Award Data

Organophosphorus chemical warfare nerve agents (OP-CWA) are attractive to terrorist groups and rogue states as an inexpensive and accessible technology for chemical warfare. OP-CWA and organophosphate pesticides cause severe neurological symptoms and death by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE); the resulting excess acetylcholine accumulates and overstimulates the human or animal bo ...

This Phase 2 project targets the completion of the development of an improved system for the broadcasting of the WWVB signal, as a direct continuation of the Phase 1 project, which successfully validated the proposed approach through a feasibility study and analyses. Objectives of this project include the design of the new modulation scheme and protocol, the development of a new time-code generato ...

"This SBIR Phase I project will develop an affordable, sensitive, fast-response solution to real-time monitoring of Elemental Carbon (EC). EcoChem will employ a proven sensor technology, the photoemission aerosol sensor (PAS) to detect EC. The PAS photoionizes carbonaceous aerosols with a unique excimer lamp [Burtscher, 1992] whose wavelength is chosen to selectively ionize EX and polycyclic aro ...

The gray whale migration generates many hours of video that must be examined carefully to identify passing whales and get an accurate count of their numbers. Unfortunately, humans lack the necessary attention span. To solve this problem, a detector will be developed that can process hours of video, detecting whale blows while minimizing false positives and negatives. With an accurate record of ...

In this project, we will design a standard-based, robust, and efficient iris image quality measure tool. It can be used to select the images of sufficient quality for inclusion in the biometric repository database(s), improve collection processes, and develop quality-based iris matching algorithms. At the same time, it can be incorporated into iris recognition systems as plug-ins to improve recogn ...

Nanometrology International, Inc. (NMI) proposes to demonstrate the feasibility of 3-dimensional (3D) characterization of nanoscale objects using scanning probe microscopy (SPM) with a measurement uncertainty of less than 0.7 nm. To accomplish this task, we propose a novel method of 3D tip characterization and use of an innovative surface reconstruction algorithm recently introduced by NIST and th ...

"The ability to determine air pollutant emission quantity and emission rate are extremely important for environmental protection, policy making, and law enforcement. A pollutant emission rate can be determined by calculating the product of the airflow rate from an exhaust fan and the composition of the pollutant in the air. The pollutant may be any number of things, including particulate matters ...

"Operational Technology Corporation (OpTech) proposes to couple the ultrasensitivity of fluorescence-based detection with the high selectivity of synthetic DNA aptamers as replacements for antibodies to detect chemical and biological (CB) terrorism threats in 10 minutes or less from a variety of swabbed surfaces and liquid matrices. OpTech has previously provided strong proof-of-concept for a rap ...

"The increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxides has been linked to climate change, which has a myriad of environmental and human health implications. In response to this growing concern, FuelCell Energy (FCE) has developed novel system concepts for separation of Carbon dioxide from greenhouse gas (GHG) emission sources, using Direct FuelCell® (DFC®) technology. ...

The recent discovery of Eu activated alkali-earth halide scintillators promises to revolutionize remote detection and identification of radioisotopes. This proposal addresses the development of methods for production of large-volume, high-quality Barium Bromine Iodide scintillators. High-quality, low-cost scintillators for detection of gamma-rays are needed for monitoring of nuclear non-proliferat ...