Award Data

The Advanced Pavement Evaluation (APE) prototype system combines multiple sensors to detect, measure, and assess the condition of sub-surface features, including in-pavement traffic sensors, pavement structures, and defects or deterioration of such structures. In phase II, the research and development efforts produced two distinct prototypes solutions: a step-frequency ground penetrating radar (SF ...

Improved traffic signal timing and traffic incident response are two of the most cost-effective ways of reducing urban arterial network congestion. System-wide analysis of its cause is required to mitigate congestion or excessive traffic delay. Network wide, synchronized and real-time traffic flow data, and Signal Phase and Timing (SPaT) data are indispensable for effectively adjusting traffic sig ...

One of the principal technical and cost barriers to successful commercialization of algal biofuels as an alternative energy source is the inability to extract the useful oil components from the algae in an economical and environmentally sound fashion. Indeed, the DOE announcement for this proposal specifically notes topic areas (5d) regarding methods for extracting oils from microalgae as goal of ...

Industrial hydrogen production relies primarily on natural gas and hydrocarbon feedstocks to drive the various reaction chemistries that lead to hydrogen generation. Carbon dioxide, the ultimate co-product when such feedstocks and processes are employed, necessarily becomes a major contaminant of the generated hydrogen. Thus, carbon dioxide isolation and removal is an important process step in th ...

Ethylene and propylene are major chemical industry raw materials and consume a great deal of energy related to their production. It is estimated that 230 trillion BTU/yr are consumed in olefin/paraffin separations. Significant energy consumption is employed when cryogenically separating ethane from ethylene and propane from propylene. These cryogenic separations are difficult and are both capital ...

Network operators are facing sustained bandwidth demands from users and applications in the scientific computing and commercial communities. Hence many are actively migrating to faster 40/100 Gb/s technologies to support large scale transfers. Here the provision of advanced network testing/monitoring capabilities is vital for rapid and effective deployment of these new technologies. However, curr ...

Solvent extraction by hexane is the most common choice for extraction of oil/lipids from algae. However, hexane is not the best choice of solvent for algae oil extraction because of the need to market byproducts for human and animal consumption. Oil and hexane from the solvent extraction process are separated by distillation/evaporation which is an energy intensive operation. Presence of explosive ...

Building upon the successes of an SBIR Phase I project, Traffax Inc. in cooperation with Purdue University proposes in Phase II a large scale deployment of Bluetooth Traffic Monitoring (BTM) technology to exercise real-time capability and continued exploration of BTM arterial specific applications. Whereas the first phase concentrated on resolving several key issues and demonstrating utility in s ...

Refrigeration and air conditioning in buildings, industry, and transportation account for approximately 10 quads of U.S. primary energy consumption. Motors power the equipment and control the environment in advanced cooling applications and thus their energy consumption represents a significant part of their operating and life cycle costs.Fan motors for heating, cooling and ventilation run the mos ...

Today, conventional hydropower generation accounts for 75% of the United States renewable energy generation (over 270,000 GWH) despite utilizing less than 20% of the usable hydropower available for development. Recent studies indicate that advances in lower cost higher performing generator technologies can substantially increase this resource utilization. Just a 5% increase in market penetration w ...