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Final technical report describing research conducted during support from the Early Career Award to Matson. Description of progress on projects, description of scope of unpublished work, and list of products is included.
The technology commercialization fund assisted with the design and development of an intermediate scale packed be thermal energy storage system. Presented in this final report is the design, testing, and modeling of a 100 kWh th radial packed-bed. Air is used as a heat transfer fluid and 3/8” pea gravel is used as the storage medium. Testing has demonstrated the formation of a thermocline within the packed-bed. An air charging temperature of 450 °C was achieved resulting in a charging power of 26.5 kWh th . The radial packed-bed was charged for 5 hours and discharged for 5 hours. Minimal temperature variation was observed at the bottom, middle, and top axial locations of the radial packed-bed which suggests that buoyancy and hydrodynamics in the injection well had a minimal effect on the uniformity of air flow through the bed during charging and discharging. This indicates that the forced convection in a radial direction is dominating the flow regime compared to the buoyancy. The findings of this study suggest an increased air duct diameter through the air heater will increase the charging temperature and increase air mass flow through the system. Increased mass flow through the packed-bed is hypothesized to shorten the thermocline length. Modeled and measured results are compared, and it is here determined that a more comprehensive CFD model will aid in the understanding of air flow and thermocline evolution within the packed-bed.
This Final Technical Report describes our exploratory efforts that combine reticular materials synthesis (hydrolytically robust metal–organic frameworks, MOFs) with AI‑enabled molecular simulations to develop mechanistic, quantitative design rules for recovering lithium and other alkali-metal ions from highly dilute, competitive aqueous resources (e.g., seawater). The central outcome is a joint experimental–computational study of ion uptake in MOF‑808 (Chemical Science, 2025) that quantifies both thermodynamics and kinetics of Li + , Na + , and K + uptake and identifies how pore size, pore hydration state, dehydration penalties, and pore-window transport barriers govern selectivity. Guided by these insights, we synthesized and tested functionalized MOF‑808 and multivariate MOFs incorporating ion-recognition motifs (including carboxylates and crown-ether linkers) and evaluated uptake in synthetic seawater, highlighting framework topology and pore chemistry as levers for improved Li + /Na + discrimination. We also developed transferable simulation models, enhanced-sampling protocols, and automated workflows that enable systematic screening of porous sorbents.
The final scientific report for our DOE-funded project covering the period 9/1/21-8/31/25
This is the final scientific/technical report associated with the award "Early Career: Constraining the Electromagnetic Shower Energy Scale at LArTPC Neutrino Detectors Near and Far"; the primary research topics associated with the award are neutrino oscillation physics, reconstruction of neutrino interaction events using machine learning techniques, and detector calibration.
GismoPower’s Final Research Report documents the outcomes of a DOE SBIR Phase II project focused on advancing the MEGA® (Mobile Electricity Generating Appliance), a trailerable, plug-in solar canopy appliance designed to deliver appliance-class electricity generation for homes, small businesses and renters. The project’s core objective was to remove the technical and regulatory barriers that have historically prevented plug-in solar systems from being safely certified, permitted, and interconnected in the United States.
This final technical report summarizes the outcomes of a DOE-funded project on federated scientific machine learning (FL) under nonsmooth, nonconvex, and hierarchical optimization settings. The project develops new mathematical models, algorithms, and theoretical guarantees for decentralized stochastic, bilevel, and minimax optimization problems arising in DOE mission-relevant applications. A unified framework of randomized and zeroth-order federated optimization methods is introduced, providing provable convergence, communication efficiency, and sample-complexity guarantees. The report documents algorithmic design, theoretical analysis, and empirical validation of the proposed federated learning methods. The project also contributes to workforce development through graduate training and dissemination of results via publications and seminars.
Final Technical Report for Award SC0020286.
Final technical report for the ARPA-E SHARKS project: Confinement Exploiting Arrays of Cross-Flow Turbines (ConExT). This involved collaboration by the University of Washington, University of Wisconsin, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oberon Insights. Cost-effective, large-scale utilization of tidal and river current resources requires turbine arrays. Most array concepts involve multiple, staggered rows of turbines analogous to wind farms. However, in water, turbines that have an appreciable projected area (i.e., the projected area over a full revolution) relative to a channel’s cross-sectional area can theoretically extract far more energy than when operating in isolation. This suggests substantial benefits to a confinement-exploiting approach to array layout, in which turbines are more densely clustered in a single row spanning a channel. The objective of this project was to move this concept from theory to practice, as well as establishing environmental and economic trade-offs. This objective was accomplished through scale-model experimentation, high-fidelity computational fluid dynamic simulation, and integrated techno-economic modeling.
Collision of birds and bats with wind turbines is a conservation concern for both land-based and offshore wind projects. The fatality rates of birds and bats at land-based turbines are well documented. The measurement strategies on land focus on finding carcasses following collision, estimating the number of carcasses missed through searcher efficiency, carcass persistence trials and carcass fall distributions, and modeling statistically robust fatality rates. Few technologies have been developed to monitor offshore bird and bat collisions, and many that have been developed focused on detecting collisions with large birds. The few studies that have attempted to document collisions at offshore turbines do not account for smaller bodied animals or for collisions that might be missed, which prevents the calculation of statistically robust fatality rates. The overall goal of this report, A Multi-Sensor Approach for Measuring Bird and Bat Collisions with Offshore Wind Turbines (Project), was to develop an effective multi-sensor system for quantifying bird and bat collision rates, specifically for offshore wind facilities. The Project goal and resulting automated collision detection system was achieved through two major technological advancements: 1) refining The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research’s (TNO’s) existing WT-Bird® vibration sensing system, that had successfully detected large bird collisions during daytime, to allow for improved detection of smaller birds and bats during both daytime and nighttime hours and 2) improving image processing systems and developing and integrating machine learning algorithms to automatically detect and classify small and large bird and bat collisions with offshore turbines. This final technical report (FTR) summarizes Methods , Results , Conclusions , and Lessons Learned during each of the five Tasks identified for this research and development effort. This FTR includes summaries of the following: Task 1. Initial Engineering Tests to Improve WT-Bird® Task 2. Installation of WT‐Bird® on a Utility-scale Turbine at the National Wind Technology Center – National Renewable Energy Laboratory Task 3. Field Tests and Refinement of the Object Detection System Task 4. Validation of WT-Bird® on a Land-based Turbine Task 5. Preparation for the Implementation of WT-Bird® on an Offshore Turbine. This research and development effort documented successful improvement of the WT Bird® collision detection system to detect small birds and bats, and WT-Bird® is the first collision detection system to validate results compared to land-based post-construction monitoring. The collision trials provide estimates of missed targets that can be used to estimate fatality rates, a significant improvement relative to other offshore collision monitoring systems. Advances were made in developing an edge-processing solution to reduce data storage requirements, which is important if the system is deployed for long periods of time at offshore turbines. The improved WT-Bird® system also provides an important option for wind operators on land or offshore who need to document specific details about when collisions occur, particularly efforts to further research on bat impact minimization, or when standard fatality searches are impractical (e.g. offshore) or inadequate (e.g. challenging locations on land).
This report provides the final status of the “Enhanced Outcrop Methane Capture (EOMC) Project” which was focused on drilling two new methane capture wells along the Fruitland Formation Outcrop for capture of methane and carbon dioxide which are naturally seeping from the Outcrop. The EOMC Project was focused on evaluating whether novel horizontal drilling technology will result in improved capture of methane and carbon dioxide which are naturally seeping from the Fruitland Formation Outcrop on Southern Ute tribal trust lands within the Southern Ute Indian Reservation (the “Reservation”).
Final technical report for the Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI) project covering fiscal years FY22 through FY24. The DOE Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI) is a partnership between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and major cloud providers including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to provide universal access to big data in the cloud. At the heart of OEDI is a centralized repository of high-value energy research datasets aggregated from the U.S. Department of Energy's Program Offices, National Laboratories and other collaborators. It aggregates smaller, domain-specific repositories, allows direct data submissions, and includes support for big data through its energy data lakes. OEDI's data lakes make high-value data universally accessible and help researchers, collaborators and the general public overcome many of the obstacles to accessing and using big data.
This is the final technical report for the SETO-funded project Securing Solar for the Grid (S2G) from FY22-24. The project scope included development and dissemination of standards' requirements, best practices, equipment testing procedures, assessment tools, as well as education and training materials for cyber defense, posture and maturity tailored to solar technologies. The outcomes for this work include: co-led the development of cybersecurity certification standard (UL2941), co-led the development of cybersecurity guide (IEEE1547.3), development of recommendations for supply chain cybersecurity, and development of cybersecurity risk profiles and recommendations for DERMS.
This final report for FEW0277 summarizes the work performed over the project performance period of October 2021 – March 2025. This project was funded under the “Reactive Capture and Conversion R&D” lab call released in FY2021. The goal of the project was to develop dual-function materials and process for capturing CO 2 from the atmosphere and converting it into CH 4 . The work was organized into four parallel tracks in 1) direct air capture materials synthesis and characterization, 2) catalysts for CO 2 conversion, 3) mechanistic investigations via ab initio simulations, and 4) process modeling, technoeconomic analysis, and lifecycle assessment. The project was split into two budget periods. The first budget period focused on development of amine-based materials, due to their known performance for CO 2 direct air capture and their potential to act synergistically with metal catalysts to enable a low-temperature methanation pathway. The second budget period focused on development of alkali-based materials and a simulated-moving-bed process for high conversion catalytic reduction of captured CO 2 to CH 4 . All project milestones were completed during the project performance period and are summarized in this report. Our work resulted in publication of eight peer-reviewed manuscripts, one patent application, and numerous presentations given at domestic and international conferences and invited academic department seminars.
This is the final technical report for the DOE-OCED project DE-CD0000051. The report provides the progress at the close of the project. The objective of the project is to design and build a large pilot plant for carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) capture from a pulp and paper (P&P) mill using RTI’s non-aqueous solvent (NAS) technology at a capacity of 120,000 t-CO 2 /year, with >90% CO 2 captured. The pilot plant will be used for testing and evaluating the NAS capture process using real flue gas from the P&P mill’s power boiler for a minimum of 1 year of parametric testing and a minimum of 2,000 hours of continuous long-term testing. The testing will provide data for process optimization and scale-up for the P&P industry, provide information on interaction of flue gas contaminants on solvent performance and degradation, and inform strategies for emission control. At the end of the project, the pilot plant will be managed by International Paper (IP), the host site owner, which will continue to capture CO 2 , sequester the captured CO 2 , and be eligible for the 45Q credit.
This final technical report summarizes the work accomplished in this DOE Early Career Research Program project that has established moiré superlattice materials and two-dimensional (2D) heterostructures as a highly tunable platform for controlling heterogeneous charge transfer (ET) kinetics at solid-liquid interfaces. By precisely engineering van der Waals heterostructures of atomically thin 2D materials, particularly bilayer and trilayer graphene with controlled twist angles, this project demonstrated systematic control of interfacial charge transfer rates spanning three orders of magnitude. This research addresses fundamental questions about how electronic structure, charge localization, and atomic layer-dependent properties govern charge transfer at electrochemical interfaces, with broad implications for energy conversion, electrocatalysis, and next-generation electrochemical devices.
The search for neutrinoless double-beta decay (0nbb) explores new physics by directly probing the unknown mass scale and possible Majorana nature of the neutrino. The nEXO experiment, one of the two leading proposed ton-scale projects in the US, has a projected sensitivity to the 136 Xe 0nbb half-life of 10 28 years. The interpretation of possible signals in this next generation of experiments would be complicated by significant variations in theoretical calculations of the nuclear matrix elements (NMEs) of the decay, and nuclear structure measurements testing those theories can help address that uncertainty. We have 136 Xe(p,n) 136 Cs reaction at TUNL to deduce the level-scheme of states in 136 Cs through which the lowest-lying 1+ state decays. We find that over 99% of such decays will proceed through at least one isomeric state with a lifetime of order 100ns, which would enable large xenon detectors to employ a delayed-coincidence technique to search for charge-exchange processes including solar neutrino interactions. We have carried out measurements at TUNL of the 134 Xe( 3 He,n) 136 Ba and 136 Xe( 3 He,n) 138 Ba reactions to low-lying 0 + states in the residuals to probe the BCS assumption for QRPA NME calculations for the initial and final nuclei in 136 Xe 0nbb. While the analyses of these reactions is not yet complete and is ongoing, our initial results indicate tension with the BCS assumption. We have assembled a thermosyphon cooling R&D system for nEXO which has demonstrated up to 500 W of cooling in vacuum. We have developed a simple thermosyphon cooling simulation for nEXO and planned laboratory tests with the R&D system to benchmark it.