Award Data

In response to the Water Power Technologies Office “Co-Development of Marine Energy Technologies at Smaller Scales.” We propose a co-development of an “Oscillating Water Column” and the “Offshore Power Station”. This proposal is to design a small scale Oscillating Water Column to provide the “offshore energy” as described as one of the activities needed in the “blue economy”. W ...

The rate of climate change in the Arctic is larger than elsewhere on Earth. The Arctic has unique and complex couplings and feedbacks between the surface and the atmosphere that in turn modify the radiative balance there differently than elsewhere. Current understanding holds that an increase in downwelling long wave radiative flux, driven by increased water vapor and mixed phase clouds, may be ac ...

Lithium-ion batteries are promising energy storage devices for hybrid and electric vehicles, providing high specific energy (approximately 150 Wh/kg), energy density (approximately 400 Wh/L), and long cycle life (greater than 15 years). However, these applications require further increases in energy density and improved low-temperature (less than ¿10 degrees C) performance. Silicon-based anod ...

The design of complex three-dimensional (3D) charged particle devices, used in high energy physics research, is extremely difficult. It has been recognized that computer optimization can provide a critical tool for designing the next generation of advanced, higher performance devices. Therefore, this project will implement computer-optimized design technology in advanced 3D simulation tools for ...

Advanced, high brightness photoinjectors are required for the next generation of linear accelerators and free electron lasers. Current photoinjector lasers suffer from complexities related to the use of multiple amplifier stages to achieve the desired pulse energy. There are also issues related to power scaling. This project will investigate the use of a liquid nitrogen cooled, Yb:YAG, mode-loc ...

New fuel forms are needed to enable gas-cooled fast fission reactors to operate using a once-through deep burn fuel cycle. These small, modular reactors will have a core life of 30 years and will burn the plutonium-239 that is created in the core as well as other transuranics. Deep burn rapidly and effectively reduces the inventory of transuranics from spent fuel without the need for repeated recy ...

For economically viable large-scale production of microalgae based food and biofuel to become a reality, significant improvements in algal productivity need to be achieved. With current regulatory guidelines, large scale outdoor cultivation of microalgae for these products restricts the use of transgenic algal strains, which in the laboratory, have thus far been the primary strategy taken to effec ...

A recent report by the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee entitled “Challenges at the Frontiers of Matter and Energy” pointed to the need to better understand hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, often at the mesoscopic scale. Such structures can be studied by x-ray and neutron scattering techniques, but they do not generally yield narrow signals in momentum or energy space. The nat ...

One of the most exciting recent developments in superconducting RF technology has been the discovery of a nitrogen-doping process which can reliably increase the superconducting quality factor of niobium resonators well above 1010 at high frequency (>1 GHz). This process is now well demonstrated in particular for TESLA-style 9-cell cavities at 1.3 GHz. Nitrogen doping is part of the plan for the p ...

The development of a multi-TeV e+e- linear collider is a key priority set by the P5 panel, which established the long-term strategy of the U.S. HEP program. A Two-Beam Acceleration (TBA) is one of the most promising approaches for this facility due to its potential for achieving high efficiency and the ability to accelerate particles with positive and negative charges. However, there are still cha ...