Award Data

Solar water heaters are a well-established renewable energy technology that has been widely adopted outside of the United States. Here we propose to significantly improve the evacuated solar tube collectors (ETC) by utilizing the dry-drawable carbon nanotube (CNT) sheets for solar energy absorption and CNT multifunctional nanocomposites with functional layers of heat accumulators and heat transpo ...

Development of a solid with high conductivity of Mg2+ cations will allow application of that substance as membrane in magnesium-air batteries. These batteries will be much cheaper, safer, and at the same time store much more energy than lead-, lithium- or sodium batteries with the same weight. Such batteries would be ideal for electric vehicles and for the off-peak storage of renewable elect ...

Successful adoption of open frameworks such as perfSONAR in Science DMZs within DOE labs, universities, and small-businesses, and the emerging trends of software-defined cloud platforms that inherently require multi-domain performance transparency are major drivers for a new market. However, perfSONAR framework and other proprietary solutions developed by industry cannot be effectively integrated ...

Redox flow batteries are a promising technology for electrical energy storage for renewable energy sources; however traditional redox flow batteries are limited in their use due to non-uniform pressure drops and mass transfer limitations, as well as high manufacturing costs related to the felt material costs for the electrode and component alignment challenges during manufacturing.General Statemen ...

The US Department of Energy has a stated goal to increase the energy efficiency of turbines, and one well recognized method of achieving this is through the use of ceramic thermal barrier coatings (TBCs). However, state of the art zirconia-based TBCs have a temperature limit of about 1200oC, and new TBC materials that can operate at elevated temperatures of 1300oC and above are needed to continue ...

Critical to determining the success of an EGS well is the measurement of the flow distribution along the open-hole length of that well. Knowledge of not only the depth but the spacing of intersected fractures is required in order to determine the sweep efficiency of fluids flowing through the reservoir. Currently, the only device available for measuring fluid flow within a geothermal wellbore is t ...

The laser plasma accelerator (LPA) is a very promising technology for generating gamma rays for the detection of contraband bulk nuclear materials, but is currently limited by the rate at which the beam can be pulsed. Erosion of the capillary plasma channel is the main limiting factor and can be mitigated through the use of artificial diamond to construct the channel. Computational modeling and ...

This proposal is in response to the Defense Health Agency 2017 Phase I SBIR topic 17B-005.The approach is the use of a membrane oxygen pump using newly developed nano-thickness membranes with all the layers less than 1 micron total.Nanometer thickness membranes enable more oxygen output per surface area at temperatures of 300-600 C than current state-of-the -art 600-800 C membranes that are 50-300 ...

Nanotechnology has yet to live up to its promise of exploiting properties which emerge at the nanoscale because of the lack of manufacturing precision to control the nanoscale dimensions, thus denying society many energy saving materials and applications. This project targets a key component of an Atomically Precise Manufacturing system: a high-speed sub-nm-precision manufacturing platform for ato ...

One of the major maintenance headaches causing increased operational cost in the production of mature oil wells is the elimination of wax and paraffin buildup in the production tubing. The accumulation over time of paraffin compounds in "cold spots" in the tubing creates high pressures and flow constrictions that contribute to accelerated pump wear, and constrict the flow of fluids to the surface. ...