Award Data

The Department of Energy has a mission to ensure America's prosperity and security by addressing energy and environmental challenges. This Phase II project develops and demonstrates the domestic, economic and environmentally responsible production of biodiesel fuel from brown grease, a waste that is currently a burden disposed in landfills or incinerated. The conversion of "brown grease" from dome ...

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 ...

High-temperature superconductors (HTS) are a vital technology for future particle accelerators, motors, generators and other electric power systems, fusion reactors, and many other medical and defense applications requiring high magnetic fields. One remaining limiting factor limiting to the implementation of HTS systems is the lack of adequate sensors to monitor the temperature and strain states o ...

Society at large and DOE in particular have an interest in the continued development and refinement of a smart grid infrastructure that more efficiently and reliably matches electrical resources to demands. While technological advances in recent years have improved the smart grid, these advances have been limited by a lack of granularity of data (e.g. environmental conditions at multiple locations ...

One of grand challenges in nanoscience and nanotechnology is to achieve fundamental under- standing of the dynamic evolution of materials in actual operating environment, non-equilibrium conditions, or undergoing chemical reactions at the nanoscale. This requires forefront advances in imaging and analysis techniques that combine nanometer-scale spatial resolution, optical excitation and spectrosco ...

The Neutron Spin Echo (NSE) method has provided unique information about the dynamics of soft materials, including confirmation of the de Gennes model of polymer reptation, and quantitative measurement of the bending constants of various membranes. In almost all cases these measurements have been made at small neutron scattering angles, where structural correlations with length scales between 10 n ...

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 co ...

According to a report by the Hydrogen Council, a global lobby set up in January 2017 by Toyota and Air Liquide that includes 27 members such as automakers Audi, BMW, Daimler, Honda and Hyundai, and energy firms Shell and Total, increasing the use of hydrogen in power, transport, heat and industry could deliver around one fifth of the total carbon emissions cuts needed to limit global warming to sa ...

Wastewater from oil and gas production has high total dissolved solids (TDS) and organics and needs to be treated for safe disposal or reuse. Coal-fired power plant discharges and mining effluents share similar high TDS and organic contents. This project targets the development of an energy efficient, and robust supercritical desalination technology to treat hypersaline solutions, destroying organ ...

Finding better ways to measure rhizosphere properties has the potential to transform agriculture. Better understanding of the root-microbe-soil interactions that characterize the rhizosphere will help reduce fertilizer, pesticide, and herbicide inputs, improve effective carbon dioxide sequestration, enhance biofuel crop production, and lead to more efficient farms with higher profitability. But th ...