Award Data

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 ...

Phosphorus (P) remediation is an extremely difficult and costly environmental problem and could cost $44.5 billion dollars for treatment using conventional water treatment plants to meet EPA requirements. Phosphorous runoff can lead to“dead zones” due to eutrophication and can also cause hypoxia, leading to death of aquatic life that thrive in an oxygen-rich environment. None commercial prod ...

In 2011, there were 60,000 dairy farms in the US. Of there, 56,600 had herds of fewer than 500 animals. Currently, manure digester installations are only considered economical for herds of at least 500 animals. There require turbine or diesel generator sets of 100 Kilowatt size and larger. The need exists for a smaller waste to energy conversion approach for implementation on small farms were ...

In this program, we will develop a breakthrough technology that will enable wafer-scale epitaxial lift-off (ELO) of GaN power device heterostructures from low-dislocation-density bulk GaN substrates. This technology will be used to provide a low-cost vertical junction field effect transistors (VJFETs) with high breakdown voltage (greater than 1,200 V) and high current capability (greater than 100 ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will employ Nanofiltration to generate sulfate ion feedstocks and high current density on-site generation (synthesis) of the powerful oxidant peroxodisulphate (“persulfate”) with novel, high reliability boron-doped untrananocrystal-line diamond (UNCD) electrodes to dramatically lower the cost of unconventional fossil fuel (FF) waste water ...

A team of EP Purification and the University of Illinois engineer and chemists is pursuing the commercialization of low cost microchannel plasma modules capable of efficiently producing ozone for water treatment. The conservation of water resources for human consumption is a growing national priority. Contamination of ground municipal water by animal manure, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals, for e ...

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 ...

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 ...

"With the rapid growth of biodiesel industry, the production of crude glycerol as one of major biodiesel byproducts has been dramatically increased. Fully utilizing such a large quantity of crude glycerol is critical to the sustainability of biodiesel industry. Lactic acid is an important industrial chemical that is widely used as a food additive for flavoring and preservative, a moistener in co ...

One of the program areas of interest to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the development of rapid, non-invasive monitors to detect exposure to toxic air pollutants at trace (ppt) levels. Of the 356 chemicals listed on the Chemical Emergency Preparedness and Prevention Office¿s List of Extremely Hazardous Substances (Section 302 of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-To-Kn ...