Award Data

Soraa will develop a cost-effective technique to manufacture high-quality, high-performance gallium nitride (GaN) crystal substrates that are better than today’s GaN crystal substrates, which are expensive and prone to defects. Soraa will also develop pathways to large-area GaN substrates that can handle power switch applications. Substrates are thin wafers of semiconducting material needed for ...

Concentrator PV systems using highly efficient multijunction photovoltaic cells hold out the promise of very low-cost solar electricity generation, but their adoption has been hamstrung by the requirement for bulky mechanical trackers that add cost, diminish land use, increase maintenance, and exclude roof-top installations. The Stationary Wide-Angle Concentrator (SWAC) PV system will provides the ...

Cost-effective electrochemical reduction of CO2 (ECO2R) in the atmosphere, is the holy grail of green chemistry. Using only water and electricity as other inputs, ECO2R has been demonstrated to produce ethanol with pure oxygen as a co-product. Ethanol is a versatile fuel that can be used in fuel cells, reformed to make hydrogen, or burned in an internal combustion engine. Ethanol produced from air ...

NanoSD, Inc. with its partners will develop a transparent, nanostructured thermally insulating film that can be applied to existing single-pane windows to reduce heat loss. To produce the nanostructured film, the team will create hollow ceramic or polymer nanobubbles and consolidate them into a dense lattice structure using heat and compression. Because it is mostly air, the resulting nanobubble s ...

Ammonia is not only one of the most produced chemicals worldwide for fertilizer, but also a real carbon-neutral liquid fuel (CNLF), which is important for renewable energy storage and transportation. The well-known traditional Haber-Bosch (HB) process annually generates more than 120 million metric tons of ammonia for fertilizer, with about ~1.0% of the world’s annual energy consumpti ...

"We propose to develop a stable, low-cost, low power CO2 sensor module that meets the requirements of the ARPA-E SENSORS FOA, namely, 30 ppm precision over a dynamic range of 400 ppm to 2000 ppm with 10 ppm drift per year. Existing optical non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) CO2 sensors simply cannot scale to the cost and power requirements of the FOA. We therefore propose a solid state architecture ...

Grid-tied energy storage systems provide stabilization to the electric grid that is necessary to accommodate the growing percentage of electricity generated by intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Existing conversion systems between the storage media and the utility lines are large, costly and only 95%-98% energy efficient. In this ARPA-E project, Opcondys, Inc. will build ...

Empower Semiconductor has developed a resonant integrated voltage regulator (IVR) technology that can dramatically improve the energy efficiency of any digital CMOS IC. As Moore’s law has advanced, the plexity and power needs of digital ICs has grown dramatically. The voltages required by these ICs have lowered and the resulting voltage accuracy needs have become more stringent. Existing voltage ...

Methane emissions are responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas warming. A proven, economical way of mitigating these emissions is to find high-flow methane sources and convert the methane stream into carbon dioxide, using flares or generators, mitigating 96% of the warming effects. We propose to develop a miniature methane flare, capable of handling emissions from sources in the range of 10-200 tonne ...

Carbon drawdown and retention in terrestrial biomass is currently limited by the rate of photosynthetic assimilation and of decay of lignocellulosic biomass respectively. Living Carbon is developing innovative methods of reducing the susceptibility of vegetative biomass to decay by lignotrophic fungi, thereby reducing the rate of release of carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere through fungal resp ...