Award Data

75867 Mercury (Hg) emissions are an important environmental problem because Hg is a volatile heavy metal that is toxic and bioaccumulates to a high degree in animals and humans. The major sources of Hg emissions include fossil fuel combustion, waste incineration, and chloralkali production. With the increased development of coal gasification technologies, the monitoring of Hg in gasifier synthe ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will demonstrate superior power-delivery, rapid-charge, and long cycle-life performance of prototype carbon-coated, nanoparticle-based electrodes for use in inherently safe, moderate-to-large sized lithium ion batteries of various commercial designs. The primary innovation is the use of optimally sized, arranged and assembled carbonc ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a novel method, Evolutionary Chemistry, to simultaneously generate and select from a library of small molecules, using modified RNA both as a catalyst and as an amplifiable tag for detection of binding to a target. The commercial application of this project will be to streamline the process of discovery of new com ...

76214-Next generation experiments in High Energy Physics require the use of thinned detectors with high density interconnects; however, present manufacturing techniques for wafer thinning produce very low yields. Standard processing techniques have proven to be unacceptable for the production of high pixel count detector assemblies. Therefore, this project will develop technology for plasma-etch ...

75630-The most efficient solid-state white lights developed so far typically use a bright blue light emitting diode. The diode is used not only as a blue source, but also for the simultaneous optical excitement of an inorganic downconverter, which converts a fraction of the blue light to yellow. When the yellow light is mixed with the remaining blue, it is perceived by the human eye as white. H ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project integrates the imaging system developed in Phase I with a smart-sensor injection system that can inject or sample from the cavity underlying the early chicken embryo with high levels of accuracy accompanied with improved hatch when compared to manual methods. The Phase I work showed that it was possible to image and detect the blasto ...

75487-Restricted natural gas supplies, reduced peak electrical capacity, and steadily increasing demand for domestic water heating are placing a strain on limited conventional energy resources. Water heating is one of the most practical uses of solar energy; efficiencies for solar water heaters often exceed 75% compared to 15% for typical photovoltaic systems. However, despite rising conventiona ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project deals with the problems of reconstructing complex free-form shapes from measured data. Raindrop Magic's primary interest is to produce well-structured, high-quality CAD models. Several techniques exist to reach this goal; unfortunately, automatic surfacing systems provide only rough approximations and do not capture the original design int ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will investigate applications of Combinatorial Morse Theory in Reverse Engineering, a field that focuses on converting physical objects into a digital representation suitable for CAD, CAM, and CAE. The biggest challenge in this field is to automate the conversion process while producing a model that meets all the requirements of downs ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project proposes to investigate the problem of globally aligning multiple point scans of a 3D object. Given the digitized scan data for two partially overlapping surfaces, a numerical measure is described that quantifies the resistance encountered by one sliding over the other (lockability versus slippability). This measure is a heretofore mis ...