Award Data

Particle accelerators are used in a variety of ways to the benefit of people at large. Part of the challenge in making the benefits of these machines accessible to the broader society is their cost and complexity. The cryogenic system that cools the superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavity contributes to this problem. Recent advances from Fermilab have shown that the conventional liquid helium ...

The Department of Energy Office of Fusion Energy Sciences is seeking the development of wrap-able radiation-resistant electrical insulators for superconducting magnet coils used in fusion energy reactor systems. These insulators must: (1) exhibit low gas generation under irradiation, (2) have higher pot life, and (3) exhibit attributes of insulation systems with high bond and higher strength and f ...

Controlled thermonuclear fusion promises to radically transform our society, providing nearly limitless renewal energy. Cost-competitive fusion requires plasma facing components (PFC) which can sustain extreme photon and energetic particle fluxes over a lifetime of years, as these components will dictate the maintenance and overhaul periods of future reactors. Robust, scalable PFCs manufacturing m ...

Fiber optic-based sensing devices and systems allow for electromagnetic interference-immune interrogation of temperature and strain distribution within the cryomodule coil winding pack of superconducting magnets. A specific use of fiber sensors is for rapid and redundant quench detection. Novel fiber-optic sensors may also be used for precision measurement of distributed and local temperature and/ ...

Triton will design a high effectiveness, low size and weight, non-metallic heat exchanger. This technology will reduce the size and cost, and improve the efficiency, of commercial and residential HVAC systems. Triton is proposing a novel microscale geometry and manufacturing method to create a heat exchanger material that can be used in any length or width, allowing infinite design flexibility for ...

DOE seeks development of optimized wind-compatible power converters for industry collaboration with potential cost savings, increased power performance, grid support and to move the grid connection power module from the wind turbine nacelle. Our project approach is to develop a much lower cost, smaller weight, smaller size solid state power converter (PFC PDK), utilizing commercial silicon carbide ...

Metal mesh filters are used to control the transmission of infrared through terahertz radiation in a variety of systems including sensors, cameras, and high-performance telescopes. Currently, high-performance metal mesh infrared filters are fabricated using photolithography but this is a costly and time consuming process and it is limited to filter diameters of 300 mm or less (the largest size tha ...

Membrane technologies are currently the lowest cost option for desalination of water and purification of other liquid and gas streams. There is a need to develop continuous, precise, and smart manufacturing techniques that have the potential to lower the cost and facilitate the adoption of high-performance membrane materials and design architectures. Membranes are currently produced by large scale ...

The DOE’s Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program has funded 2 software packages, LOGOS and SR2ML. One of the key goals of LWRS is to manage the aging of systems, structures, and components (SSCs) so nuclear power plants can continue to operate safely and cost-effectively. The Safety, Risk, Reliability Model Library (SR2ML) is a software package that contains a set of reliability model ...

At several workshops held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) over the past 5 years, members of several U.S. scientific communities stressed the need for an advanced capability for measuring slow molecular motions in complex fluids such as polymers and biomaterials. The technique preferred by these researchers is called Neutron Spin Echo (NSE). While there are two NSE spectrometers in the U.S. ...