Award Data

Infrared spectroscopy is the most widely used technique for chemical characterization with a worldwide market of over $1B annually. Conventional infrared spectroscopy suffers, however, from fundamental spatial resolution limits that prohibit its application at the nanoscale. This has prevented widespread use of IR spectroscopy in the growing field of nanoscale materials. The atomic force microsc ...

Photocathodes are one of the most critical components in RF-based linacs and light source systems. Current photocathodes lack the capability to meet the long term requirements for medical, defense, industrial and many scientific systems. This program will develop a new generation of photocathodes that provide high performance and long life. Calabazas Creek Research Inc. (CCR), in collaboration wi ...

Understanding the genomic basis of economically important plants for growth time, crop yield, responses to drought and disease resistance is of critical importance to sustaining and improving food supplies for humans and livestock, as well as insuring sufficient raw material availability for industries that depend on plant materials, such as biofuel manufacture. Current computational methods for a ...

Spectroscopy in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) wavelength region (8 to 12

Small Angle Neutron Scattering (SANS) has been an extremely productive materials science probe for several decades and is used extensively by researchers studying a wide range of subjects, including polymers, ceramics, metals and biological macromolecules and functions. However, it is limited to length scales from 1 to 100 nm and requires highly collimated and relatively monochromatic neutron beam ...

Development of a solid with high conductivity of Mg2+ cations will allow application of that substance as membrane in magnesium-air batteries. These batteries will be much cheaper, safer, and at the same time store much more energy than lead-, lithium- or sodium batteries with the same weight. Such batteries would be ideal for electric vehicles and for the off-peak storage of renewable elect ...

Idaho National Laboratory (INL), under funding from the Critical Materials Institute, has developed a US patented technology to reclaim valuable metals from waste electronic equipment. The Electrochemical Recycling Electronic Constituents of Value (E-RECOV) method uses an electrochemical cell to efficiently recover the bulk of metals from discarded electronics, leading to more complete recycling o ...

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 ...

This SBIR/STTR project delivers an ultra-low power structural health monitoring (SHM) system that uses autonomous, wirelessly embedded sensors to monitor and assess structural integrity in wind turbine blades. EASE features impedance-based active SHM, which is highly sensitive to damage like cracks, delimitations, mass variations, fastener failures and stiffness changes. Blades are the only wind t ...

The injection and storage of captured CO2 in coal beds has been suggested as a strategy to reduce industrial emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. The sequestration process involves the adsorption by coal of injected CO2 and an associated desorption of CH4 whose production can partially offset the operational cost. The acceptance of this strategy depends on: the ability to effectively monitor the ...