Award Data

Contamination by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has become an immense environmental issue in the US in recent years. PFAS are a group of man-made chemicals, the most common being perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), that are very persistent in the environment and cause adverse health effects in humans upon exposure. This year, 610 locations in 43 states, ...

In a previous National Science Foundation SBIR project, the developer created an online platform that uses songs to support mathematical learning. In the current project, the team will develop a prototype of a component of a platform to guide students in creating and producing their own music videos about algebra. The prototype will include a video production application, features to enhance learn ...

Manufacturing of Portland cement, the primary binder in concrete, accounts for ~7% of global CO2 emissions, 4% of energy use, and exhaustion of natural resources. Premature aging of concrete in infrastructure systems is another major concern.  A robust binder chemistry has been developed to overcome these drawbacks.  The original approach to production of this binder, however, is not compatible ...

Prescriptive and Predictive Decision Analytics have proven invaluable in helping the USAF sustain combat support goals. The challenge lies not just with the analytics but in aggregating mountains of varied data and exploiting information; data curation is the real goldmine. Humans lack the ability to provide real-time data curation of the deluge of new data. Machine Learning (ML) is now providing ...

Two major waste streams, thermoplastics and used automotive tires, need a technological and economic method to decrease their entry into our environment. Both have long life-cycles as waste, causing many deleterious environmental problems. The Phase I, II , and Ill goal is to divert plastic and tire waste and its pollution away from landfills and the environment into transformational new technolog ...

Conventional methods of treating contaminated mine waters with lime (Ca(OH)2 and CaO) and caustic (NaOH) are expensive to construct and operate. Limestone (CaCO3) is 1/8 to 1/40 the cost of lime and caustic, respectively, and is commonly used in passive mine water treatment systems. The generation of alkalinity from limestone is limited by calcite solubility. Where mine waters are contaminated wit ...

Check-in Check-out (CICO) is a widely used behavioral intervention for elementary and middle schools centered on goals, feedback, and communication with parents about daily behavioral performance. This project will develop a prototype platform to streamline and automate the delivery of CICO. The prototype will include an app, a user-friendly interface, and a dashboard to track progress and capture ...

SoarTech proposes DeepCounter: a system that automatically learns UAS and C-UAS behaviors across multiple tasks using DRL within a 3D simulation environment. Our system addresses several gaps in applying state of the art DRL to learn C-UAS and UAS behaviors. First, our existing DRL framework extends the state of the art to work with variable numbers of heterogenous agents. Our work in Phase I will ...

Antibiotic resistant bacteria have become a major concern in discharges from hospitals, wastewater treatment plants, and agricultural runoff. A quick, inexpensive, field- deployable method of detecting antibiotic resistant bacteria in these waters is desirable. Antibiotic resistant bacteria of concern include Salmonella, Staphylococci, E. coli, Enterococci, and coliform bacteria, among others. A p ...

Department of Defense personnel must wear respiratory protection continuously when deployed in regions with the danger of chemical or biological attack. Manufacturing respirators/masks using conventional molding methods limits the features that can be designed into the protection. Additive manufacturing provides an ideal approach for manufacturing respirators. Additive Manufacturing enables the ab ...