Award Data

Safe and efficient ionization and filtration technology compatible to biodefense applications is of paramount importance. Current ionization methods are energy-intensive, costly, prone to ozone generation, or inefficient, and consequently ill-suited for building protection applications. To overcome these limitations, we propose to develop and demonstrate a novel bioaerosol ionization and collectio ...

In Phase I RANCOR successfully demonstrated an innovative enabling humidity control technology to provide very low humidity air to water sensitive, fully reusable CO2 adsorbents. The use of adsorbents enables complete reusability/rechargability and reduces the total heat load on the SCBA to the point where ice or other cooling systems will no longer be required. In Phase II Paragon will introduce ...

Protein manufacturing is of paramount importance to chemical and biological defense applications. Existing protein purification methods primarily rely on synthetic-resin based chromatography, which is time-consuming, labor-intensive, expensive, and consequently, ill-suited for developing rapid countermeasures to chemical and biological threats. To overcome these limitations, the overall goal of th ...

his project involves the commercialization of the breast phantom designed by NIST and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) for quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The breast phantom consists of two independent phantoms, one focused on diffusion MRI measurements and the other focused on accurate measurements of fat and fibroglandular tissue properties. The proposed phantom is o ...

Passive microwave sensors aboard satellites provide valuable information regarding weather conditions by measuring atmospheric attenuation over a broad range of frequencies from 0-200 GHz. Additional ground-based sensors are desirable to provide complementary upward looking measurements that can be used to refine existing attenuation models. Operating over such a large bandwidth, however, places ...

We aim to create a low-cost, high-sensitivity hand-held plasmonic biosensor capable of sensing biotoxins. We will do this by using newly developed biodesign technology to create a new class of proteins which have an orders-of-magnitude increase in SPR signal-to-noise. These will be incorporated into a novel SPR device in which the transmission of light is affected by the binding of a particular t ...

The overall objective of this Phase I project is to develop a nonlinear trim module in FUN3D for enabling the determined and over-determined trim analyses to be performed by FUN3D with static aeroelastic effects. Based on an optimization formulation, the over-determined trim analysis can determine the optimum control surface scheduling of multiple control surfaces to achieve the best aerodynamic e ...

Thick, 3D woven carbon/phenolic composites offer potential improvement over legacy thermal protection systems (TPS) for re-entry vehicle heat shield applications. However due to the scale and complexity of typical re-entry vehicle structures, it is likely that multiple 3D woven panels would need to laid up to create the overall heat shield, creating a potential weak spots at the panel joints. ...

Gas-Liquid separation is an acute microgravity problem. Existing devices use centrifugal motion on microporous membranes to separate the two phases. Centrifugal devices consume electricity and are prone to failure. The microporous membranes easily foul and have significant water loss. Novel membrane devices are proposed. Membranes can simultaneously disengage gases from gas-liquid dispersion and d ...

Advanced robotic systems demand an enhanced vision system and image processing algorithms to reduce the percentage of manual operation required. Unstructured environments, whether man-mad (e.g., International Space Station) or natural (e.g., Mars), present significant challenges to supervised autonomy or fully autonomous systems – advanced perception sensors and associated software are requir ...