Award Data

Childhood obesity is a complex, multi-faceted problem which has been traced to many preventable risk factors, not the least of which includes; food access, outdoor ads, crime/safety, racial and income disparities, as well as increasing sedentary behaviors caused by excessive screen time. The economic impact of obesity related disease has proven quite significant. The direct cost of childhood obesi ...

Cooling and drying of feed pellets are the most important operations in the feed manufacturing industry. These operations are carried out simultaneously, in a single machine, by passing ambient air through a moving bed of pellets. However, simultaneous control of both these processes is very difficult. Overdrying of pellets is a common problem that costs several million dollars to feed processi ...

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of western wildfires.The threat to peopleand infrastructure is growing with more population living in the wildland-urban interface.Advances in technology provide the opportunity to improve wildfire mapping accuracy timelinessand dissemination. An un-stabilized airborne fire mapping sensor is proposed utilizing an array ofminiature thermal inf ...

Despite its clean and green nature when utilized in fuel cells and other devices, most hydrogen is currently produced primarily from non-renewable sources, such as natural gas, oil, and coal. Anaerobic digestion provides a potentially improved alternative to manufacturing hydrogen from petroleum and natural gas. Anaerobic digesters can produce hydrogen from inexpensive and renewable energy sources ...

Over the past decade, private industry has shown a growing interest in the development of autonomous Commercial Motor Vehicles (CMVs). A successful autonomous CMV system will require that the vehicles meet both technological requirements and existing regulatory requirements for traditional CMVs. While some regulations are passive, others require drivers to take actions. Of note is the requirement ...

THE TESTING FOR SALMONELLA CURRENTLY INVOLVES METHODOLOGY THAT REQUIRES 3-8 DAYS TO COMPLETE AND A FAIRLY SOPHISTICAT ED SKILL LEVEL TO PERFORM. THIS PROJECT IS DESIGNED TO D DEVELOP BOTH MANUAL AND BIOSENSOR-BASED HOMOGENEOUS ASSAYS THAT WILL REDUCE THE DETECTION TIME OF SALMONELLA TO WITHIN 24 HOURS AND BE TECHNICALLY SIMPLER TO PERFORM. THE NOVEL ASPECT IS THE USE OF A LIMPSOME-ENCAPSULATED ENZ ...

In Phase I, PortaScience successfully built an automated prototype unit for determining the somatic cell count of dairy milk samples using a liquid colorimetric assay. The prototype unit can perform the following functions: sip milk samples, add buffer/dye solutions, mix all solutions and generate a voltage reading at a fixed timed interval yielding quantitative values for the somatic cell count. ...

This proposed activity will conduct case studies of six selected United States ports to determine whether an integrated terminal information system in each of them might deliver significant benefits to port operators, port users, and shippers. Using the experience of the railroad industry as a guide, problems and possibilities for integrating information flow will be examined. The final report w ...

A significant performance gap exists between the theoretical number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPS) that an HPC machine is capable of sustaining and the number of FLOPS realized by real-world HPC software. One of the principal reasons for this gap is the parasitic work that computational processes must do to communicate with one another. It has been shown that this communication work can be s ...

High Tunnels (commonly called poly tunnels or hoop houses) are a type of field protected agriculture. They are essentially an intermediary between the full environmental risk-taking of outdoor production, and the controlled conditions, and relatively high energy use, of a conventional greenhouse. There are hundreds of thousands of acres in cultivation under high tunnels across the world. Domestica ...