Award Data

In 2011, there were 60,000 dairy farms in the US. Of there, 56,600 had herds of fewer than 500 animals. Currently, manure digester installations are only considered economical for herds of at least 500 animals. There require turbine or diesel generator sets of 100 Kilowatt size and larger. The need exists for a smaller waste to energy conversion approach for implementation on small farms were ...

Coal fired Gasifer Combined Cycles (GCC) have both high efficiency and very low emissions. A critical need for GCCs is a method of removing the H2S produced from the sulfur in the coal from the hot gases. There has been extensive research on hot gas clean-up systems, focused on the use of a zinc oxide based sorbent (e.g., zinc titanate). Unfortunately, current sorbents are relatively expensive, ...

The overall objective of the proposed project is to develop new injury criteria, model based risk assessment methodology, and a software tool to assess neck injury risk from head supported mass (HSM) loading. Based on the foundation of Phase I feasibility studies, the proposed Phase II work will focus on model enhancement, extension and validation, risk assessment, and software integration and tes ...

The catastrophic drinking water treatment plant failure in March 1993 in Milwaukee was a direct result of the inability to control coagulant chemical dosage during significant changed in raw water quality. This event largely dispelled the myth that only small water utilities were vulnerable to such control problems. The current state of this critical technology, coagulant dose control, is woeful ...

"Project Opportunity The vast majority of today’s polymers, plastics, foams, synthetic fiber, adhesives, and coatings are made from oil, which is non-renewable, non-biodegradable, depends in large part on foreign sources, is highly sensitive to regional conflicts, and has a large carbon footprint. Unfortunately, today’s selection of renewable polymeric materials is extremely limited and most ...

Coal is the largest source of power generation in the U.S.A. but its conbustionproduces SOx and NOx which must be removed from the flue gas. Current removaltechniques (limestone base Flue Gas Desulfurization and Selective CatalyticReduction) are effective but expensive due to the large amouth of sorbentconsumed. The leading regenerable process is the NOXSO process, which wses asodium aluminate s ...

The combustion of fossil fuels, particularly coal, introduces large quantities of arsenic into the environment, much of which reaches natural waters. Acute arsenic poisoning results from ingestion of only 100 mg of the element, while chronic poisoning occurs with the continued ingestion of smaller amounts. Processes developed for arsenic removal from drinking water are appropriate for small volu ...

Current methods to discern the differentiation state of stem cells are time-consuming, labor-intensive, costly, invasive, and consequently, ill-suited for clinical applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose to develop a microfluidic stem cell analyzer for accurate, non-invasive identification of the cell differentiation state in conjunction with automated cell sorting at high-throughp ...

Current methods for stem cell isolation are time-consuming, costly, and labor-intensive, and ill-suited for point of care applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose to develop and demonstrate a high-throughput, non-invasive, microfluidic stem cell analyzer to enable a rapid isolation of high-quality stem cell products from clinically relevant samples. Our technology enables significan ...

"The large-scale production of nanoparticles of the highest purity will be accomplished by the Eltron Solvent-free Powder Synthesis (ESPS) system described in this proposal. Since conventional particle size reduction methods are unable to reduce particles to the nano-scale and tend to reduce the purity of the powders, the ESPS system has been designed for direct yield of high purity and nano-size ...