Award Data

A variety of organic and inorganic contaminants originating from municipal, agricultural, and industrial wastewater sources are being found at increasing frequency in the Nation’s natural and drinking water supplies. These “emerging contaminants” include pharmaceuticals, antibiotics, steroids/hormones, flame retardants, perfluorinated compounds, personal care products, and herbicides/pestici ...

Environmental Fuel Research, LLC (EFR-LLC), has demonstrated the technical feasibility of separating fats, oils, and greases (FOG) from grease trap waste (GTW) and converting FOG to biodiesel that can meet ASTM specifications. GTW is a dirty and low-value waste from the food service industry that is high in FOG and currently is treated as a liability. The EFR-LLC process uses a bubble column react ...

A uniquely qualified team consisting of ETSVP-JV, LLC a small business joint venture, and subcontractor RTI International, are commercializing an innovative reactive nanofiber filtration media for controlling PM2.5 and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Materials developed for the Department of Defense to protect troops from chemical and biological agents are the foundation for next generation fil ...

It is not likely that an autonomous system can be programmed with all the information it requires to perform every mission or every variation of every contingency within the near future. One way to address this issue is to provide user-friendly means to teach or program a robot to add to its autonomous capability. This proposal focuses on the physical aspects of the robot performance, manipulat ...

Objectives and Intellectual Merit: The infrastructure of modern civilization is a set of complex systems1 that dynamically interact across multiple layers of abstraction. Researchers from many disciplines2 are designing analytical tools for predicting the global and local behaviors of these complicated, multi-layer networks. Easily usable, available (open source) and inter-operated tools are neede ...

Military Environmental Control Units (ECUs) represent one of the dominant energy users in forward operating environments, and significant effort is being made to improving overall ECU efficiency [1]. Reducing overall Size, Weight and Power (SWaP) of military ECUs is complicated by the transient, yet predictable, nature of the thermal demand profile over the course of a typical daily usage cycle, ...

Recent advancements in sensor simulation tools [2] have improved our ability to model radar, lidar, camera, and GPS with software/hardware in the loop. Of course, our ability to model the physics of heavy trucks [3] is quite mature as well. To address the challenge of developing the STE, we will provide our autonomy algorithms as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The focus of this topic ...

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has been supporting research of energetic materials and incendiaries as payloads for weapons to defeat targets containing chemical and biological agents. Several universities and Navy labs have been involved in this research, and have narrowed down on a few material formulations that are efficient biocides. These formulations contain a chemical ingredient ...

The proliferation of nuclear and radiological weapons of mass destruction is a serious threat in the world today. The goal of this proposal is to develop a new, very low cost radiation detection technology that will be useful for detection and for surveillance of individuals who have been near radioactive materials. The technology can also be used for dosimetry, and will provide the technology for ...

In Topic DTRA143-001, a need has been identified to improve monitoring human presence near containers, stored items, and secured areas in order to monitor activities, particularly in remote locations that are not patrolled all day every day. The use of smart materials to detect human presence by sensing volatile organic compounds emanating from the human body is a major area of interest within the ...