Award Data

Water expansion during freeze-thaw cycles can cause deterioration in concrete, leading to scaling, cracking, and crumbling over a period of years. Resistance to this damage is achieved with a system of voids formed by adding surfactants to the fresh concrete to stabilize air bubbles naturally entrained during mixing. The volume fraction, size, and spacing of these voids are critical. It is importa ...

Broken rails are a common cause of mainline derailments and a particular concern given the increasing use of our rail system for passenger traffic and petroleum products. The progressive nature of the defects provides an opportunity for early detection of cracks before they become significant enough to cause a derailment. Unfortunately, current inspection technology does not allow these inspection ...

Use of motorcycles helmets significantly reduces the risk of fatality or serious brain injury to riders in the event of a crash, but riders often do not wear helmets in warm weather because of thermal discomfort. We propose to develop an innovative ventilation and cooling system that will maintain a cool, dry environment inside the helmet while also meeting applicable safety standards. The key the ...

State-of-the-art software protection and anti-tamper systems move critical software and data out-of-band to the adversary, by using a hypervisor or on secure hardware. Unfortunately, the systems running this software are built using untrusted commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) parts. Supply chain threats to critical components, such as hardware or firmware Trojans, have invalidated the assumption tha ...

We propose to determine what outputs from the SSAJ measurement system would be suitable for traffic control applications, to determine what the "real time" needs and accuracies are for measurements of signature, speed, acceleration, and jerk (SSAJ), to integrate the output of our IST-222 Standard Signature Output Card with and Advanced Transportation Contorller (ATC) and finally to demonstrate pro ...

Future High Level Architecture (HLA) simulations will incorporate non-visual stimuli. One such stimulus will be force feedback that is provided using haptic displays. Force feedback will be instrumental in o btaining high fidelity information exchange between the simulation and the user. However, one significant problem with providing force feedback between a simulation and a user is that time ...

Proposed is an investigation into the use of highly flexible and extremely strong, superelastic, Nitinol shape memory alloy fibers as a means of dramatically increasing the damping properties in and improving cutting and puncture resistance of organic fiber based protective clothing fabrics. The Nitinol fibers are to be used as reinforcement for organic fiber fabrics made from nylon, aramid, poly ...