Award Data

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 fraction, size, and spacing of these voids are critical. It is importa ...

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. Unfortunately, current inspection technology does not allow these inspection ...

Ensuring the health of coastal marine ecosystems has emerged as one of the primary environmental concerns of this century. Frequent monitoring of water quality is required to establish baseline levels, allow identification of anomalies, and enable early detection of problems. Citizen science programs have been shown to be a highly effective method of monitoring water quality. Creare proposes to de ...

Commercially available unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are not well designed to meet requirements for many atmospheric measurement applications, including deployment from ships, long endurance, and low cost. Multi-rotor UASs have recently gained popularity as a lowcost platform use in measurement and monitoring applications, but these systems have limited endurance and payload capabilities. Exist ...

Accurate marine weather nowcasts and forecasts are critical requirements for mariners to maintain situational awareness and ensure safe navigation for vessels, passengers, crew, and cargo. To best achieve this, reliable observations of atmospheric and sea conditions must be available at high spatial and temporal coverage. Unfortunately, existing approaches for marine weather observations are inade ...

Current radar systems are driven by sensing requirements in the field. Today, and even more so in the future, the operation of these systems will be plagued by heterogeneous threats, each seeking to counter the sensing capability with different types of countermeasures. The traditional approach to solving this problem would be to introduce multiple individual systems (sensors and effectors) into t ...

Low cost polyurethane laminate tent materials are designed to solve the cold crack issue with PVC tent fabrics. The use of novel construction of urethane/textile laminates offers a breakthrough in environmental durability over current offerings. This new laminate configuration provides for a new class of economical lightweight shelters with extended operating capability.Using a composite textile r ...

The Army has an ever-growing need to provide electric power to soldiers on the battlefield. Of particular need is an efficient, power dense, jet fuel-powered system for charging batteries. The Army has invested heavily in thermal-to-electric power conversion, most notably in thermoelectric generators or TEGs. Because the conversion efficiency of TEGs is relatively low, and because the hot side ...

Power and propulsion systems for small unmanned aerial systems (UASs) face increasing demands for high efficiency, high power density, and reliability. Small gas turbines offer high power density and excellent reliability, but are less efficient than internal combustion engines. We propose to develop advanced heat exchanger technology that can be used to produce recuperators that will increase the ...

AmberWave, Inc. has developed a method to laminate an ultra-thin (18 microns) monocrystalline Si layer to a conductive and fracture-resistant supporting layer such as a thin steel alloy foil. With this UTSi (Ultra-Thin Si) technology we have integrated front and rear cell processes based on the world-record PERL (Passivated Emitter Rear Locally diffused) silicon solar cell design, and have demonst ...