Award Data

Conventional volatile organic compound (VOC) recovery membranes (silicone rubber) preferentially transport organics over air. Although this silicone rubber has shown some success, it is not appropriate upstream of catalytic oxidation. Catalytic oxidation requires modest increases in VOC concentration at pressure to maintain performance. This is best achieved by using a reverse separation membra ...

Diesel generator sets (gen-sets) are used routinely to supply electrical power. Hospitals, businesses, and small communities use gen-sets to help reduce costs by load leveling and provide emergency power during blackouts (either scheduled or unscheduled). Recent power outages in California have led to large increases in the purchase of gen-sets, primarily for providing emergency power. In addit ...

A nearly universal trend in modern technology is integrating systems, and their associated devices, on decreasingly smaller scales. Examples range from complete telecommunication systems on a chip to implantable medical devices smaller than human cells.The majority of these devices apply hybrid designs that integrate on a commensurate scale electronics with active and passive optical components. ...

This Phase I research project involves an innovative technology for sulfur dioxide (SO2) removal from coal-burning flue gases: flue gas desulfurization (FGD) technology. The current FGD technologies are expensive and energy extensive, and they generate secondary pollution. For example, the limestone-based wet scrubber FGD system costs up to 15 percent of the total construction cost of a coal-fi ...

In this Phase I program, a unique carbon material is proposed as high density, ambient condition ammonia vapor storage media. Ammonia is a potential solution of hydrogen supply for fuel cell systems; it has high hydrogen content and cracking ammoniagenerates COx-free hydrogen gas. The preferred ammonia storage system is the one that based on vapor adsorption system at near ambient conditions to av ...

There continues to be a need for low cost production and shipment of fuel-grade ethanol from agricultural sources. Ethanol from agricultural sources has many advantages including developing fuel independence and significantly reducing greenhouse gases. Also, bio-ethanol has significant value as an oxygenated and octane improver. Although ethanol from agricultural sources has many advantages, th ...

In this SBIR effort we will design (Phase I) and demonstrate (Phase II) an integrated silicon electronic-photonic upconversion receiver that when used with our photonic backend will allow for a highly sensitive, real-time, and economical millimeter wave (mmW) imaging system. The development of this chip leverages recent progress in CMOS and SiGe HBT high speed analog circuit design and integrates ...

The Foliage Abstraction RF Multiscale Estimation Rendering (FARMER) framework will perform high fidelity simulations of heavy foliage environments using a novel multiscale approach, dramatically extending the capabilities of existing foliage modeling tools and integrating existing computational electromagnetics (CEM) solutions. FARMER will use domain decomposition and an innovative scattering dis ...

Although biodiesels have been increasingly used in automobiles, trains, commercial aircrafts and heating systems, they are not currently used in the military aircrafts and land vehicles because they typically do not meet the JP-8 performance criteria as specified by MIL-PRF-83133E. Unintentional contaminations by the biodiesels into the jet fuels can introduce adverse effects, including engine ope ...

In this Phase II SBIR effort we will dramatically reduce the size, weight, and power requirements of a passive millimeter wave imaging system based on optical upconversion. To this end, we will integrate custom silicon-germanium low noise amplifiers that have been designed to efficiently couple with our high performance lithium niobate upconversion modules. In Phase I we analyzed the design requ ...