Award Data

This SBIR Phase II project proposes to integrate an easy to use, inexpensive, and portable bacterial concentrator with a handheld pathogen detection system to enable ultra-low cholera pathogen (Vibrio cholerae) detection. Cholera affects communities across 41 countries, including in Yemen, where in the first 5 months of 2020 has had 110,000 suspected cases. Current methods used to detect the chole ...

Phase II is the continuing effort to demonstrate the feasibility of producing an automated delayering and imaging system with end point detection, material density detection with built in neural network error correction. This process, coined fast Automated Delayering-Image Capture System (ADICS) leverages off of the existing Pix2Net which is a proven automated imaging 3D microchip reconstruction s ...

This Phase II SBIR project will continue the development of an optical sorter that will be used to estimate drop sizes in sprays. The optical sorter will determine the size of drops in the 0.1 to 10 microns range. Drops in this size range are prevalent in the automobile industry, where the fuel injection pressures have increased tremendously over the past two decades. These newer injectors provide ...

During Phase I, Management Sciences, Inc. (MSI) proved feasibility of adapting their current technology into a product capable of improving performance resulting in increased efficiency and extended life cycles of heat pumps. The resultant product is a tool named the Heat Pump Sentient (HP-Sentient). The HP-Sentient will improve performance and reduce maintenance costs through aggressive goal-seek ...

X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy is a widely used and extremely sensitive analytical technique for qualitative and quantitative chemical analysis. Superconducting Transition Edge Sensor (TES) microcalorimeter detectors have now been developed that achieve an energy resolution of 2 eV for 1.5 keV X-rays, which is sufficient to enable the measurement of the small shift of the X-ray line position that ...

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 ...

Modern supercontinuum (SC) light sources are generated by non-linear interactions between ultrashort laser pulses and optical fibers. These light sources have high brightness and are spatially coherent. Output in near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelength ranges has been demonstrated. SC wavelength ranges are constrained by the transmission and dispersion properties of the fibers. Previously, ou ...

Southwest Sciences¿ Phase 2 SBIR project will lead to development of residential fire sensing systems based on recently developed, low cost temperature and optical imaging sensors combined with newly introduced highly miniaturized, micropower CO sensors. Sensor modules will be part of a low power wireless network. Each module will be about ½ the size of a business card, a few mm thick, and w ...

A key factor of international efforts to identify and suppress the supply of and demand for nuclear materials, and thereby to deter potential traffickers, is the ability to accurately identify contradicted material and ultimately to trace it back to its origin. Alpha particle spectroscopy is widely used in nuclear forensics to assay trace quantities of sensitive nuclear materials, but the limited ...

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 ...