Award Data

The Bureau of Land Management and other agencies have called the rapid expansion of energy exploration on the Rocky Mountain Front, the single largest environmental challenge facing the western U.S. The Powder River Basin (PRB) of Wyoming and Montana is an area of major development for coal bed methane gas (CBM) exploration. CBM resides in underground coal seams, trapped by large aquifers of water ...

A key technology with immediate potential for reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with fossil fuel power plants is carbon sequestration. To ensure successful CO2 sequestration, the ability to monitor leakage from the geologic storage sites and the pipelines delivering the CO2 to those sites is paramount. The goal of this SBIR is to accelerate the development of a low-cost fiber- ...

This project develops and evaluates the technical feasibility of implementing a suite of Social Activity Modules to be used with the CosmoBot™ system, an interactive robotic toolkit, for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The CosmoBot™ system is equipped with social activity modules and interactive games to engage multiple children, providing an engaging, effective mode of deliverin ...

In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act. The ruling allows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate CO2 emissions. Such regulation will entail monitoring a wide variety of pollution sources, including automobile exhaust systems, industrial emission sources, and carbon sequestration sites. With presently availa ...

This SBIR project addresses the problem of waste and low manufacturing yield in the typical thin film manufacturing process. It has the potential to make a significant impact on energy utilization and become a critical component to making thin film processes cost effective, leading to waste-free manufacturing. Thin film deposition processes are extensively used in man-critical industries with sign ...

The poor nutrition habits of Americans are as well documented as the myriad attempts to reverse this course by health practitioners and researchers. The breadth of nutrition knowledge is increasing along with our waistlines. USDA researchers collected data from MEDLINE, a database of medical journal articles. They found that the annual number of journal articles that link fats and cholesterol to h ...

The U.S. poultry industry produces two billion pounds of feathers each year, which are considered waste biomaterials and currently converted into low value protein for use in animal feed. In Europe, feathers are autoclaved or burned and then buried as a waste material due to regulations prohibiting animal by-products in feed. A more appropriate use for feathers is to utilize their unique structura ...

The production of hybrid carrot seed is difficult because of the indeterminacy of ripening and the tendency to shatter mature seeds. The umbel (flat-top cluster) inflorescences (seedheads) of carrots mature sequentially over a 3-4 week period. The primary (king) umbel matures first, followed by the secondary and tertiary umbels. The standard harvest method is to swath when the primary and many of ...

Camelina seed production is expanding throughout the semi-arid portion of the wheat belt and is proposed for intercropping between rows in vineyards and nut orchards. These markets and the market need for small maneuverable harvesters for research plots and breeder blocks have created a need for an inexpensive, but efficient, camelina harvester. The Seedster has the potential for meeting the deman ...

The objective of this project is to develop CO2 absorption columns with rates of production that will enable CO2 capture for less than $20 per ton of CO2. The research will make use of a nano-composite sorbent material called interstitial “Spiderwebs”TM. The Spiderweb material was conceived to overcome a fundamental kinetic limitation of conventional solid sorbents for molecular and ionic sepa ...