Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this proposal is to produce a fully characterized polyurethane heart valve prosthesis that will be ready for clinical evaluation. Existing replacement valves suffer from several shortcomings. Specifically, biological tissue fixation and methods used to mount the tissue to the supporting stent of bioprostheses cause time dependent structural changes ...

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Cultures differ in cognition. These cognitive differences naturally result in expectancy violations and perceptual mismatches between people of different cultures. And while they are, by nature, difficult to observe, a culture’s cognitive attributes significantly influence individual perceptions and overt behaviors. A training program that addresses general cross-cultural perspective taking s ...

Contemporary operational environments are often characterized by ambiguous, multi-cultural contexts, where Army Soldiers must rapidly adapt without extensive prior knowledge of a region or its people. Ongoing training development efforts are addressing the need for general cultural competence, but this broad competence must be clearly defined and assessed in order to determine if our Soldiers are ...

Realizing the promise of nuclear fusion depends in part on effective plasma facing components (PFCs) that can withstand the intense heat loads, forces, and neutron bombardment of long-pulse high-power reactor operation. A single reactor such as ITER will require thousands of PFCs. Because imperfections in the joints of just one PFC could have disastrous consequences for reactor operation, joint ...

Many military missions involve the use of equipment that requires small batteries for power where AC grid power is unavailable. Also, there is a need for a high quality power output device that conditions a power input to make it suitable to power sensitive communications equipment. The weight of this equipment is also a factor which affects Its usefullness in quick moving military situations. M ...

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are one of the most efficient and cleanest power generating systems being developed. A key component is the cathode air heat exchanger, or recuperator, which ensures that the cathode air, and thereby the cells, are at sufficient temperature to permit ion mobility ¿ and thereby improve overall SOFC system efficiency. At present, commercially available metallic recu ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goals for this Phase I proposal are: 1) construction and bench testing of a novel device to dissociate tissue from donor pancreas using ultrasound for the recovery of pancreatic islet cells for transplantation, and 2) marked improvement in yields and viability of islets recovered using this approach as compared to the existing, standard method. Pancreatic i ...

Modern turbine engines undergo extensive ground testing in test cells during development. These engines are instrumented with numerous strain gages for high-frequency dynamic strain measurements. Currently, analog signals from these gages are routed out of the test cell to remote data acquisition equipment over hundreds of feet of wire. With up to 200 gages to be installed, the task of patching ...

Political, economic, and environmental considerations require that the national dependence on petroleum-based transportation fuels, especially imported oil, be reduced by accelerating the development of domestic renewable alternatives. The United States has the potential to generate, sustainably, about 1.3 billion dry tons of biomass per year, and bio-oil derived from this renewable feedstock cou ...