Award Data

Technologies for terrestrial ecosystem management – in the area of precision agriculture and ecosystem restoration – have made significant advances recently for more sustainable practices by optimizing water, nutrients, and fertilizers Many of these technologies include monitoring and imaging of plants, soil, and crop harvest as well as their interactions, using in situ sensors, remote sensing ...

Wind and solar electricity are gaining traction in the marketplace, but the electricity available from these sources is out of synch with demand Protonic ceramic electrochemical cells (PCECs) operating at intermediate temperatures (400 - 650°C) have enormous potential for electricity storage and delivery by reversible operation between electrolysis and fuel cell modes and therefore stand to addre ...

Although thermal and cold neutron scattering is widely used and is critical for success in many areas of materials science and engineering, relatively low neutron fluxes severely limit applications of not only laboratory neutrons generators, but also large national neutron facilities State-of-the-art thermal and cold neutron sources are large expensive national facilities, which serve diverse comm ...

In spite of the promise of terahertz frequency range, the maturity of terahertz technologies, such as sources or detectors, remains relatively weak In particular, ultrafast optoelectronic switches are a key component to both sources and detectors, but current versions of them require too much power to be commercially viable, particularly for applications involving detector arrays The overall objec ...

Quantum information sciences started as a concept many years ago, transitioned to a subject of theoretical analysis, followed by experimental efforts mainly focused on controlling individual qubits Rather dramatically, the last couple of years have witnessed a significant milestone with the creation of nascent functioning quantum computers operating with tens of qubits Present quantum computers, r ...

Large size diffraction-grade diamond is needed for high scientific impact applications at synchrotron and Free-Electron Laser (FEL) X-ray sources, stemming from diamond’s unique physical properties in low atomic number and extremely high thermal diffusivity Sufficiently large diffraction-grade diamond crystals, similar in crystalline quality to that of silicon, are required for the fabrication o ...

Ammonia is a critical component of the US economy as US agricultural exports exceeded $100BB in 2015 and depend heavily on ammonia fertilizers. Ammonia production consumes 1% of the world’s total energy supply and millions of tons are imported each year. An innovative bioelectrocatalyzed process is being developed using immobilized mutated nitrogenase enzymes to directly convert atmospheric ni ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program aims at development and demonstration of an integrated theoretically/experimentally combinatorial method for the accurate prediction of rheological behaviors of special polymer solutions. In-depth understandings of dynamic responses of the polymer solutions under external shear are essential for development of the “smart” polymer-based add ...

Recently, the Generation IV International Forum has established a set of nuclear reactors (advanced nuclear reactors), with main objectives to improve overall reactor safety, efficiency, sustainability, and proliferation resistance for economically viable nuclear energy. These advanced reactor technologies rely on novel fuels and materials that are resistant to radiation damage and corrosive envir ...

Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) is a powerful and unique approach to characterize the chemical, physical and potentially biochemical properties of materials with the nanometer scale resolution in real-time. A key element for NSOM systems that combine optical spectroscopy with scanning probe microscopy, is the actual probe itself. While many commercial vendors offer off-the-shelf meta ...