The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced $17.6 million for 14 cooperative agreements with small businesses and institutions of higher education to develop and deploy efficient and environmentally friendly highway transportation technologies that will help reduce petroleum use in the U.S. The funding will go toward projects that pursue breakthrough approaches to providing Americans with greater freedom of mobility and energy security, while lowering costs and reducing impacts on the environment.

The selected projects will support innovative technologies and solutions in the areas of energy storage, power electronics and electric motors, advanced combustion engines, materials technologies, and fuels and lubricant technologies. Some awardees include:

• Miltec UV International, LLC of Stevensville, Md., will receive $1.5 million to develop the next generation of safer lithium ion plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) batteries by combining high-speed precision printing and UV curing to instantly fixture ceramics on separator film.

• University of Colorado Boulder of Boulder, Colo., will receive $2 million to develop a new modular power conversion approach that uses both silicon and wide-band gap devices to address the fundamental power conversion, loss, and component stress mechanisms.

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of Champaign, Ill., will receive $672,000 to develop and test a micro-jet enhanced fuel injection and combustion system.

• RMX Technologies of Knoxville, Tenn., will receive $2 million to scale up a carbon fiber oxidation technology that reduces energy consumption and oxidation time.

• The Regents of the University of Michigan of Ann Arbor, Mich., will receive $874,024 to use alternative fuel ignition to improve engine efficiency.

For more information, visit www.energy.gov.