Award Data

Plastics are indispensable materials for the modern life and global economy, but current practices in the generation and disposal of commodity plastics are largely unsustainable and causing severe worldwide plastics pollution and enormous materials' energy and value losses to the economy. In particular, plastics are a material of choice in packaging applications but they are currently designed for ...

Tristructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel is a key component of advanced small modular nuclear fission reactors due to its inherent safety at high temperatures and irradiation levels and decreased proliferation risk relative to current reactor fuels. A more efficient cooling method for TRISO fuel compacts would increase heat transfer, allow for an increase in fuel density, and further improve accident ...

The problem/situation that is being addressed concerns the development of near infrared ultrafast interference coatings(IC) for high average power femtosecond lasers that will meet the specifications of the DoE solicitation: “broad-bandwidth, laser damage threshold of 0.5 J/cm2 (1 ps), engineered using a process that is scalable to large areas.” Advances in compact high gradient laser-driven p ...

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 ...

Residential and commercial buildings represent a prime opportunity to improve energy efficiency and sustainability worldwide. Currently, lighting and thermal management within buildings account for 20% of the United States yearly energy consumption. The objective of this Small Business Technology Transfer Phase 1 project is to develop a low cost nanostructured smart window coating that reduces bui ...

Solid state lighting is being promoted as the ultimate lamps of future. Though the internal quantum efficiency of OLED devices is almost 100%, external efficiency is a mere 36% mainly because of poor light out-coupling (~40%) from the device. Improvement in light out-coupling to >70% and further reducing the manufacturing cost will rapidly accelerate the commercialization of the OLED technology. T ...

The composition of atmospheric particulate matter (“aerosols”) strongly influences health and environmental impacts, but there exist few time-resolved, long-term records of particle-phase chemical composition due to lack of appropriate monitoring tools. Needed is an instrument that is robust, easy-to-operate, with automated calibrations and data reduction, to provide operationally-inexpensive ...

Currently the commercially available technologies for H2 separation such as pressure swing adsorption and cryogenic distillation are very energy intensive. Membrane technologies can be very energy efficient; but for high selective membranes low flux and high cost are the major challenges that frustrate commercialization. Recently, cermet has shown promise because of less precious metal usage and m ...

Ice crystals can form spontaneously from the freezing of water droplets at temperatures colder than -38

Present day photoinjector cathodes have a poor lifetime or inadequate quantum efficiency for advanced applications. In addition, the efficiency is constrained by the frequency up- conversion in the drive laser from infrared to ultraviolet photons. Novel nanofabrication techniques allow for the sub-wavelength patterning of grooves and hole-array surfaces on the cathode. Exploiting the surface plas ...