Award Data

Three-dimensional woven and braided fiber architectures provide important advantages to composites, including suppression of delamination, high damage tolerance, improved through-the-thickness properties, simplicity and cost-effectiveness of manufacturing complex composite structural components. However, in order to diversify applications and reach high volumes of utilization of these materials in ...

Strength and durability of commonly used bonded and bolted composite-to-composite and composite-to-metal structural joints suffer from sharp geometry variations, mismatch of elastic moduli, Poisson's ratios, coefficients of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity of the adherends, altogether causing high stress concentration and premature joint failure. The proposed work introduces several nove ...

The proposed research will develop a non-equilibrium plasma source for deposition of thin films on refractory materials at temperatures less then 600K. The developed source will also have the flexibility to surface treat thermally sensitive substrates without damage. Our existing non-equilibrium atmospheric plasma source will be optimized for depositing amorphous SiC and ZrO2 thermal barrier mat ...

79737B Only half of the estimated carbon delivered to the atmosphere by human activities in the 1990s remains there. The "missing" carbon was absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems and oceans, thus mitigating human perturbations to the carbon cycle. Carbon isotopes play a central role in understanding this terrestrial carbon sink at a variety of scales, but instrumentation to directly measure carbon ...

79513S Sodium hypochlorite is an industrial chemical that is produced with technologies that rely on organic membranes and undivided cell methods, which have performance limitations from fouling and limited selecivity. This project will develop an innovative and energy efficient, low temperature, cost-effective, and environmental friendly electrochemical process that uses a sodium-ion-conducting ...

79234S In January of 2004, the EPA published draft regulations for the control of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, and one of the most promising technologies for controlling mercury involves the treament of flue gas with activated carbon. As a consequence, the fly ash collected from power plants contains high concentrations of mercury-impregnated activated carbon, which would make ...

79252 As environmental regulations become increasingly stringent, there is mounting pressure on automobile manufacturers to substantially lower unburnt hydrocarbon emissions. This will require monitoring the hydrocarbon content in the exhaust with more accuracy than currently possible using the two oxygen sensor system. This requirement is especially important during start-up conditions, which a ...

76066S Ceramic membranes with ion-specific conducting properties can provide gases with purity unmatched by other gas separation methods. However, in order to realize the full potential of these membrane devices, high temperature seal materials are required to isolate the ultrahigh purity product gas from the inlet gas mixture. This project will develop a composite seal material that combines t ...

The design of turbomachinery components is a complex process requiring many steps and hundreds of minute decisions in an iterative process. The design proceeds from engine cycle performance and meanline design through 3D viscous flow calculations (CFD) and finite element structural analysis (FEA). Design studies may traverse this process many times, with routine tasks performed by engineers in a ...

Taggants are small objects used to label things or people that need to be traced. Synthetic DNA Taggants are ideal for this, since very small amounts can be detected if the sequence is known, and can be disguised by natural DNA in the environment. Known protocols for DNA amplification (e.g. PCR) allow for very sensitive DNA detection, but suffer from disadvantages: the apparatus is not very portab ...