Award Data

More than 10 million tons of polyurethane (PU) foams are manufactured globally each year, and as much as 20% of that production is unsellable scrap. Combining that manufacturing scrap with end-of-life recycling or disposal of PU foam, every year there is a tremendous waste of material that was made with a large investment of energy and still contains some very useful chemical functionality. Mobi ...

Advanced sensing technologies are needed to more efficiently address the requirements for the long- and short-term monitoring of groundwater, specifically for chlorinated hydrocarbons such as trichloroethylene. Current monitoring procedures can be expensive, as they generally require on-site visits to collect groundwater samples, or employ “portable” systems (gas chromatograph instruments), wh ...

Methane is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide. Various technologies and process improvements have been developed to curb methane emissions in the United States. There is still a lack of economically viable technology, however, to utilize dilute methane streams containing 10-40% methane, in which the other component is primarily carbon dioxide. The streams are oft ...

Polyurethane (PU) coatings continue to be a detriment to the environment. As long as compliance leads to higher costs for coatings manufacturers and applicators, tighter regulation will lead to increased resistance by these companies or ultimately will shift production to less regulated areas. The ideal situation would be if environmentally friendly practices led to lower costs for coatings manufa ...

In most critical software systems, a state that is partially visible through values passed across interfaces contains information that could determine the health of the software system, and whether a failure is likely in the future. Some of this information behaves in a continuous fashion, e.g., the available memory or disk space is easily interpreted to monitor system health. Other values are nom ...

Optical Physics Company is proposing to implement an interferometric angle sensor for the purpose of determining the relative angle between the two diffracting crystals. Two approaches can be pursued, namely (1) the dual grating interferometer, and (2) the angle interferometer. The estimated cost of materials for building the angle sensor in quantity ranges between $2K and $12K. The expected accur ...

Using a new concept for humidity control, based on a proprietary saturated air source, MAC will develop a design for an environmental chamber for use with NIST’s SPHERE UV source, in weathering or other UV degradation studies. The chamber will interface to the exit port of the SPHERE, maintaining the material coupons, mounted in a standardized sample holder, at a programmed temperature and relat ...

AMT Nano, LLC has developed innovative technology for achieving a versatile microrobot platform. The innovation relies on a unique micromolding process, which is low-cost and high-throughput, and high precison. The process achieves versatility by generating deterministic freeform shapes in polymers and nanocomposites. Several perceived benefits accompany the micromolding process. Due to the three- ...

"Before entering the national pipeline distribution system, all natural gas must be dried, which is currently achieved using glycol dehydrators. However, the glycol dehydrators extract hazardous volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the raw natural gas streams, In the U.S. alone the VOC emissions from dehydrators total an estimated 44,000 tons per year, half of which are benzene, toluene, ethyl ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop and ready for commercialization a scalable, low-cost process for purification of water containing Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs) using anodic oxidation with boron-doped ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD®) thin films. Resent research demonstrated that there is considerable potential for the development of electrochemica ...