Award Data

Intellectual Merit: This STTR project will develop novel engineered Clostridia strains for fermentation to economically produce butanol as a biofuel from sugars derived from starchy and lignocellulosic biomass. Butanol is an important industrial solvent and potentially a better transportation fuel than ethanol. Recent rising oil prices and limited petroleum resources have generated high interest i ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will investigate the technical and commercial feasibility of coating metal foils with a solid sorbent so that they act as a desulfurizing component for pre-treatment of sulfur-laden liquid fuels. The coated foils will be inserted into a small heat exchanger that acts as a platform unit for conversion of liquid fuels to hydrogen for fue ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project addresses the need for novel catalytic systems for electrochemical energy conversion technologies, specifically polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells, through an innovative bilayer electrocatalyst design and the ability to implement that design using a sophisiticated electrodeposition process. The project will demonstrate impro ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I research project will investigate the feasibility of improving the addressing speed of Plasma-sphere. Plasma-spheres are hollow transparent shells that encapsulate a selected pressurized gas. When a voltage is applied across the shell, the gas ionizes and glows. Plasma-spheres are applied to flexible, electrically addressable arrays to form Plasma-sp ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I proposal addresses key components for managing the liquid natural gas and hydrogen fuel supply economy. Transporting and storing cryogenic liquid fuels entails danger of fire and explosion. Since these fuel technologies are growing and acquiring increasing US strategic as well as worldwide importance, sensors and instrumentation to safely mana ...

The Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project will combine two classes of nanocomposite materials and combine them into a single bulk material component by pressure-assisted sintering technique. The two classes of materials individually exhibit thermoelectric (TE) behavior, and one goal of this research would be to evaluate the combined TE characteristics of the bulk comp ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will dramatically improve electrocatalyst utilization in PEM fuel cells to reduce their cost and ultimately assure their commercial viability in transportation applications. Using current technology, the cost of mass- produced PEM fuel cells is driven by the cost of platinum catalyst, yet the vast majority of the platinum is unutilized ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I research project aims to develop a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based co-processing unit that will enable more rapid searches of protein and nucleic acid data by allowing, among other functions, one core of a multicore system to be used as a co-processing unit for data management. Enabling faster comparison and analysis of sequences ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase 1 project seeks to improve educational assessment rubrics. Accreditation requires adequate assessment rubrics to substantiate expected student outcomes. Faculty struggle with specifying outcomes and their rubrics, due to inexperience and lack of proper tools. Our first research objective is to accumulate and classify expected outcomes, including ...

The Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase II project will demonstrate the ability to color structural composite parts made of thermoplastic polymers reinforced with long (3 mm to 25 mm in length) glass fibers. Today the options are black or natural resin color which limits their design appeal. Colorants are not used in thermoplastic composites for structural applications becaus ...