Release Date: May 3, 2007

WASHINGTON, DC - With the recent release of a funding opportunity announcement, the Secretary of Energy has kicked off the U.S. Department of Energy's longest running student-teacher research grant program, the University Coal Research (UCR) program.

The announcement calls on the Nation's colleges and universities to propose new projects to advance coal science and enhance the long-term use of coal. The program supports the Energy Department's continued commitment to improving the environmental performance of our Nation's most abundant energy resource.

In the program's 29th year, more than $550,000 will available to fund two projects, with a maximum of just over $275,000 per project. Each project will involve one or two colleges or universities and will extend over 36 months.

Research will be conducted under one broad topic: enabling advanced modeling and simulation for fuel-flexible combustors. Examples of research interests under this topic include:

• Quantifying current prediction capability for flashback and lean blowout and identifying the sensitivity to physical sub-models.
• Conducting numeric investigations of boundary condition effects on computational fluid dynamic simulations of thermo-acoustic instabilities.
• Evaluating the role of transport parameters in model prediction accuracy.

Since the program's inception in 1979, nearly 1,760 students have received hands-on research experience working side-by-side with their professors to develop clean and efficient technologies for the use of coal. Past UCR research has developed concepts that are now in commercial practice - from new ways to wash impurities from coal to a spin-off technology that provides more efficient use of carbon inks in office copiers.

Proposals under the new funding opportunity are due by June 20, 2007. The Office of Fossil Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory, which implements the program for DOE, will name winning projects in November 2007.