Award Data

This Phase I research is intended to evaluate the feasibility of manufacturing low-cost, acid-resistant sanitary sewer pipe from sulfur concrete. Sulfur is an abundant mineral recovered from coking, natural gas processing, and petroleum refining. Secondary recovery of sulfur, resulting from environmental regulation, produces more material than is needed by U.S. industry. The U.S. Bureau of Mines ...

Major improvements in process control, compliance monitoring, and environmental decisionmaking could be made if more accurate, less costly, more rugged techniques were available for continuous monitoring of multiple gas phase pollutants. As part of the solution, Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy is emerging as a promising Field Analytical Method (FAM) for multiple gas monitoring. H ...

Infrared tunable diode laser spectrometers provide a highly effective means of measuring trace concentrations, with either remote sensing or with advective sampling. It is often desirable to measure more than one trace gas at a time. This is especially true when gas emissions are strongly correlated, such as in combustion emissions where measuring both the CO2 concentration and another minor con ...

The world fungicide market is approximately $5.5 billion and is almost exclusively synthetic chemicals.Over the past decade there has been increasing concern over chemical pesticide residues in the foodsupply, in the groundwater, and associated with worker safety issues. Recent legislation may limit theuse of many existing chemicals and the cost of research has slowed the introduction of new fung ...

Protozoal predators severely limit the successful pond cultivation of the alga Haematococcus forthe commercial production of the aquaculture industry's natural colorant astaxanthin.Commercial producers frequently experience predatory attacks that eliminate 90% of theirHaematococcus biomass within 72 hours. The development of a cost effective, commercial-scale, in vitro, predatory-free production ...

Bacterial plant diseases of economically important crops are difficult to control. Chemicals used to treat bacterial plant diseases cannot only alter soil flora and auna, but ar unreliable for preventive control when environmental conditions favor growth of plant pathogenic bacteria. This research is directed toward development of an effective control for bacterial plant diseases using phages wh ...

The whitefly pest and vector, and the geminiviruses that it transmits, have become the principaldeterrents to vegetable production in the U.S. sunbelt states, in Mexico, and throughout the CaribbeanBasin since the introduction and spread of the B biotype whitefly vector in the late 1980's. The mosteffective means of controlling geminivirus-incited diseases is through resistant tomato varieties. ...

The use of sub-therapeutic concentrations of anti-microbial agents in animal feed has contributed to theproductivity of the U.S. meat and dairy industries by preventing infectious diseases, by decreasing theamount of feed required and by increasing the rate of animal weight gain. However, failure to observerecommended practices of drug withdrawal can result in concentrations of antibiotic residue ...

The use of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect contaminants such as solvents, fuels, and pesticides in soil and water samples is now well established. Although ELISA and related methods can facilitate analysis of samples, several washing and separation steps are involved that require 30 to 120 minutes per sample to reach equilibrium. Recently, near infrared fluorescence immunoassa ...

This proposal seeks to develop a method for the encapsulation of a liquid artificial culture medium that has been proven suitable for rearing a variety of beneficial insects. There are no existing methods available for the production of soft-shelled, aqueous-filled, 1 cm diameter capsules which could be used to encapsulate water-based artificial diets. All current industrial encapsulation techno ...