Award Data

Over the past 150 years, copper mining in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan has resulted in the accumulation of approximately 1/2 gigaton of tailing piles. These wastes occur in a number of forms on the uplands and in the lakes and waterways. Today these tailings are drifting along the lakeshore and affecting the beauty of the otherwise pristine coastline of Lake Superior, depreciating the valu ...

Passage in 1996 of the Food Quality Protection Act and amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act reflected concerns regarding food and drinking water safety and required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a screening program, using appropriate validated test systems and other scientifically relevant information to determine whether certain substances may have an endocrine ef ...

In this proposed Phase I project, we will develop a fiber optic scintillator system with radionuclide-selective cladding for use in the detection of radionuclide contamination in water supplies or wastewater streams. The current terrorist threat requires that vigilance be maintained on all avenues of attack to the United States, including the potential for attack on the country’s food or water ...

This proposal describes an Application Coherency Manager that implements and manages the interdependencies of simulation, data, and platform information. It will also enforce a simulation configuration profile submission that includes the specification of the interdependency requirements. To describe these interdependences, a general-purpose language will serve as the basis for higher-level rule ...

Heat shield technology is a critical component of manned spaceflight. In particular, the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) requires thermal protection systems (TPS) beyond the current state of the art. While new TPS shields are under development, a key difficulty is the ability to diagnose TPS performance. Technology demonstrator missions are being planned, but designing instrumentation capabl ...

Active flow control to prevent or delay boundary layer separation dramatically improves the performance of air vehicles in critical regions of the flight envelope. FlexSys Inc. has designed a compact, efficient, electromechanical High-Frequency Micro-Vortex Generator system (HiMVG) and tested it a subsonic speeds, proving that, when tuned to the boundary layer, it is as effective at promoting flow ...

The structural design during the early development of an aircraft focuses on strength, fatigue, corrosion, maintenance, inspection, and manufacturing. Usually the acoustic requirements are met after the design of the fuselage structure has been completed. Ideally the structural-acoustic concerns should enter the design cycle early and they should be considered along with other main design discip ...

We have developed a next-generation thruster under a Phase II SBIR which we believe can meet NASA requirements after some modifications and improvements. It is the first practical example of chemically-augmented electric propulsion, using efficient laser diodes focused on an exothermic fuel tape to make a jet. We own the patents on this technology. Advantages of our thruster technology are large ...

With the expected extension of duration of the space missions outlined in NASA's Vision of Space Exploration, such as a manned mission to Mars or the establishment of a lunar base, the need to produce potable water from onboard wastewater streams in a closed-loop system becomes critical for life support and health of crew members. Reverse osmosis (RO) is a compact process that has proven its abili ...

Future NASA planetary exploration missions require secondary (rechargeable) batteries that can operate at extreme temperatures (-60oC to 60oC) yet deliver high specific energies (> 180 W·hr/kg) and long cycle life (>2,000 cycles). Functional organic materials are a promising technology for use as the cathode in Li-Ion batteries due to their high specific energy density. It is also expected that t ...