Award Data

Pipeline operators employ cleaning tools for improving product throughput, inhibiting corrosion, and preparing their pipes for inline inspection. For many pipeline risk models, improving the scope and quality of input data is a long-term process. If the combined cost of pigging and inspecting was low and could be done simultaneously, pipeline operators would be encouraged to perform inspections mo ...

The United States has a vast network of pipelines used for fuel transport. This infrastructure, installed in 1950–1970, is one of the largest in the world. Yet poor/missing records of the materials used, combined with the overall age and associated environmental degradation effects, often results in unsafe operation. Current non-destructive inspection techniques are only capable of detecting mat ...

During the Phase I effort, Semandex Networks and its team developed a prototype capability to detect trends in research publications by automatically identifying emerging concepts within the data. The implemented capability provides insights into past and

Proposal title: Rapid Assessment of Air Void System in Fresh Concrete 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 ...

Proposal title: Broken Rail Detection from Flashing Rear End Device 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. Unfortu ...

The proposed Phase II effort investigates innovative finite element formulations, alternative structural modeling procedures and modern parallel computational strategies to improve the computational performance of high fidelity simulation software for modeling the progressive collapse behavior of blast damaged buildings. Its goal is to reduce the time required to compute and visualize high fideli ...

More than 1,300,000 Level 1 commercial vehicle inspections - a safety-critical, time-consuming, often difficult and painstaking process, especially as regards the brake inspection component -- are performed every year in the United States, under all sorts of weather and lighting conditions. The current technology used adds to the complexity and error potential inherent in this important task. In ...

Orora Design Technologies proposes to develop electronic design automation (EDA) tools employing minimally invasive circuit design-based methods to mitigate single event effects (SEEs) for next generation Ultra-DSM CMOS (

In Phase I of this effort we analyzed the structural response of a BLU 109 during typical penetration events. Based on these finite element results, we proposed and demsonstrated a simple robust concept for a passive penetrator sensor that identifies the material being penetrated and also correlates strongly with its underground trajectory. Such a sensor would obviously provide valuable informatio ...