Award Data

A Multimodal Acoustic Tool for Inline Pipe Inspection 3/19/2018 The US energy transport pipeline system is a longstanding distribution network with most of its still standing pipes being installed between the 1950s–1970s. Due to degradation mechanisms, such as embrittlement, capable of causing a two-fold reduction in fracture toughness, pipe rupture is a major risk. Current nondestructive ins ...

NDT of Fracture Toughness for Pipeline Steels 3/16/2018 Ultrasound-based technology to nondestructively determine fracture toughness of pipeline steels will be developed. Fracture toughness is the material parameter that, along with applied loading and flaw geometry, dictates the critical crack size, and therefore controls the flaw size that must be detected during inspections. A major challeng ...

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 ...

Infrasound and seismic measurements are used by DTRA and the DoD for nuclear test monitoring, terrorist blast forensics, battle damage assessment, and environmental monitoring. However, these long wavelength physical signals are typically recorded through single-point sensors or sparse low density arrays. As a result, the critical signals of interest are often corrupted or masked by noise or inter ...

This proposal describes the development of a generalized toolkit that enables improved and automated mapping of partitioned subdomains onto available distributed compute nodes for applications operating within pure-MPI or hybrid-MPI parallel runtime environments. This toolkit may be invoked either as an independent pre-processing step or as a dynamic library, improving an applications real-time do ...

A significant performance gap exists between the theoretical number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPS) that a HPC machine is capable of sustaining and the number of FLOPS realized by real-world HPC applications. One of the principle reasons for this gap is the parasitic work that computational processes must do to communicate with one another. It has been shown that this communication work can b ...

Individual differences in vulnerability to sleep loss and fatigue from extended work hours and night work are a substantial problem in transportation work schedule development, fatigue risk management strategies, and prediction of performance impairment in real-world operations. This project will deliver an individualized Fatigue Management Program (FMP) technology for trucking operations that in ...

Standoff detection of nuclear materials continues to be one of the most critical tasks that security specialists must confront in a wide variety of applications, both military and civilian. There have been several approaches for standoff nuclear material detection. Each of them utilizes a different fundamental property of nuclear materials to improve the sensitivity of detection. In this SBIR prog ...

DTRA and other DoD agencies are currently seeking earth penetrators with higher efficiency for reaching deeply buried targets. Current penetrator materials and designs suffer from high levels of frictional drag, unbalanced resistance due to lateral forces and localized melting of the warhead leading to shape change and further instability. General Sciences, Inc. (GSI) has developed a method for en ...