Award Data

With infrastructure costs escalating it is becoming essential to monitor the health of asphalt and concrete pavement so that timely maintenance can maximize their usefulness. This SBIR will develop a sensor that can be embedded within concrete or asphalt, which can measure moisture, temperature, stress and strain. It will provide critical data for evaluating pavement performance starting with th ...

Traffax Inc. proposes a system based on Bluetooth point-to-point communications to anonymous detect vehicles, establish travel times, and develop accurate Origin & Destination (O-D) matrices. Preliminary research performed at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, Indiane Department of Transportation, and Purdue University identified the use of consumer devices ...

In the proposed Phase I SBIR program, Aymont Technology and CoolCAD Electronics will design and demonstrate prototype silicon carbide (SiC) avalanche photodiodes (APD) specifically designed for high-efficiency, single-photon counting of 121.6 nm Lyman-alpha photons. This detector will be provided to relevant personnel at NIST for calibration and testing. Both discrete APDs and arrays will be used ...

One of the causes of derailments occurs when the track gage is no longer compliant with the FRA track safety standards for gage measurments. Ensuring track gage is in compliance with the FRA track safety standards is therefore of paramount importance to the FRA. Currently, the FRA wishes to develop a non-contact track gage measurement system that overcomes the limitations of current systems (unr ...

This is an SBIR Phase II proposal to develop a tactile refreshable computer display prototype (TRCD) that will support multiple tactile alphabets (e.g. ELIA, braille, and Roman), multiple lines of text, and graphics to benefit the more than 1.8 million blind Americans. Commercially available TRCDs are expensive (~$12,000, or $19 per actuator), provide only one line of text (with 640 actuators) and ...

A wireless sensor and actuator network capable of providing precision time synchronization between the nodes of the network will be developed. The IEEE 1451.0 smart transducer interface and IEEE 1588 time synchronization standards will be combined, with additional software and hardware to provide synchronization between the clocks on the Wireless Transducer Interface Modules (WTIM) sensors/actuato ...

This proposal seeks to produce a unique thermographic coating inspection system that is customized for the inspection of bridge coatings. This system uses active thermography where IR sources are used to provide controlled heating to a coating system. The presence of a defect in a coating system will result in differences in heat flow, which can be imaged with an infrared camera. An off-the-she ...

Over 10 million coral specimens a year are traded in the +$100 million/year ornamental-recreational aquaria industry. Over ninety percent of commercial coral specimens come from some form of mass harvesting of wild corals from coral reefs. This can have a detrimental impact to coral reefs. We have invented a method of perpetual propagation of corals through tissue engineering. Hundreds to thou ...

High resolution magnetic mapping is a technique that has shown great value in the forensic evaluation of magnetic audio recording tapes. The use of single element raster scan systems has shown that the technique has promise in diagnosing many other systems where internal currents or magnetized inclusions generate external measurable fields. NIST has developed a 256 channel MR array sensor that ha ...

Planphoria will research, define and develp methods to turn our nation's roadways into a giant energy collection and transference system that produces low cost electrical energy close to point of use. Though roadway environmental conditions change, and different roadway requirements vastly differ from the requirements of other roadways, we will determine the feasibility of this concept by leading ...