Award Data

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 fraction, size, and spacing of these voids are critical. It is importa ...

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. Unfortunately, current inspection technology does not allow these inspection ...

Interference of unburned and activated carbon in fly ash with air-entraining admixtures (AEA’s) 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 this project, a new method is suggested, which can qualitatively and quantitatively measure different surfact ...

Use of motorcycles helmets significantly reduces the risk of fatality or serious brain injury to riders in the event of a crash, but riders often do not wear helmets in warm weather because of thermal discomfort. We propose to develop an innovative ventilation and cooling system that will maintain a cool, dry environment inside the helmet while also meeting applicable safety standards. The key the ...

The proposed SBIR program by Virtual AeroSurface Technologies (VAST) focuses on the development of a novel variant of pulsed blowing active flow control in which chemically-based flow control actuators are utilized to create high-impulse pulsed jets from discrete reaction chambers with a flowable propellant mixture provided to each. Chemically-based actuation is capable of producing high-impulse ...

One of the primary shortcomings identified during the NASA sponsored CFD Vision 2030 Study conducted during 2012-2014 was that the generation of meshes suitable for CFD simulations constitutes a principal bottleneck in the workflow process as it requires significant human intervention. CAD simplification and cleanup is one of the most user-intensive steps of the CFD mesh generation process and it ...

NASA is considering multiple missions involving long-term cryogen storage in space. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are the typical cryogens as they provide the highest specific impulse of practical chemical propellants. These cryogens are stored at temperatures of nominally 20 K for hydrogen and 90 K for oxygen. Due to the large size of these tanks, refrigeration loads to maintain zero-boil- ...

The proposed innovation will refresh crew clothing to extend the duration of wear. It is a collapsible or portable light-weight cleaning sanitizing and deodorizing system using ozone and water vapor to: (1) remove the combined contamination from perspiration salts, organics, dander, and dust; (2) kill 99.9% of common bacteria and viruses; and (3) reduce or eliminate associated odors. The system w ...

Life support systems for future space suits will require advanced instrumentation to enable use of the suit for multiple missions. We propose to develop an oxygen flow meter for the space suit ventilation loop that will provide highly accurate flow measurements while meeting challenging requirements for low pressure drop, compact size, and durability. In Phase I, we will prove the feasibility of ...

Global Technology Connection Inc, in collaboration with the University of South Carolina, an academic leader in real time diagnosis and prognosis, proposes to develop a Operation-Aware ISHM for Environmental Control and Life Support in Deep Space Habitants. The core innovations include: 1) Application of advanced fast diagnosis and prognosis algorithms in Lebesgue sampling framework for distrib ...