Air Force Department’s RECOVERY Grant for Nanoscale Fuel Additives Research

Anticipated efforts are subject to final Recovery Act approval and Funding. Contractors should wait for receipt of the formal solicitation prior to incurring proposal preparation costs. This American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Research Program will create new research jobs and new technologies that will provide further economic stimulus. This American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Research Program will investigate the underpinning science necessary to develop nanoscale additives for novel fuels. The ability to dissolve or suspend additives or catalysts in fuels has created the opportunity to develop new sets of desirable properties for fuels for aircraft, rockets, and satellites. An understanding of how these new catalytic processes occur and how multifunctional catalysts can be developed will be investigated. Areas of interest include understanding fundamentals of catalytic processes involved including interactions between catalyst and substrate, charge donation and charge transfer; understanding fundamental properties of nanostructures and their roles as catalysts; the role and effect of water and impurities on fuel additives; addition of additives to ionic liquids; the aging and long time behavior of catalysts; the performance of fuels developed with these new additives. This program seeks to bring together recently developed experimental and theoretical methods and approaches so that the optimum nanostructured catalysts can be developed for use in propulsion systems. A multidisciplinary effort is required to address this developing opportunity including fundamental research in chemistry, physics, surface and materials science, and computational simulation and modeling.
Full Announcement AFOSR-BAA-2009-3 will be posted within 10 days of this
presolicitation notice.