Award Data

Proposal title: Rapid Assessment of Air Void System in Fresh Concrete Water expansion during freeze-thaw cycles can cause deterioration in concrete, leading to scaling, cracking, and crumbling over a period of years. Resistance to this damage is achieved with a system of voids formed by adding surfactants to the fresh concrete to stabilize air bubbles naturally entrained during mixing. The volume ...

Proposal title: Broken Rail Detection from Flashing Rear End Device Broken rails are a common cause of mainline derailments and a particular concern given the increasing use of our rail system for passenger traffic and petroleum products. The progressive nature of the defects provides an opportunity for early detection of cracks before they become significant enough to cause a derailment. Unfortu ...

Proposal title: Rapid Assessment of Air Void in System in Fresh Concrete Air void parameters such as specific surface (SS) and spacing factor (SF) are essential in evaluating Freeze-Thaw (F-T) durability in fresh concrete. We have demonstrated the feasibility and viability of using an acoustic method to measure in near real time air void distributions in fresh concrete, the proposed solution is b ...

Proposal title: Detection of THC Use in Drivers The overall objective of this program is to develop a portable, cost-effective and non-invasive sensor device for near real-time salivary THC detection to be used at roadside in drivers. This will eliminate the need for expensive and time-consuming analytical techniques which have a turn-around time of several days. During the Phase I program Giner ...

Proposal title: A Robust Railway Track Crack Detection System Using Thermal Signatures In Phase I, we developed a practical sensor platform suitable for mounting on the back of train. A large amount of IR images associated with rail tracks were collected on an MBTA train. Algorithms were developed to identify both right and left tracks from a moving train. To help detect track cracks, we develope ...

Proposal title: Detection of THC Use in Drivers The intoxicating effects of marijuana are of concern to the law enforcement community as well as to the general manufacturing, service and commerce community where employees may need to be screened for intoxication. A reliable method to quantitatively measure the amount of the intoxicating agent delta-9- tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in suspected marij ...

Proposal title: Increasing Awareness About Intelligent Transportation Systems and Connected Vehicle Technologies for High School The goal of this FHWA Phase IIB SBIR program is to convert an existing board game that teaches students about Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Connected Vehicle (CV) technologies into a mobile game app that can be sold online as a commercial product. The boa ...

Proposal title: Accurate and Rapid Measurement of Adsorption Capacity of Fly Ash in Concrete Mixtures Interference of unburned and activated carbon in fly ash with air-entraining admixtures (AEAs) in fresh concrete mixtures is a major concern in the concrete industry. Therefore, a rapid and accurate measurement of adsorption capacity of fly ash is of great interest to this industry. In Phase I, ...

Proposal title: Resilient Wayside Structures to Reduce Severity of Passenger Equipment Collisions and Derailments Additional passenger fatalities/injuries can occur during derailments involving interaction with wayside structures. Analogously, automobile fatalities often result from interaction of vehicles with roadside structures; personnel hazard reduction is a key design criterion for roadsid ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: We believe that employing current molecular biology techniques it is possible to develop plasmid DNA based positive control standard kits for a wide variety molecular assays for environmental organisms, and that this represents a significant commercial opportunity. In Phase I we demonstrated that plasmid DNA-based qPCR positive controls are stable, perform as well as genomic DN ...