Award Data

Modern agriculture is highly dependent on nitrogen (N) fertilization to maintain high yields and profitability. In organic agriculture, cover crops and bulky organic amendments supply N; transport costs can be prohibitive, and energy used in transport is substantial. In conventional agriculture, industrial N fixation uses natural gas, high temperatures, and high pressures to convert atmospheric N ...

The respiration of fresh fruits and vegetables (FF & amp;V) converts oxygen from the surrounding air into carbon dioxide, moisture and ethylene. While ethylene is used under controlled conditions as a ripening agent, the presence of even small amounts of ethylene gas in shipping and storage containers causes most fresh produce to deteriorate much faster, potentially spoiling it before it reaches t ...

This project will develop a catalytic process to manufacture a new renewable and degradable bio-plastic that could be used to replace polyethylene in many applications, including those that constitute a large part of land and ocean litter such as bags, food packaging and disposable tableware.

The production of turpentine in the U.S. exceeded 301,000 tons in 2004 (Romney 2004) and the production of resin acids exceeded 800,000 ton in 2003 (Romney 2004), which also includes the production from directly tapping trees (e.g., gum turpentine, gum rosin). There is growing demand for bio-plastics (non-petroleum derived polymers); for example Pepsi announced it will be using bio-plastic bottles ...

Many activities and technological systems prevalent in today’s society – air traffic control and air travel, the power grids, communications, deep-water drilling operations, human spaceflight – are vulnerable to the effects of sudden flares from our Sun. Because the propagation speed for flare emission is the speed of light, it is necessary to forecast these events in order to mitigate thei ...

In the proposed effort, we will leverage this extensive experience and capabilities to realize a frequency agile mmW radiometer that can cover the range of DC-110 GHz and can be scaled to DC-200 GHz under Phase II. Ours is a photonic system that multiplies and up-coverts a low-frequency reference signal onto an optical carrier (laser) using EO modulation, then uses the modulation sidebands to inj ...