Award Data

City planners and engineers need detailed assessments of public rights-of-way to evaluate existing conditions, determine compliance with draft accessibility guidelines, and plan reconstruction projects. Current assessment methods are inadequate and inefficient due to the time and resources required. This project will develop an automated public rights-of-way assessment process and the measuremen ...

Optimization of generator performance and maximization of output power are difficult to attain in the generation of hydro-power. This is due to the changing water conditions and corresponding changes in the form of available energy. ESL proposes to use self-tuning controls in combination with a suitably chosen and optimized generator driven by hydro-energy and condition it for distribution to then ...

The proposed effort is aimed at the development of a new low-cost technique for extracting the fuel precursor components from marine alga cells. The effort is aimed at reducing the total production costs of alga-derived fuels, up to one-half of which may be attributed to the recovery/extraction process alone. Development of advanced processing technologies such as that proposed here is necessary i ...

The objective of Phase II is to continue our efforts from the Phase I project and perform in-depth testing of technologies critical to achieving the required level of measurement performance. The Phase II project will involve the design of the NOAA water vapor profiling lidar and testing of component parts, seeking external sources of funding for the systems (for Phase III) and further creating a ...

The ability to monitor the integrity of a bridge structure and detect damage or condition changes at early stages is of significant importance for bridge operation safety. Currently, the most widely used damage detection methods rely on subjective, incremental visual assessments or localized testing techniques. In this proposal, we propose to develop and test a low cost and efficient bridge stru ...

Increasing population, vehicles, and the excessive traffic induced by urban sprawl is overburdening the existing highway system. Traffic delays and air pollution are often caused by ineffective traffic signal timing. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are adopted to better manage and control the surface transportation network in many cities. However, there is lack of an independent signal ...

This Phase II proposal develops a novel third rail insulator cleaner called the Vohrtex based.on the successfully completed Phase I project that developed the low water consumption, quick cleaning tool, the “Spin Wedge.” The Vohrtex slides on the third rail and is attached to a service vehicle that rides on the track. The Vohrtex has a pair of arms, which hang down on opposite sides of the t ...

This research focuses on the development of a real-time signal timing methodology and algorithms that balance safety and efficiency. This research consists of two phases: Phase I was completed in December 2009; it examined the relationships between signal timing and surrogate measures of safety, namely the frequency of rear-end, angle and lane-change conflicts. The FHWA Surrogate Safety Assessm ...

Historical methods of reliability assessment are less and less effective as device sizes shrink. Already researchers are unable to package the many advanced devices because the act of cutting the wafer and the packaging operation pre-stresses or destroys the devices resulting in unreliable test results. Additionally the increasing cost of fabricating a wafer with advanced integrated circuit techno ...

We propose to build a compact, rugged airborne laser photoacoustic spectrometric (LPAS) sensor based on a tunable mid-IR diode laser for continuous, real-time measurements of water vapor, and perform field tests to qualify it for dynamic airborne in situ monitoring of upper troposphere water vapor. An innovative diode laser frequency locking technique developed by us will be utilized for tunable d ...