Award Data

New innovative technology for the visually impaired has been developed by NIST. If commercialized, it would provide refreshable tactile graphical information to the visually impaired, enabling them to compete on a more equal footing in the workplace and the education system.

A novel chemical vapor deposition (CVD) based step-flow epitaxy process is proposed for controllable growth of SiC nanowires with high polytype integrity. SiC nanowires will be grown in a modified commercial high-temperature CVD reactor, used by industry for growing high-quality SiC epitaxial thin films. Different polytypes of SiC nanowires will be grown by choosing appropriate substrate materials ...

The work proposed will provide a demonstration of feasibility and specific design recommendations for building an elevated-temperature resonating crystal balance with nanogram sensitivity. The approach will build upon existing technology commercialized by Masscal for operating a QCM in a temperature-controlled calorimeter. Precise temperature control and new types of crystal sensors will be used t ...

The most practical arrangement for investigating moving fires within a restricted space is to use a high- resolution stand off technique. One such method that fits this description is the use of a staring infrared (IR) sensing device (i.e. imager).

Improving the quality and intensity of the x-ray beam is an important design goal for every synchrotron installation. Although small, the effects of vacuum windows on x-ray absorption and phase contrast cannot be neglected. Synchrotron x-rays have wavelengths on the order of one Angstrom (1 x 10-10m), the same order of magnitude as inter-atomic distances. These x-rays are used to study many differ ...

Thin film multilayers of nanometer scale thickness are fundamental to the future of electronics and communications technologies. Chemical depth profiling by ion etching techniques are critical to the characterization of these structures. A fundamental problem with current ion etching technologies is that typical ion energies (~1k eV to 20 keV) create extensive damage and intermixing of nanometer t ...

We propose developing a prototype of a GUI-based wizard that: ¿ Guides users through the steps that are needed to define their processes using PSL in a visual/textual manner. ¿ Checks for consistency/correctness according to PSL ontology. ¿ Generates the PSL description. We believe that VISI-PSL will facilitate the generation of PSL descriptions to the extent that it will be used by process ...

Next-generation smart machine tools are currently under research and development. Critical to the success of these tools will be the inclusion of smart sensors. These sensor suites will need to measure physical parameters such as temperature, vibration, pressure and so on. Luna Innovations has extensive experience in developing solar powered wireless systems to transmit sensor data. Luna proposes ...

This project will (i) extend and harden the PSL Editor and the Ontology-Driven XSLT Generator (ODXG) tools and (ii) extend the process description syntax (PDS) derived from the PSL for both KIF and XML/RDF formats. In addition, we will extend the PSL metatheoretical framework to support the PDS and the PSL tools by providing PSL extensions to support calendars and activity specialization, and by d ...

We propose to develop a robust framework, called the Process Knowledge Integration and Management Framework (PKIMF), to support the complete lifecycle of enterprise process knowledge that natively use the Process Specification Language (PSL). PKIMF uses a dashboard approach to design, analyze, integrate, exchange, and manage process knowledge. Its features and capabilities include the use of a pro ...