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 ...

Use of motorcycles helmets significantly reduces the risk of fatality or serious brain injury to riders in the event of a crash, but riders often do not wear helmets in warm weather because of thermal discomfort. We propose to develop an innovative ventilation and cooling system that will maintain a cool, dry environment inside the helmet while also meeting applicable safety standards. The key the ...

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 ...

Tau Technologies leads a team with proven experience in applying technology to solve real world challenges. Our program manager was the Principal Investigator at Battelle Memorial Institute on a project that successfully developed and demonstrated a 300-meter range, man-portable facial recognition system for SOCOM. This proposal will incorporate newer technology and algorithms to improve accurac ...

ATA proposes to conduct feasibility studies and develop a CubeSat Laser Communications (CubeSat LaserCom) system that enables high data rate communications from a CubeSat to ground terminals, GEO terminals, and other CubeSats. Our proposed CubeSat LaserCom terminal integrates advanced ATA line-of-sight stabilization, tracking and pointing technologies with space-qualified laser and detector techn ...

When imaging over long distances, atmospheric turbulence between the camera and subject degrades the collected data limiting the effective resolution, regardless of the quality of the optic and sensor used. This reduction in image quality can have serious impacts on the ability to carry out missions by reducing situational awareness and preventing target identification. EM Photonics has been worki ...

sci_Zone is seeking to develop LinkStar, an integrated flight computer and radio system/hosted payload for cubesats. The goal of this payload is to become the heart of future cubesats to provide a secure, high performance flight computer with integrated communications framework that uses no more than 3W average power and fits within 0.5U. The heart of the LinkStar system is the Xilinx Zynq UltraS ...