Award Data

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 ...

A recent report by the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee entitled “Challenges at the Frontiers of Matter and Energy” pointed to the need to better understand hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, often at the mesoscopic scale. Such structures can be studied by x-ray and neutron scattering techniques, but they do not generally yield narrow signals in momentum or energy space. The nat ...

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is one of the primary tools for biological and materials characterization; however, there is an overarching need to push TEM temporal resolution into a ps-range to study physical processes on their fundamental spatial and temporal scales. With state-of-the-art TEM, however, it is not possible to capture a single image with a temporal resolution better than 10 ...

Modern quantum information systems employ optical photons for long distance communication, operating at ambient temperature, between microwave cavities, which house microwave photons used in quantum computing and microwave detection. These optical photons, carried by fiber-optic or free-space links, offer a low-cost, uncooled alternative to bulky, expensive microwave coaxial cables, which are loss ...

For economically viable large-scale production of microalgae based food and biofuel to become a reality, significant improvements in algal productivity need to be achieved. With current regulatory guidelines, large scale outdoor cultivation of microalgae for these products restricts the use of transgenic algal strains, which in the laboratory, have thus far been the primary strategy taken to effec ...

To advance a strong and economical biofuels and bioproducts industry, tools are needed for breeding microalgae to improve phenotypes of commercial interest, including biomass yield, culture stability, harvestability, and accumulation of valuable compounds. This project aims to increase biomass feedstock yields by the phototrophic green alga Scenedesmus obliquus by using classical breeding approach ...

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 ...

Food production, and in particular animal-derived meat products, are a major source of green-house gases, compounded by the remarkable inefficiency in biomass conversion (grain to dense muscle tissue in meat), along with growing challenges with food safety, quality and nutrition. To address this growing problem, we propose to exploit the emerging field of cellular agriculture (tissue engineering o ...