Cooperative Agreement 2026016

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project grant, awarded under the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program (CFDA 47.084), focuses on the development of retrofit dehumidification systems for air conditioning (AC) units. The $274,921 award to Helix Earth Technologies Inc. aims to enable greater than 50% energy savings for AC systems by eliminating latent loads through a novel liquid desiccant-based retrofit dehumidification...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation's Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) provides $1,235,696.00 to Arizona State University to develop cost- and energy-efficient brine treatment technologies that enable decarbonized brackish water desalination (BWD) for climate-adaptive water supply. The project aims to: 1) integrate nanofiltration and reverse osmosis to enable cost-effective brine volume reduction; 2) design an innovative interface-enhanced crystallizer for...

This $100,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program will support the development of passive solar desalination technology for produced water from oil and gas extraction sites. The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station will modify existing solar evaporation ponds using hierarchical nanstructured hydrogel materials to increase evaporation rates and superhydrophobic coatings to enhance water droplet departure on glass...

This Project Grant from the National Science Foundation will support the development of a novel hollow-fiber membrane technology tailored for use in a liquid desiccant air conditioning system. Awarded on May 15, 2023 for $255,965 under the NSF Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships program, the grant aims to demonstrate a customized membrane design and quantify its impact on the proposed system's efficiency, size, and cost. The recipient, Zephyr Innovations Inc., plans to conduct a series of...

This Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) program (CFDA 47.084) was provided to Aeris Water Technologies, LLC, a minority-owned small business located in Atlanta, GA. The $304,996 award, effective from March 1, 2025 to February 28, 2026, supports the development of an advanced atmospheric water extraction (AWE) device. The project aims to optimize AWE adsorbent materials and device configurations to create a...

The National Science Foundation awarded $275,000 under the Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships federal grant program (CFDA 47.084) to Kazadi Enterprises LTD to develop a Hydrologic Open Cooling System. The project aims to create a renewable, closed container cooling system incorporating rechargeable vacuum insulation and a novel two-stage heat pump. The system is designed to maintain cooling chamber temperatures between 1.5-5 degrees Celsius using 10% or less of the electrical power of...

Advanced Cooling Technologies Inc., doing business as Act, was awarded a $195,369.97 Project Grant from the Department of Energy Office of Science on February 22, 2021 to complete work by November 21, 2021. The grant was awarded under the Office of Science Financial Assistance Program (CFDA 81.049) to support Act's research into supercritical carbon dioxide dewatering enhanced by cosolvent and surfactant formulations. Specifically, Act will work to develop techniques using supercritical CO2,...

This EAGER (Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research) project, awarded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems under CFDA Program 47.041 Engineering, will explore the mechanisms underlying the performance of a two-dimensional interfacial evaporator that uses microcapillaries and metal surfaces to enable highly efficient water evaporation through solar-thermal interfacial evaporation. The total award amount is...

This National Science Foundation (NSF) Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (CFDA 47.084) Project Grant award of $274,994 supports the development of an innovative, membrane-free, and chemical-free desalination technology based on ion concentration polarization. The goal is to create a scalable system that can effectively transition from a bench-scale production capacity of 10 liters per hour to a larger-scale capacity of 1,000 liters per hour. This advancement aims to make desalination more...

Colorado School of Mines was awarded a $408,664 project grant from the National Science Foundation Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems under the NSF Engineering program (CFDA 47.041) to develop an advanced membrane distillation process for desalinating and recycling complex wastewaters. Through computational fluid dynamics modeling and bench-scale experiments, the School will work to harness buoyancy-driven instabilities to improve mixing within membrane...