Award Data

US forces are increasingly involved in asymmetric warfare, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance missions. These scenarios can place soldiers in direct contact with harmful biological and chemical warfare organisms and agents, toxic industrial chemicals, and explosives. Current portable sensor technology solutions rely on visible and near-IR Raman or Fluorescence spectroscopy. But operations ...

A stand-off mid-IR based system offers great promise for the detection of chemical, biological or explosive (CBE) agents. Such a system has yet to be realized due mostly to broad spectral features and interfering substances. In this proposal we will demonstrate the feasibility of a system that collects laser induced thermal emission (LITE) from a substance and identifies it as known CBE agent with ...

Development of a novel logistic fuel reformer that has excellent tolerance to sulfur and is resistant to coke formation is proposed. The reformer will produce a hydrogen-rich product that contains less than 1 ppm sulfur and is suitable for use with solid oxide fuel cells. Significant improvements in power density, startup time, durability, and cost relative to state of the art logistic fuel refo ...

The overall goal of this proposed Army STTR is to demonstrate low-cost, non-destructive methodologies for non-agglomerating drying of anisotropic nanomaterials. NanoSonic and Virginia Tech will work in tandem to demonstrate novel approaches involving both high performance coatings and CO2 processing that facilitate gentle, simultaneous drying and exfoliation of nanoparticles, preventing agglomera ...

SET Corporation, together with Carnegie Mellon University''s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), will develop a system that leverages state-of-the-art sensing, perception, and machine learning to provide trafficability assessments for UGVs for agricultural, security and military applications. It will consist of a set of proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors that provide rich data about ...

This will facilitate the development of remedial approaches for existing facilities and assist in planning new facilities, logistics, and procedures to protect the environment without impairing critical mission functionality. The commercial application will include software distribution and updates.

Physical Sciences, Inc. (PSI) proposes to demonstrate environmentally benign, low cost biological agent simulant particles that mimic the infrared, scatter, fluorescence and atomic absorption spectra of bacillus subtilis (BG), Erwinia herbicola (EH), and the MS2 Bacteriophage (MS2). These stimulant particles will be composed of materials that are commonly available foods or nutritional supplement ...

Physical Sciences Inc. proposes an innovative, filter free approach to rapidly concentrate and detect bacterial spores from large volumes of flowing water for the purpose of early warning detection of contaminated potable water supplies against low concentration biological pathogens. Our approach builds on previous concentration work to study the feasibility of optimizing this approach and lays t ...

A narrow-band microbolometric detector is proposed to the address need for a low-cost, portable system to perform chemical and biological threat detection. An approach is shown to achieve a narrow-band bolometric detector whose response can be tailored to both a desired peak wavelength and bandwidth. The approach will enable the design of an array of detectors meeting the requirements for chemical ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research program will develop narrow band plasmonic resonant cavity filters with integrated microbolometer sensors operating in the long wave infrared (LWIR) atmospheric transmission band for IR absorption measurements of low concentration chemicals. IR spectroscopy can identify a wide range of contaminants, including chemical/biological warfare agents, exp ...