Award Data

Septic systems, widely used by >25% of U.S. households, represent a 6-billion-dollar market with a 5-7% projected growth rate. There is growing interest in non-potable reuse of septic tank effluent, yet existing disinfection methods are either costly (e.g., UV) or require households to handle hazardous chemicals (e.g., chlorine tablets). This project will validate a promising septic tank technolog ...

Microplastics are environmental pollutants ubiquitous in marine and freshwater environments and have been established to have deleterious impacts on aquatic life and human health. Preventing Microplastics from getting into waterways or removing it once it is there, is the mission of EPA’s Trash Free Waters program and, as the production of plastics continues to grow, EPA is looking for innovativ ...

CleanRobotics has developed a robotic, artificial intelligence (AI) powered system, called TrashBot, for sorting and auditing recycling, landfill, and compost from facilities with transient populations. Our system has the unique capability of ensuring proper waste sorting of up to four waste streams with the added cost reduction of eliminating user intervention. Discarding waste becomes an educati ...

The harsh environment posed by hypersonic flight makes antenna design challenging due to extreme temperature exposure coupled with often competing mechanical/aero and RF performance requirements. FIRST RF proposes an advancement to its numerous conformal antenna technologies utilizing additive manufacturing of dielectric materials. This approach will decouple the competing RF and mechanical requir ...

There is a need for a lightweight, high-performance, insulation to protect the internal systems in hypersonic vehicles. A passive thermal protection system (TPS) design would be simple and reliable. As designs evolve, there is a need for TPS insulation materials that can be additively manufactured. Our Phase I approach will additively manufacture pre-ceramic scaffolds that are used to create low d ...

Estes Energetics and Battelle Memorial Institute will apply a fast, affordable manufacturing technology—proven to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 and Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) 4—that manufactures a layer of carbon-carbon directly on composite structures without requiring use of an autoclave or densification process holds, resulting in reduced manufacturing time while improving com ...

Sivananthan Laboratories (SL) with the University of Iowa as the STTR partner, proposes to develop metasurface-coupled type II superlattice (T2SL) LWIR detectors that are predicted to outperform HgCdTe detectors. We developed in Phase I fundamental understanding of metasurface-coupled T2SLs, likely performance, and issues related to scaling up device structure to form arrays for LWIR imaging. In P ...

Hypersonic aerial vehicles have tailored aerodynamic shapes with sharp leading edges to maximize performance. When a vehicle is travelling through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 or higher, it encounters intense friction with the surrounding air. The nose cone and the leading edges of the flight vehicle will experience extremely high temperatures from 3000°F to 5000°F. Ultra-High T ...

Numerica proposes to leverage extensive expertise in advanced battle management algorithms, advanced guidance and control algorithms, hypersonic defense, and high-g missile threat modelling to develop a physics-based, real-time prototype battle management and advanced guidance algorithm that produces optimal launch scheduling and optimal guidance for mid-trajectory interception of hypersonic threa ...

Sb-based III-V semiconductor Type-II superlattice (T2SL) materials with band structure-engineered device architectures are groundbreaking for infrared detectors and focal plane arrays (FPAs). T2SL FPAs have become very attractive candidates for various MDA/DOD sensor platforms including air, space, ships, and missiles. T2SL wafers, the starting materials of FPAs, are grown on large substrates usin ...