Award Data

Proposal title: Rapid Assessment of Air Void System in Fresh Concrete Water expansion during freeze-thaw cycles can cause deterioration in concrete, leading to scaling, cracking, and crumbling over a period of years. Resistance to this damage is achieved with a system of voids formed by adding surfactants to the fresh concrete to stabilize air bubbles naturally entrained during mixing. The volume ...

Proposal title: Broken Rail Detection from Flashing Rear End Device Broken rails are a common cause of mainline derailments and a particular concern given the increasing use of our rail system for passenger traffic and petroleum products. The progressive nature of the defects provides an opportunity for early detection of cracks before they become significant enough to cause a derailment. Unfortu ...

Low or narrow bridges are often hit by legal-sized commercial vehicles and oversize vehicles often strike regulation bridges. In both cases the accidents result in extensive property damage, possible personal injuries and even death, and increased traffic congestion. Past attempts to warn drivers of risks for bridge hits have failed due to inaccurate measurement, high rates of false alarms, or s ...

The detection of neutrons is a critical capability for the identification of special nuclear materials in homeland security applications. Both plutonium and uranium can be detected by their neutron signatures. Next-generation detectors should efficiently detect fission neutrons, even in a high background of gamma rays. Neutron detection systems consisting of 3He have found widespread use due to th ...

Job related injuries cost the railroads over $1 billion annually and from 2005 through 2008 30.3% of those injuries occurred in the rail yard. A majority of the accidents were attributed to slips, trips and falls from the worker slipping on ballast or tripping on other trackside objects. IEM is developing a Transportation Autonomous Device that may be configured to work autonomously, with a remote ...

Energy Research Company proposes the continued development of its proprietary technology, Laser Induced Acoustics (LIA), for standoff detection of VBIEDs and suicide bombers, and building a LIA based prototype suitable for high fidelity simulations. LIA uses a laser to interrogate a surface with the resulting acoustic signal indicating the presence of any explosive residues. In addition, we are us ...

In Phase I of this effort we analyzed the structural response of a BLU 109 during typical penetration events. Based on these finite element results, we proposed and demsonstrated a simple robust concept for a passive penetrator sensor that identifies the material being penetrated and also correlates strongly with its underground trajectory. Such a sensor would obviously provide valuable informatio ...

Orora Design Technologies proposes to develop electronic design automation (EDA) tools employing minimally invasive circuit design-based methods to mitigate single event effects (SEEs) for next generation Ultra-DSM CMOS (

More than 1,300,000 Level 1 commercial vehicle inspections - a safety-critical, time-consuming, often difficult and painstaking process, especially as regards the brake inspection component -- are performed every year in the United States, under all sorts of weather and lighting conditions. The current technology used adds to the complexity and error potential inherent in this important task. In ...

AccessData is proposing enhancements to its Distributed Network Attack (DNA)product to increase the functionality which will increase the number of workstations that can participate in the system; from approximately 1,000 to potentially 1,000,000 workstations. This will be accomplished by coupling its world class password attack technology with a proven open source desktop grid computing infrastru ...