Colorado small businesses garner $17M in energy grants

Gov. Ritter praised the announcement of more than $17 million in grants from the U.S. Dept. of Energy to eight companies in Boulder and Wheat Ridge for advanced energy and cleantech research and development projects. The awards are part of $188 million in Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants the Dept. of Energy awarded across the country to assist up-and-coming technologies and to create jobs through commercialization.

"Congratulations to our small businesses that are using innovation and cutting-edge technology to create clean-tech solutions with long-term benefits to our New Energy Economy and the nation," Gov. Ritter said. "These Department of Energy grants are helping Colorado companies move quicker to get their technology to market and create even more jobs for generations to come."

The Colorado awards include:

TDA Research, Inc., Wheat Ridge

  • $999,918: Brackish and Wastewater Cleanup for Process Cooling; This project will develop and demonstrate a technology that will permit fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, as well as petroleum refiners and other industries that use large amounts of cooling water, to significantly reduce their demand for fresh water by using brackish water resources for cooling that are currently unsuitable because of their salinity.
  • $1,000,000: Production Scale-up of Nanoporous Carbons for Ultracapacitor; Certain graphitic materials with nano-sized pores have unusually high electrical capacitance properties that make the materials useful for high power density capacitors ("ultracapacitors") with potential applications in a number of uses where high power density is required, such as wind turbines and automobiles. Future automobiles will make extensive use of electrical power, and power demands will be met by a number of storage devices such as batteries and ultracapacitors. This project will develop a technology to produce large quantities of nano-porous carbon materials for use in ultracapacitors, starting from low cost starting materials such as wood and char. TDA Research is working with a number of US manufacturers to commercialize the new carbon-based materials production technology.
  • $1,000,000: Reactive Distillation Biodiesel Process; TDA Research will develop a new process for making biodiesel that can use any oil or fat feedstock, especially low-cost unrefined vegetable oils and waste greases or animal fats. The use of low-cost feedstocks will reduce the price of biodiesel and expand the nation's production beyond what is possible from refined soybeans or canola.
  • $1,000,000: Novel Catalytic Alkane Oxidation Process; This project will develop a new catalytic process that produces ethanol more cheaply than current synthetic processes and can be used in existing petrochemical plants. Ethanol, primarily made from corn, is a versatile chemical that is used as a chemical solvent, a sterilizer, an antifreeze, a chemical intermediate, and an oxygenate in fuels.
  • $1,000,000: A New Three-Part Architecture for Efficient and Stable Bulk Heterojunction OPV Devices; This project will develop a new combination of materials that will simultaneously increase the efficiency and the stability of organic solar cells so that they become suitable for commercialization.

Tusaar, Inc., Boulder

  • $998,940: Economical Sequestering & Immobilization of Heavy Metals - Means to recycle water and reduce pollution; Electric power plants generate large quantities of solid and liquid residuals which contain a broad spectrum of heavy metals. These residuals are stored in various ways including surface impoundments and landfills. In many instances, these materials come in contact with ground water and release some of these heavy metals into the surrounding environment. Stored fly ash from coal fired power plants can potentially pollute groundwater by leaching toxic metals like mercury & cadmium. This project will develop a new technology that promises to provide an economical and effective means to sequester and immobilize over 27 different heavy metals thus reducing groundwater pollution and enabling water recycling.

Infotility, Inc., Boulder

  • $999,576: Controller for Charging/Storage System; This project will develop a smart controller and small storage unit in order to provide energy storage for utility grid stabilization and the incorporation of greater intermittent renewable energy. These will be installed at thousands of residential sites and dispatched by the utility using smart meters and new communication technologies.

Kapteyn-Murane Laboratories, Boulder

  • $750,000: Recovery Act - Development of a Fiber Based Source of High Average Power Ultrafact Pulses at 2.0 Microns; This project makes use of recent advances in ultrafast fiber laser design in combination with optical amplification to convert the laser output for use in free-electron lasers or high harmonic generation. Limitations on fiber laser pulse duration will be removed by using the technique known as crossed-polarized wave generation, and making fiber lasers suitable for free-electron lasers, where they will be used to enhance the peak-power output of x-ray pulses. This technology promises to be useful for basic studies in chemistry and physics, for developing super-high-resolution microscopes for biology and medicine, for viewing nanoscale materials, and for applications in the nanoelectronics industry.

Tech-X Corporation, Boulder

  • $999,588: High Fidelity Simulation of Low-Energy Ion Beam Chopping for the Spallation Neutron Source; This project will develop enhanced software which will be used to reduce risk and cost for planned experiments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the upgrade to the Spallation Neutron Source.
  • $999,943: High-Fidelity Modulator Simulations of Coherent Electron Cooling Systems; This project will develop high-performance software for the Electron Ion Collider to assist DOE scientists in the design of an electron cooling section that will enable such a facility to meet performance requirements.
  • $999,749: Extending Chombo with PETSc; This project will interface an existing highly scalable and efficient library (Chombo) to a library of solvers (PETSc) for improved numerical robustness.
  • $699,352: Parallel Validation Tools for Fusion Simulations; This project will develop software that will facilitate the testing of codes against experiments, which will lead to improved forecasting of fusion experiments. Better forecasting of fusion experiments gives greater confidence that ITER will succeed, and enable improved fusion performance.
  • $999,718: Plasma Jet Modeling for MIF; This project will explore (through computer models) an emerging fusion concept while improving plasma modeling tools. This is one step toward realizing the potential of nuclear fusion to produce clean, inexpensive energy for the United States.
  • $999,724: QuAI - A Quality Assurance Infrastructure for Data-Centric Applications; This project will develop a customizable and secure infrastructure that provides quality assurance in distributed data processing for large HEP and NP experiments and NASA missions.

Boulder Precision Electro-Optics, Boulder

  • $756,850: A Laser Power-Build-Up System for H Atom Ionization; This project will build a prototype cavity, and lock a high-power pulsed laser to the cavity to attain MW peak pulse powers. This will quantify the mode distortion from absorbed power, and examine the performance of different mirror coatings. Attention to the materials used and the design will allow ultra-high vacuum cleaning techniques to be used to avoid mirror contamination issues.

Kapteyn-Murnane Laboratories, Inc., Boulder

  • $946,116: Development of High Efficiency High Average Power Picosecond (10-50ps) Laser for High Repetition Frequency Electron Guns; This project will develop a prototype 2 MHz picosecond amplified laser to meet the needs of FEL photocathodes. This requires a state-of-the-art cryogenically cooled, amplified laser system to meet the goals of the photoinjector laser.

Eltron Research & Development Inc., Boulder

  • $1,000,000: Unconventional High Temperature Nanofiltration for Produced Water Treatment; This project will develop a proprietary high temperature nanofiltration technology that will remove salt and other dissolved solids from produced water originating from domestic oil and gas production. Treated water can be re-used in the extraction process without cooling/re-heating costs or can be recycled as an acceptable supply of source water.
  • $1,000,000: Molecular Separations Using Micro-Defect Free Ultra Thin Films; This project will develop a thin film molecular sieve technology that will make the separation of CO2 and other kinds of molecules much cheaper. This will be of great use to pharmaceutical and chemical industries, in addition to energy industries.