Award Data

Commonly used water treatment approaches to mitigate phosphorus pollution and its consequences in small watersheds include the use of chemicals to precipitate phosphorus or algaecides to terminate algal growth. Both approaches require the addition of chemicals to the waterbodies resulting in biomass/sludge build-up, solid precipitates and/or potential toxicity from added metal salts. There is a hi ...

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 ...

The Phase II project will be dedicated to the design, creation and full-scale testing of a functional multi­-specific sensor prototype for real-time environmental water monitoring. The sensor will be miniature, portable, robust, easy-to-use and completely field-deployable. The utilized competitive displacement detection scheme guarantees high specificity as was shown in Phase I, while bright fluo ...

"At 2.7 million miles of paved roads, the United States has the largest network of roads in the world. The mainstream approach to pavement rehabilitation has been to mill the deteriorated asphalt and replace with new asphalt mix. The hot in-place pavement recycling process has the potential of replacing the milling and resurfacing process with substantial financial and environmental savings. Ho ...

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 ...

Lead in household paint and dust is a serious health hazard, as low-level lead exposure can result in a number of adverse health effects, especially in children. Onsite and real-time detection and quantification of lead in paint/dust are very important to homeowners and certified lead-based paint removal professionals. Toward this end, both field-portable equipment (such as X-ray fluorescence inst ...

The U.S. poultry industry produces more than 45 billion pounds of poultry annually. A majority of this production is from concentrated animal feeding operations. In a modern poultry growing facility, small chicks are raised in several large “houses” that typically cover over 20,000 ft2. Starting with each grow-out period, fresh wood mulch bedding material is spread over the house floor. Ove ...

This Phase I project deals with the optimization of onsite ferrate synthesis breakthrough technology patented by Ferrate Treatment Technologies, LLC (FTT). Ferrate is a powerful oxidant and disinfectant for treatment of water and wastewater. Ferrate also possesses efficient coagulation properties and enhanced coagulation also can be achieved using ferrate as a pre-oxidant. Ferrate is well known to ...

Reduction in dependency on imported petroleum and the quest to identify renewable energy sources has led to a search for innovative biofuels derived from renewable biomass, which promise long-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Butanol is one possible biofuel. It is an industrial fuel that can be produced from crops using acetone-butanol (AB) fermentation by butanolagenic microbes, such a ...