Award Data

Identification and Significance of the Problem or Opportunity: The meat processing infrastructure is declining and aging across the United States leaving small farms with limited poultry, natural pork, and ruminant processing options. Work to rehabilitate existing but aged processing establishments utilizing energy efficiencies and renewable energy design to increase the profitability is needed. B ...

A back-illuminated planar InGaAs photodiode tested to have 95% quantum effiiency (QE) at 1550 nm, area greater than 1 mm2, low capacitance (125 MHz) will be improved. Although the existing Phase I device exhibited bulk material dark current generation better than commercially available devices, the sidewall-generated dark current was found to dominate the noise equiva ...

Non-Meat and Poultry Product (Non-MPP) food processing plants manage their effluent to satisfy environmental regulations concerning waste discharge. Currently, many non-MPP plants mechanically screen out large pieces of organic material (biosolids) that are processed for use as livestock feed. However, minute biosolids in liquid suspension collected from the food plant's effluent are generally dis ...

Airborne Technologies, Inc. Phase II effort will be to build and demonstrate a low-cost marinized Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) that can be operated easily from small or large vessels and is capable of reliable and repeatable operations in an ocean environment. The UAS will be utilized for the detecting and tracking of marine debris, sea-life or other objects in the open ocean. The system inclu ...

Highly productive, third-rotation commercial plantations have been successfully managed in the United States by the pulp and paper, timber, and the environmental-remediation industries for more than 40 years with great success in terms of wood yields and job creation. The success of the poplar plantation industry has consistently been shown to be dependent the propagation of elite varieties that h ...

The Alaskan fishing industry produces over one million metric tons of by-product and waste annually. Rural coastal Alaska communities have been using the grind and dump method for decades. There is an opportunity to expand existing onshore processing in rural coastal communities and provide additional economic value from fish waste and, simultaneously, reducing or eliminating the impact of current ...

Even today as a highly technical and advanced world civilization, the physiology of deep sea fish and invertebrates continues to remain mysterious and poorly known. Past specimen containers fail to either have the size or volume needed or lack the robustness for high pressure containment of in many cases, lack the repeatability necessary to ensure a reasonable lifetime of continuous use. The Tec ...

Trellis installation is a major expense for establishing new commercial blackberry or raspberry (bramble) plantings. Research by the USDA and universities clearly demonstrates that by developing novel trellis designs and methods of manipulating bramble canes, costs of labor for cane pruning and training and winter injury can be reduced and hand-and mechanically-harvested efficiency, fruit quality ...

Voxtel has demonstrated efficient high-speed photon counting with thresholded linear-mode avalanche photodiode (APD) receivers using multi-gain-stage InGaAs/InAIAs APDs. In contrast to Geiger APDs, thresholded photon-counting linear APD receivers are thought not to suffer afterpulsing, and can support maximum count rates (MCR) up to 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster than Geiger APDs. However, the ...