Award Data

Biomass heating/cooking stoves in developing countries do not efficiently cook food or heat houses, while consuming too much fuel and emitting pollution resulting in respiratory illnesses, premature death, and climate change. Affordable technologies found in 1.) EPA approved heating stoves, 2.) DOE funded cooking stoves, and 3.) TEG (thermoelectric generation) lighting devices, improve heating, co ...

Fumed silica is an important additive in many products including paints, plastics and tires, but it is produced by an energy-intensive costly, toxic and hazardous process. SioTex has developed a superior triple green replacement for fumed silica that produces no toxic waste, uses little energy, and is inexpensive.  Our patent pending technology uses rice hulls, a bio-waste, as the feedstock.  Us ...

This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Project develops methods of recycling rare earth alloys from used nickel metal hydride batteries. Alloys of rare earth metal, nickel and other metals provide functional hydride storage materials that are critical to the operation of nickel metal hydride batteries and their applications. The current fleet of hybrid electric vehicles relies upon nick ...

Current anaerobic digester systems are designed for capturing energy from waste from large heads of farm animals. GHD, Inc., a leading manufacturer of anaerobic digesters, has stated that a minimum dairy heard size for economical implementation of a biogas system as 800 cows. These require turbine or diesel generator sets of 100 Kilowatt size and larger, a limiting factor in economically scaling ...

As part of its mission to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency develops and promotes innovative cleanup strategies that restore contaminated sites to productive use, reduce associated costs, and promotes environmental stewardship. Testing and characterization of the environment for potentially harmful contaminants is a costly endeavor. Current technolo ...

The objective of this project is to evaluate the feasibility of using some newly discovered materials, water-stable metal-organic frameworks (MOF), as filters for pollutants common in indoor air. By way of background, recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-supported work from Professor Masel’s laboratory has shown that a new class of water-stable MOFs shows unprecedented adsorp ...

Distributed energy offers a means of providing reliable, cost-effective electrical power to residents of rural communities. These requirements often cannot be met by current distribution methods due to limitation of remote central station power generation and transmission. With the migration of population from urban areas to rural areas and the increased power demands placed on electrical grids fr ...

There is a finite amount of fossil fuels, which will only last a few more decades. Therefore, it is imperative to develop renewable sources of energy. An area that has recently attracted a lot of attention is the conversion of renewable oils to biodiesel, primarily through the methanolysis of triglycerides. The use of an immobilized lipase as a heterogeneous biocatalyst to transform oils into biod ...

In this program, Omega Optics, Inc. and the University of Texas, Austin, propose a novel lab-on-chip photonic crystal slot waveguide infrared spectrometer for detection and spectroscopic analysis of BTEX hydrocarbons (benzene and toluene) in water and greenhouse gas (carbon dioxide) in air. The device utilizes the unique dispersive properties of slow light photonic crystal waveguides together with ...

Interior wood composite panels are widely used for furniture, bookshelves, kitchen cabinets, and flooring, and are predominately made with carcinogenic urea-formaldehyde (UF) resin. A new formaldehyde-free, environmentally friendly wood adhesive that mainly consists of abundant, renewable and readily available soybean flour and a novel curing agent have been developed in a laboratory. The novel cu ...