Award Data

This Phase II Small Business Innovation Research project targets the development of a technology for segregating fuelbased contaminants (char and ash) from oxygen carrier material in the context of chemical looping combustion application. In chemical looping, the wellmixed solids that flow from the fuel reactor consisting of char, ash, and oxygen carrier particles cannot be completely separated in ...

A key requirement for microalgae biofuels production is a very low cost harvesting technology. Commercially available solidliquid separation technologies applicable to microalgae, such as chemical coagulation, membrane separations and centrifugation, are too costly for biofuels production or other lowcost microalgae processes, such as wastewater treatment. A low cost harvesting process is bio floc ...

Current methods for manufacturing carbon fiber rely on high temperature ovens for the stabilization/oxidation and carbonization steps, which tend to be slow and energy intensive. As such, carbon fiber composites are expensive then steel, which limits their use in costsensitive, highvolume industrial applications such as automobiles, oil and gas, and infrastructure. To reduce energy consumption and ...

Laser based advanced accelerators can achieve very high accelerating gradients, but their duty cycle is limited by the laser power availability and media recovery time. Inverse Free Electron Laser (IFEL) is a vacuum farfield laser accelerator scheme which does not rely on a medium (plasma) or a structure (metal or electric) and therefore is potentially capable of accelerating charged particles ver ...

The introduction of substandard or counterfeit materials into the DoD supply chain can have extremely expensive, and potentially life threatening, consequences. Current techniques used to detect nonconforming materiel can be destructive (e.g., manual sectioning and inspection of a part), time consuming and expensive (e.g., micro-computed tomography, ultrasound), or provide only limited informatio ...

The Department of Energy has a mission to ensure America's prosperity and security by addressing energy and environmental challenges. This Phase I project aims to produce domestic, economic and environmentally responsible biodiesel fuel from brown grease, a waste that is currently disposed in landfills or incinerated. The conversion of "brown grease" from wastewater treatment plant’s fats oils a ...

The Department of Energy needs improved radiation resistant electrical insulation materials for the superconducting magnet coils in fusion reactors. To achieve safe, reliable, economic and environmentally benign fusion energy system, DOE is seeking organic/inorganic insulation-capable materials that are wrappable. These materials under irradiation will enable magnet coils to: (1) operate reliably ...

Currently, the most promising types of radiotherapy is proton or carbon therapy, as they have demonstrated significant improvements in clinical efficiency and reduced toxicity profiles. Unfortunately, the high cost of treatments using both proton and carbon beams is the limiting factor preventing hadron therapy from becoming the standard of care for a wider range of cancers. Designing a linear acc ...

There is a continuing need for high power circulators to protect the next generation of high power RF sources from waveguide reflections that can destroy the device. Currently, the power level of circulators is limited by the materials, specifically ferrites that provide the required non-reciprocal operation. New approaches are required that use materials capable of very high power operation. Stat ...

Replacement of petroleum based vehicles with fuel cell electric vehicles operating on hydrogen produced from domestically available resources would dramatically decrease emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants as well as reduce dependence on oil from politically volatile regions of the world. One major inhibitor to a hydrogen society is the lack of infrastructure, which requires hydroge ...