Award Data

"Jaia Robotics’ low-cost, micro-sized hybrid uncrewed surface/underwater vehicles called JaiaBotsTM can be deployed from the shore or vessels. The system enables truly affordable multivehicle operations that can be scaled to provide wide area synoptic data collection. In the proposed effort the project team will develop a JaiaBot which is air-deployable from sonobuoy launch tubes to collect atmo ...

A cloud based system for sharing bathymetric survey data collected by FarSounder customers is proposed as a way(1) to improve safety of navigation on our oceans, (2) to collect measurements for the broader scientific and maritime communities and (3) to generally explore and broadly share information about our oceans in fulfillment of ideas proposed in Topic 9.3 “The Changing Ocean”, and in acc ...

Elevated temperatures observed in urban areas have significant implications for human health, energy consumption and infrastructure reliability, and their negative effects disproportionately impact disadvantaged populations. Increasing scientific and practical understanding of urban heat islands is an important step in identifying those regions at elevated risk, and effective mitigation strategi ...

The conventional nitric acid manufacturing method uses natural gas as a feedstock for hydrogen and an energy intensive thermal process that emits a large amount of carbon dioxide. A new low-temperature plasma system, which can be driven electrically by a renewable or nuclear energy source, could reduce the energy consumed by the synthesis of nitric acid while eliminating the emission of greenhouse ...

A need persists for innovative sensor solutions to monitor the integrity and internal conditions of dry storage cask systems for spent nuclear fuel. Spent fuel is loaded in these dry storage cannisters (DSC) which are typically welded, 5/8-inch-thick stainless steel that are then inserted for long term storage in metal or concrete overpacks. The objective of this project is to design, fabricate, a ...

Prescribed burns are a critical aspect of land management, but they require vegetation data that is hard to obtain at high resolution and on the timescale required. Our autonomous UAV collects critical fire modeling variables through subcanopy flight, enabling rapid surveys for faster and safer burn planning. In Phase I, we proved the feasibility of mapping live fuel moisture content (LFMC) with s ...

Successful deployment of water-splitting technologies to produce green hydrogen holds the potential to enable large-scale renewable energy storage on the grid and help decarbonize the chemical industry. Currently, every commercial green hydrogen technology uses pure water as the feedstock, which adds to the costs and energy requirements of these systems. If innovative technologies can be developed ...

Widespread utilization of smart inverters in the power grid with information exchange capability through cyber-physical networks poses the threat of cyberattack. The stability and reliability of the power grid can be jeopardized, resulting in economic loss to utility and consumers if inverters are hacked to perform malicious actions. Communication protocols have been developed focusing on the safe ...

Annular extruded plastics are in everything from fuel lines, hoses, pipes, and wires to catheters, medical tubing, and stents and makes up about ? of the $200B extruded plastics market. Extrusion manufacturing is a major processor of the $600B raw plastics industry, which produces 380 million metric tons of material each year. The production of these materials accounts for 4% of oil consumption an ...

Wildfire response planning is limited by the lack of high-resolution data for use in wildfire prediction. Wildfire models depend on many variables, including weather, topography, vegetation type and arrangement, fuel moisture content, and regional fire prevention measures, among others. Some of these variables are static or nearly so, but some of these are highly dynamic. In particular, live fuel ...