Award Data

Advances in materials and automation are rapidly reshaping the American manufacturing economy, and must be embraced to sustain a strong manufacturing sector in the United States. Additive manufacturing is possibly the fastest growing example of this trend, growing at an astonishing compound annual growth rate of 25.7%. The plastic materials market for additive manufacturing, valued at $700M in 202 ...

Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in food packaging, as coatings for cloth (e.g. Scotchgard), firefighting foams, electronics, and industrial and automotive components. Being perfluorinated species, they are engineered to breakdown slowly (half-life >92 years in water), and thus persist for very long times. Their high water-solubility makes them especially dangerous, and much like perchlo ...

Current petroleum-derived-plastics contain additives such as phthalates or bisphenolA that are harmful to human health and the environment. Thus, it’s critical to replace such toxic non-biodegradable plastics with biodegradable bioplastics. To meet bioplastics production need, Altex, and Texas A&M University (TAMU) have teamed up to utilize renewable biomass, such as forest residue, agricultural ...

Toyon proposes to research and develop algorithms for generalized salient change detection, and to incorporate these algorithms into software tools implemented on the cloud. Our approach leverages the two most promising methods from Phase I, both based on supervised learning. The first method is the entropy-based feature vector and corresponding neural network, which we will apply at a coarse sear ...

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop algorithms that improve the precision and recall of neural networks for low-shot object classification and detection. Our approach is based upon developing a descriptive multi-domain feature representation of the low-shot target as well as the surrounding context. A multi-branch neural network merges the various domains of information to perform accur ...

Implement methods to improve our Phase I architecture for complex SAR imagery collected from different systems and with different collection parameters. Implement techniques to boost performance across all ground features of interest. Reduce the amount of human intervention needed for training our SAR image segmentation architecture.  SAR segmentation can be applied to a number of areas: Intellig ...

THE PURPOSE OF PHASE I OF THIS RESEARCH PROJECT IS TO CRITICALLY REVIEW THE EXISTING COMPUTERIZED EOP SYSTEMS FOR BOTH PWR AND BWR PLANTS, DEVELOPED BY VARIOUS NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS TO FULLY UNDERSTAND THEIR ADVANTAGES, DISADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS IN TERMS OF THEIR IMPACT ON OPERATORS PERFORMANCE AND RELIABILITY AND RECOMMEND ONE SYSTEM OR A COMPOSITE OF SEVERAL SYSTEMS, BEFOR ...

A TWO-DIMENSIONAL NUMERICAL MODEL BASED ON A HYBRID FINITE ELEMENT METHOD WITH MESH ADAPTATION IS PROPOSED TO CALCULATE GROUNDWATER FLOW AND POLLUTANT TRANSPORT IN UNSATURATED POROUS MEDIA. THE ALGORITHM IS MODIFIED TO ENHANCE COMPUTATIONAL SPEED AND STORAGE, AND INCORPORATES PETROV-GALERKIN WEIGHTING FOR THE ADVECTION TERMS. NONLINEARITIES ASSOCIATED WITH UNSATURATED SOIL PROPERTIES, ATMOSPHERIC ...

THIS RESEARCH WILL EXECUTE AN INDEPTH STUDY OF THE BASIC FEATURES OF EMBEDDED SYSTEM AND PLANT PROCESS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ITS INTERACTIONS WITH THE HARDWARE SYSTEMS THAT IT IS INTENDED TO CONTROL AND REGULATE. THE PURPOSE OF SUCH A STUDY WILL BE TO IDENTIFY THE PROCEDURES AND ANALYTICAL TECHNIQUES, TO BE INTEGRATED IN AN EMBEDDED SYSTEM SOFTWARE ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY, THAT CAN BE OF GREATEST UTILI ...

TECHNIQUES HAVE RECENTLY BEEN DEVELOPED TO ANALYZE THE 'SEISMIC MARGIN' OF A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT USING THE HCLPF CONCEPT (HIGH CONFIDENCE OF A LOW PROBABILITY OF FAILURE). STARTING WITH AN EARTHQUAKE LEVEL SHOSEN FOR MARGIN REVIEW, THE TECHNIQUE DETERMINES WHETHER THE PLANT CAN OR CANNOT 'WITHSTAND THE REVIEW-EARTHQUAKE WITHOUT CORE DAMAGE. HERE 'WITHSTAND' MEANS 'WITHSTAND WITH A HIGH CONFIDENCE ...