Award Data

Small drinking water systems consistently provide safe, reliable drinking water to their customers; however challenges of such systems include; lack of financial resources, aging infrastructure, lack of scale, and technical/logistical challenges associated with regulation compliance. The deployment ofnew cost-effective monitoring technologies hold opportunities to substantially advance infrastruct ...

Polyurethanes are now made by reacting two components, one of which has toxic isocyanate groups. Isocyanates are especially hazardous to workers that spray-apply polyurethane paints. Researchers have developed less hazardous ways to make polyurethane, but they have poor performance, cure too slowly or are too expensive. In this project, TDA Research, Inc. (TDA) will develop new non-isocyanate two- ...

Suspended ceiling tiles are widely used in commercial and residential construction because they offer flexibility and easy access to utilities. Most of the available tiles absorb water, resulting in sagging, staining, and mold/mildew growth. They also contain potentially hazardous chemicals and release airborne fibers when broken or cut. Existing tiles are not durable, requiring frequent replaceme ...

Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) have emerged as a critical need for the U.S. Air Force. MAVs are envisioned to conduct a variety of indoor and outdoor reconnaissance missions and must be highly mobile and man-portable. Furthermore, many of the envisioned missions for MAVs require significant endurance. Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries are not capable of providing sufficient e ...

This Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program addresses the development of catalyst technology for passive, lean abatement of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from off-road diesel exhaust sources. The approach utilizes passive reduction of NOx with exhaust-borne, oxidizable species under the fuel lean conditions encountered in diesel exhaust. Although a number of technologies exist for NOx abatement ...

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 ...

RoadNarrows proposes a novel architecture to be implemented in a 6DOF vision system with applications in autonomous robotics. The system will report objects of interest along with location and pose information to a supervising computer. This system will be built around an advanced 3D vision platform that can deliver multiple video streams and 3D spatial measurements. The sensors will deliver high- ...

"Given the exigency to rein in our nation’s energy consumption and carbon emissions, a nationwide deployment of Geothermal Heat Pumps (GHPs) would help mitigate our demands on the earth’s resources by reducing energy requirements for heating and cooling. Geothermal Heat Pump systems are a proven renewable energy resource that provides significant energy savings as compared to typical heating ...

"Since March 2006, Boulder, Colorado based Cool Energy, Inc. (CEI) has prototyped three generations of a novel low-temperature Stirling engine to generate electricity for low-to-medium temperature (100°C to 250°C) heat sources including solar thermal, geothermal and waste heat. With a marketing name for the SolarHeart® Engine, in its most recent operation in April, 2010, over 1800 watts of out ...

"The large-scale production of nanoparticles of the highest purity will be accomplished by the Eltron Solvent-free Powder Synthesis (ESPS) system described in this proposal. Since conventional particle size reduction methods are unable to reduce particles to the nano-scale and tend to reduce the purity of the powders, the ESPS system has been designed for direct yield of high purity and nano-size ...