Award Data

Millions of heat pumps are used to heat and cool homes and buildings year round. Continuous operation means that components wear out at a greater rate. As a result, maintenance of residential heat pumps is a major cost driver. Current methods focus on reduced use through control settings. Typically, demand has wide swings throughout the day and people are unable to customize controls. Inevitably, ...

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 ...

Magnetic Resonance Imaging data needs to be calibrated using a universal standard. NIST and the ISMRM SQRM committee have developed the NIST/NIST MR phantom. The group had two phantoms manufactured to their specifications and these phantoms have been imaged at numerous imaging facilities. Sigma-K now proposes to develop a complete manufacturing method that will produce 50 MRI phantoms. These phant ...

Sepax Technologies, Inc. has identified a new type of anoin-exchange resin which separates single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) with >80% recovery yield and resolves in a single pass the chiral tubes of (6,5) well from commercial SWCNT starting materials by Chromatography. Improvement and scale up of the targeted resin production will facilitate the separation of chiral nanotubes for the academic ...

X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy is a widely used and extremely sensitive analytical technique for qualitative as well as quantitative chemical analysis. Superconducting Transition Edge Sensor (TES) microcalorimeter detectors have now been developed that achieve an energy resolution of 2 eV (full width at half maximum) for 1.5 keV X-rays, which is sufficient to enable the measurement of the small s ...