Award Data

The past decade has seen remarkable progress in the development of biobased fuel and chemical production. Biobased fuels and chemicals could create substantial economic benefits for farmers and rural communities, since biomass feedstock production and conversion to biobased products are predominantly rural activities. However, substantial challenges exist and achieving economic viability of large- ...

Conversion of biomass into useful fungible chemicals and fuels is a long standing challenge. A key requirement of such processes is high efficiency of conversion for economic viability. Biomass derived sugars are highly oxygenated and need processing to remove to be converted into useful hydrocarbons.We propose an integrated bio-thermochemical platform for production of a hydrocarbon which can be ...

American Solar, Inc. proposes to research and analyze two low cost solar air heating systems for poultry houses. The solar heating systems will use an existing poultry house metal roof and a new wall-mounted, solar curtain system to harvest renewable, solar heated air. The solar heated air will displace cold outside ventilation air that would be brought into the house and require heating by non-re ...

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Horn Farms Inc needs to routinely produce sufficient annual seed stocks to support commercial production of key canna varieties. Thus the greenhouse diagnostic and sanitization program is necessary to meet production goals. Accurate visual disease assessment is carried out at 2 and 4 weeks of growth (instead of 10 and 16 weeks). Genus specific PCR primers were developed which detect all viruses in ...

Wildland fires cost billions of dollars a year in the US, threatening homes, lives, and valuable natural resources. Large amounts of chemical additives, including those in water enhancers, foam fire suppressants, and long-term retardants are used in battling wildland fires to slow the spread of the fire and enable firefighters to work safely on the ground. Millions of gallons of water and hundreds ...

Culturing fish today is organized around two key steps: multiplication of fish in the hatcheries and the increase of fish biomass in grow-out production. This transition is more-or-less linear: immediately after spawning eggs get fertilized, develop and hatch, they are grown to the fry/fingerling/smolt stage, and get transferred to grow-out production. This cycle starts with the spawning event, wh ...

In this Phase I SBIR program, Reactive Innovations, LLC (RIL) will demonstrate an advanced system to recover valuable nutrients from animal manure. Since World War II, the availability of relatively cheap mineral fertilizers has been a major factor spurring specialization of production agriculture, in which crop (cereal) production has been increasingly separated from livestock production. One imp ...

Controlled environment agriculture (CEA) has been used intensively worldwide to produce high quality products. One important issue associated with CEA is that temperature control of the greenhouse is often difficult to achieve, requiring large amount of fuel and/or electric power. Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), in collaboration with the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, The Uni ...

In controlled environment agricultural (CEA) systems (greenhouses and indoor plant production facilities) light is the most energy consuming, and yet the least controlled, input factor for plant growth. Plants can dissipate up to 80% of the absorbed light energy as heat through physiological protective mechanisms (non photochemical quenching) and this light cannot be used for plant growth. Light e ...