Award Data

More than 10 million tons of polyurethane (PU) foams are manufactured globally each year, and as much as 20% of that production is unsellable scrap. Combining that manufacturing scrap with end-of-life recycling or disposal of PU foam, every year there is a tremendous waste of material that was made with a large investment of energy and still contains some very useful chemical functionality. Mobi ...

Advanced sensing technologies are needed to more efficiently address the requirements for the long- and short-term monitoring of groundwater, specifically for chlorinated hydrocarbons such as trichloroethylene. Current monitoring procedures can be expensive, as they generally require on-site visits to collect groundwater samples, or employ “portable” systems (gas chromatograph instruments), wh ...

Interior wood composite panels are widely used for furniture, bookshelf, kitchen cabinets, flooring, and other building materials, and are predominantly made with carcinogenic urea-formaldehyde (UF) resin. New formaldehyde-free wood adhesives that mainly consist of abundant, renewable, and readily available soybean flour and novel curing agents have been developed in a laboratory and successfully ...

Production of cement (the binder in concrete) is a highly polluting and energy-intensive process, accounting for about 6% of global, anthropogenic C02 emissions and close to 2% of worldwide primary energy use. This project focuses on partial (~20%) replacement of cement in concrete with milled (mixed-color) waste glass to improve the moisture barrier qualities, durability, dimensional stability an ...

Methane is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide. Various technologies and process improvements have been developed to curb methane emissions in the United States. There is still a lack of economically viable technology, however, to utilize dilute methane streams containing 10-40% methane, in which the other component is primarily carbon dioxide. The streams are oft ...

Polyurethane (PU) coatings continue to be a detriment to the environment. As long as compliance leads to higher costs for coatings manufacturers and applicators, tighter regulation will lead to increased resistance by these companies or ultimately will shift production to less regulated areas. The ideal situation would be if environmentally friendly practices led to lower costs for coatings manufa ...

The primary objective for the proposed effort is to develop innovative fast-running models (FRMs) that are based on data generated by High-Fidelity Physics-Based (HFPB) models; these FRMs are to predict the damage, responses, and subsequent residual strength of walls and slabs composed of UHPC or HPC materials of the kind that would be used in hardened bunkers. Of particular interest is to create ...