Award Data

Fog and smog reduce visibility at sea, greatly impacting ship navigation and safety. Low visibility marine conditions decrease speed and safety of commercial fleets and increase costs through poor fuel load planning. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of maritime operations to the supply chain; therefore, decreasing associated cost and risk are of the utmost importance. Applied Ocean ...

"Metron proposes to develop user-friendly software to promote understanding of impacts due to cascading climate hazards and extreme weather events, in collaboration with George Mason University (GMU). Climate and extreme weather (CEW) hazards pose significant risks to life and property. As extreme events become more prevalent, risks associated with cascading, compound events come to the fore, such ...

Face masks and respirators are frequently deployed in critical protective applications (such as medical and construction environments) where fit testing is not routinely performed before each shift. N95 and related testing protocols effectively assess filtration efficiency for respirators that remain tightly fitted throughout activity, but since these protocols prescribe sealing the tested product ...

The 21st century is the Age of the Network. Operators and clients of critical infrastructure networks are now vulnerable to cascading failures that they could not have seen coming. “Cascading” failure events remain a vital unsolved challenge as critical infrastructure network operators and regulators struggle to define and operationalize resilience, and measurement of interdependent network re ...

The long endurance “StratoSonde” lighter-than-air, uncrewed system combines a low-cost, 5day endurance StratoSonde supports up to 10 micro-dropsondes, which when released from the HAB, descend safely through the entire atmospheric column under a ribbon drogue while reporting observations directly back to the HAB. This project will assess the feasibility of integrating a disposable miniature ae ...

NDT of Fracture Toughness for Pipeline Steels3/16/2018Ultrasound-based technology to nondestructively determine fracture toughness of pipeline steels will be developed. Fracture toughness is the material parameter that, along with applied loading and flaw geometry, dictates the critical crack size, and therefore controls the flaw size that must be detected during inspections. A major challenge fac ...

According to a survey completed by NCAT in 2019, as part of the NCHRP 20‐07 project, 36 DOTs (out of 43 responded) consider fatigue cracking as the most common failure mode that the agency wants to address. However, in the same survey, 34 of the DOTs also indicated that fatigue cracking test is not required in their mix design specifications. This is primarily because a simple, practical, and ro ...

Tragically, 936 children have died in hot cars since 1998. Wisely, NHTSA has prioritized evaluation of sensor systems in vehicles for “the ability to detect unattended children and prevent heat stroke occurrence.”Recently, innovators have developed systems that detect children present in the vehicle by measuring carbon dioxide (CO2) in the vehicle cabin, but there is no test method to assess w ...

There is a clear need to improve weather forecasting accuracy. The greatest contributions to forecast uncertainty is a lack of meteorological observations over remote areas and areas experiencing pronounced convective activity. StratoSolutions’ new high-altitude balloon (HAB) platform with mini-dropsonde is a disruptive new uncrewed meteorological observation data source able to collect data at ...

The primary objective of this project is to improve awareness, safety and enjoyment for mariners in coastal and inland waters by the creation of a participatory sensor network (PSN) that facilitates sharing of marine observations with other mariners. We are adding a new degree of temporal fidelity to nautical charts and maps. The approach leverages volunteered geographic information to augment con ...