing number of PHEV models are available to consumers. PHEVs are similar to parallel hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius in that they have an electric motor and internal combustion engine that are used synergistically to significantly reduce fuel consumption while maintaining a nea ...

Graphene nanomaterials offers multiple technical benefits in printed electronics, structural materials, displays, capacitors, high-performance computing applications, and especially energy storage where researchers have reported a five-fold increase in the charge rate of a graphene- enhanced Li-ion battery. Historically, industrial production of graphene nanomaterials has been hindered by the need ...

The discovery of advanced materials and molecules is difficult and largely an experimental endeavor. Computers are used to simulate materials and molecules but rarely to design them. We aim to demonstrate that novel materials and molecules can be computationally “evolved” using Genetic Programming, and we will develop: (1) Atomically precise membranes that would separate molecules at a fractio ...

Marburg virus (MARV) is a filamentous enveloped non-segmented negative sense RNA virus. This viruse is considered to be extremelydangerous with case fatality rates as high as 88-90%. Extensive efforts have gone towards effective vaccines for MARV prevention, however,none have been successfully established as licensed vaccines. Glycoprotein (GP) is the only surface protein of MARV. There are substa ...

Ceramic matrix SiC-SiC composites are currently the leading candidate for Generation IV nuclear reactor fuel cladding and other structural components, due to their excellent thermal and chemical stability under extreme conditions. However, robustly joining SiC structures when exposed to such harsh operating conditions still presents a major roadblock. A novel bonding joint compound leveraging grap ...

Cherenkov radiation, caused by fast charged particles in a transparent medium, is widely used for charged particle identification. To date, gaseous, liquid, and solid radiators have been used as sources of Cherenkov radiation. Aerogels with low refractive index and high light transmittance, are highly desirable for Cherenkov detectors. Development and testing of aerogels with a refractive index as ...