Award Data

C56-10d-273742 The problem we are addressing is petroleum-derived acrylic acid and acrylate derivatives (together, acrylics) that are produced via a petroleum refining value chain releasing over 16 million kg CO2 each year globally. Among the many industrial sectors in need of decarbonization, the National Academies of Science recently identified a low-cost transition to a lower carbon chemical ba ...

Despite ambitious targets set by businesses and government to reduce emissions and improve sustainability, industries lack the scalable technologies to achieve these goals. While promising methods to capture and convert CO2 into value-added products including fuels and chemicals have been commercialized, these pathways are thermodynamically uphill, energy-intensive, and require temperatures above ...

Continued use of nuclear power is critical to meeting carbon emission goals and ensuring national security. Nuclear power production continually generates spent nuclear fuel (SNF) that needs to be stored in robust storage units called dry casks. The development and deployment a self-contained structural health monitoring system of these dry casks will enhance the safety and security of the payload ...

Relatively low operating temperatures of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) necessitate large thermal management systems (TMS). For PEMFCs to be a viable replacement for diesel engines in heavy-duty vehicles (100-450 kW power range), novel compact heat exchangers (HEXs) must be developed to reduce the size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) of the TMS. Rather than rely on larger fans with ...

The rising demand for renewable energy requires development of innovative energy storage technologies. Hydrogen is a versatile fuel that can be produced using wind, solar, and nuclear energy. Moreover, hydrogen can be stored and transported to provide on-demand access to energy at the point-of-need. However, the domestic hydrogen infrastructure is not yet ready to meet the demands of domestic deca ...

C56-40a-273805The Office of Nuclear Energy has developed powerful computer modeling and simulation tools for nuclear reactor design and testing. Their flagship multiphysics platform is ideal for simulating both light-water and non-light water reactors, but it cannot run on the graphics processing units (GPUs) that are increasingly used in high performance computers. Also, non-light-water reactors ...

To achieve a truly sustainable future, innovations in renewable technologies are critical. While the hydrogen economy and related technologies have made significant advancements over the past several decades, there are still a plethora of underdeveloped areas that require technological innovation. Reversible fuel cells (RFCs) are a stark example of this; as the hydrogen economy becomes increasingl ...

Efficiently vitrifying slurries, such as is stored in wells at nuclear waste sites, into a solid glass for safe stabilization and storage requires accurately measuring its chemical composition. Current measurement methods are slow and labor-intensive, and are not checked for radioactive exposure. The slurry must be sampled for transport to a laboratory while it is filtered, tested, and analyzed. W ...

Magnesium metal is the lightest structural metal commonly used for lightweighting of automotive and aerospace components, currently in short supply in the United States and has been listed as a critical metal by the Department of Energy. More than 90% of magnesium is produced in China and Russia today. A novel technology package has been developed for the manufacture of electrolytic magnesium meta ...

TeraSpatial aims to develop a solution, directly addressing the goals of the Office of Electricity (OE), to improve the robustness, reliability, and security of the power grid by delivering a flexible, AI-infused, distributed, secure wireless communications system, based on advances in 5G and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), for command and control of the power grid. This cons ...