Award Data

The release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from industrial processes can have negative impacts on the environment while also posing significant health and safety concerns. In the environment, many of these chemicals are considered precursors to ground-level ozone, which is the primary component of smog. In addition, many VOCs are cancer-causing in humans while others pose dangerous explosi ...

Because of the relatively high cost of biomass feedstocks compared to fossil fuels, biomass conversion processes must be highly efficient to provide a near-term contribution to the U.S. energy balance. Biodiesel is recognized as an important potential fuel, which is obtained by relatively simple esterification of fats or seed oils (soybean, rapeseed, etc.). The production of each gallon of biodi ...

Xtalic Corporation possesses a new technology for controlling the nanostructure of electrodeposited metal coatings. Through precise control of the metallic grain size at nanometer length scales, this technology can create coatings with precisely tailored properties. These properties are generally very favorable, and new properties and suites of properties can be achieved in alloy systems where t ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has stated a need for technologies and instruments to monitor and warn of the presence of toxic contaminants in drinking water. An innovative device that could detect, identify, and localize hazardous chemical contaminants in drinking water would be immensely valuable to water utility operators, emergency response personnel, and other decision-making offici ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified the need for an accurate and field-rugged instrument to monitor chlorine dioxide (ClO2) for use in monitoring building decontamination operations. The proposed Phase I study will evaluate the feasibility of designing and fabricating an advanced electrochemical ClO2 sensor, utilizing integrated solid polymer electrolyte proton-conducting me ...

Helium plays several critical rolls in spacecraft propulsion. High pressure helium is commonly used to pressurize propellant fuel tanks. Helium cryocoolers can be used to sub-cool and thereby densify cryogenic propellants such as liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LO2). The use of densified cryogenic propellants can reduce the gross payload weight of a launch vehicle by up to 20%, or incr ...

In this program, Agiltron and the groups of Professors Rubner and Cohen at MIT propose a novel nano-porous coating for next generation NASA UV anti-reflection (AR) applications. The collaborative research leverages recent breakthroughs in nano-porous self-assembled low reflective index multilayer structures achieved at MIT, and Agiltron's recently developed mist coating processes. The proposed UV ...

Many commercially available digital dosimeters are bulky and are unable to properly measure dose for space radiation. The complexity of space flight design requires reliable, fault-tolerant equipment with the capability of providing real-time dose readings during a mission, which is not feasible with the existing thermo-luminescent dosimeter (TLD) technology. The project will create a compact, ...

New technology is needed for sensing and characterizing incipient defects, and assessing the effects of aging in aerospace components. Next generation materials, including nickel-based superalloys that are exceedingly difficult to inspect with existing technology are being adopted by designers and manufacturers. The ability to ascertain the remaining life of a spacecraft component, and develop mit ...

Long range, RF space communications do not meet anymore the bandwidth requirements or power constraints of future NASA missions. Optical communications offer the potential to dramatically increase the link bandwidth and decrease the emitter power. High-bandwidth, long-range optical communications require reliable high-gain, photon-counting detectors operated at moderate cooling with high detection ...