Award Data

The injection of activated carbon into the flue gas has been shown to mitigate the emission of mercury in all coal-fired power plants, even those with wet and dry scrubbers. This is a low-capital-cost technology in which the largest cost element is the cost of the activated carbon sorbent. Therefore, the obvious approach to further cost reductions is to reduce the amount of sorbent needed or to ...

ADA Technologies Inc. has developed an electrochemical strippable coating technology for the removal of radioactive contaminants from conductive surfaces. The proposed three-phase SBIR project would apply this electrochemical technology to cleaning surfaces prior to welding or brazing. The process will eliminate grease, dirt, and rust from conductive surfaces using electro-polishing techniques. On ...

Nondestructive testing (NDT) has become an essential tool for inspecting and maintaining military and industrial equipment. The numerous NDT methods produce a range of complex wastewaters, albeit in relatively small volumes. In most cases, these wastes cannot be discharged to the sewer. Consequently, a compact waste-treatment system with the ability to handle a wide range of waste types would allo ...

Commercially available sorbents for controlling mercury emissions from coal-fired utility boilers are affected detrimentally by the presence of SO2 and SO3 in the gas stream. These contaminants present a significant challenge to a large portion of utility boilers, which will need to meet upcoming mercury emissions standards in an economic fashion. However, recent testing has indicated that costs ...

A wide range of practical instruments is needed for monitoring carbon dioxide concentrations of the land, air, and sea. Moderate accuracy of order 1 ppm (dry mole fraction) and temporal response of a few seconds will suffice. Expense, weight, size, and electrical power must be kept low to make the instrumentation applicable to a large number (~10,000) of one-way deployments per year. Accessible ...

Tower-based observatories monitor terrestrial ecosystems from a single spot; however, it is not known if the observations are applicable to the entire ecosystem. A vertically-integrated suite of technologies could be used to evaluate ecosystem-atmospheric interactions and determine the actual utility of tower-based systems; however, for reasons of safety and expense, piloted aircraft cannot be us ...

Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas, and improved in situ instruments are needed to track its flow throughout the global carbon cycle. Such instruments must be cost effective with regard to both hardware and operations; require little maintenance for deployments to the air, land, and sea; and provide accurate and precise measurements with negligible artifacts. This project will develop a s ...

Uncooled focal plane array technology, based on micro-bolometer thermal detectors, has evolved such that high performance can be achieved in both the medium wavelength infrared (MWIR) and long wavelength infrared (LWIR) bands with small pixel pitch, large array format and fast thermal time constant. This improved infrared sensor technology allows development of miniaturized infrared video cameras ...

Development of air-to-air and air-to-ground imaging LADAR systems with high resolution is a difficult problem, because transmit and receive signals are distorted by atmospheric turbulence along the beam path. The distortion has high-frequency spatial and temporal components due to the movement of the platform. To dynamically correct the turbulence viewed from a tactical platform, the adaptive op ...

Colorado Engineering, Inc., a small woman owned business, and the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs are teaming to extend a steganogrpahic architecture for an extensible, distributed application that can be utilized to detect steganographic content in media files, alert the user, and either mitigate (destroy) the content if possible or quarantine the files as appropriate. The initial arc ...