Award Data

As part of its mission to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency develops and promotes innovative cleanup strategies that restore contaminated sites to productive use, reduce associated costs, and promotes environmental stewardship. Testing and characterization of the environment for potentially harmful contaminants is a costly endeavor. Current technolo ...

Fumed silica is an important additive in many products, including paints, plastics and tires, and is a $1.5 billion market with a 6 percent growth rate. However, fumed silica producers rely on an energy- intensive, costly and hazardous process. The air pollution resulting from the energy utilized to produce fumed silica is a combination of carbon emissions from the production of raw materials, ene ...

Current anaerobic digester systems are designed for capturing energy from waste from large heads of farm animals. GHD, Inc., a leading manufacturer of anaerobic digesters, has stated that a minimum dairy heard size for economical implementation of a biogas system as 800 cows. These require turbine or diesel generator sets of 100 Kilowatt size and larger, a limiting factor in economically scaling ...

Chlorinated hydrocarbons represent the most prevalent contaminants in the subsurface, threatening the quality of groundwater at aquifers. Existing technologies for monitoring these contaminants require expensive, labor-intensive methods of sample collection and analysis. The goal of this Phase I research project is to develop a low-cost, compact, reliable, automated, unattended, and long-term mo ...

Caviton has developed a novel technique for the continuous monitoring of trace metals emissions. This technique is based on a microdischarge light, which is collected by a spectrometer and analyzed. All metals tested to date can b detected and the focus of this Phase II project is to develop a sampling system, carry out laboratory tests, then move to field tests of sampling and analysis. Finall ...

Chlorinated hydrocarbons represent the most prevalent contaminants in the subsurface, threatening the quality of groundwater at aquifers. Existing technologies for monitoring these contaminants require expensive, labor-intensive methods of sample collection and analysis. The goal of this Phase I research project is to develop a low-cost, compact, reliable, automated, unattended, and lo ...

Some bioterrorism agents cause disease at very low infective doses and their presence can be masked by the environment. Therefore, ultrasensitive detection is required for homeland defense applications. In this Phase I research project, Operational Technologies Corporation (OpTech) proposes to couple DNA aptamers made by the Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX) proce ...

Some bioterrorism agents cause disease at very low infective doses and their presence can be masked by the environment. Therefore, ultrasensitive detection is required for homeland defense applications. In this Phase I research project, Operational Technologies Corporation (OpTech) proposes to couple DNA aptamers made by the Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SE ...

Caviton, Inc., has developed an ideal microsensor for the continuous monitoring of multiple metals. These detection systems rely on microdischarge technology (patent pending), utilizing the power of emission spectroscopy for parts per billion-level sensitivity and laboratory instrument-level selectivity. Microdischarge sensors provide real-time continuous monitoring of metals (and othe ...