Award Data

"Given the exigency to rein in our nation’s energy consumption and carbon emissions, a nationwide deployment of Geothermal Heat Pumps (GHPs) would help mitigate our demands on the earth’s resources by reducing energy requirements for heating and cooling. Geothermal Heat Pump systems are a proven renewable energy resource that provides significant energy savings as compared to typical heating ...

"Since March 2006, Boulder, Colorado based Cool Energy, Inc. (CEI) has prototyped three generations of a novel low-temperature Stirling engine to generate electricity for low-to-medium temperature (100°C to 250°C) heat sources including solar thermal, geothermal and waste heat. With a marketing name for the SolarHeart® Engine, in its most recent operation in April, 2010, over 1800 watts of out ...

"The large-scale production of nanoparticles of the highest purity will be accomplished by the Eltron Solvent-free Powder Synthesis (ESPS) system described in this proposal. Since conventional particle size reduction methods are unable to reduce particles to the nano-scale and tend to reduce the purity of the powders, the ESPS system has been designed for direct yield of high purity and nano-size ...

"The oil refining industry is one of the most significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions, with considerable contribution from downstream activities. CO2 emissions from refineries rank third among the stationary producers (after power and cement industries), accounting for about 4% of the global CO2 emissions, approaching 1 billion tons per year. In addition, the oil refineries also emit sig ...

The SBIR solicitation expressed the need for tools to process data from disparate sources in various formats and generate drought-relevant data products. NIDIS also recognizes a need to span organizational boundaries to provide access to integrated drought information for use in water management. The Phase I SBIR project resulted in prototype Climate Information Management Toolkit (CIMT) software ...

An operational optical particle counter will be built, extensively characterized and evaluated that measures the size and shape of aerosol particles with optical diameter from 0.1 to 10 μm. This instrument will distinguish different species of dust and volcanic ash from other types of aerosol particles, and provide an estimate of the aerosol optical properties and produce compositional informati ...

This project develops and evaluates a software interface into the social media website Facebook that is independently usable by individuals with intellectual disabilities, including those with limited or no literacy skills. The software system provides a multimedia (e.g., voice recording, icons, text-to-speech) interface, a customizable filtering tool to limit screen features, and computer-generat ...

This project develops and tests the utility of Schedule Manager, a remote schedule management and monitoring prototype designed to use mobile technology to enable real-time, “on-the-fly” changes to an individual’s schedule from remote locations and to monitor adherence to scheduled activities by individuals with intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Difficulty with time management is one ...

This project develops an Internet-based system for managing and delivering “on demand” activity prompts to individuals with intellectual disabilities. This product users “cloud” (web based) technology to deliver visual and audio prompts to individuals with cognitive disabilities via a thin-client prompting application that can run on iOS or Android mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad, ...

Outdoor wood-fired boilers (OWB) are gaining in popularity for heating homes. As energy prices have risen, sales of OWBs are doubling each year because they provide a lower cost solution and use renewable fuel. There is concern about their air emissions, however. OWBs typically emit 18 times the pollution of an EPA certified wood stove and there are currently no emission controls for OWBs. The ...