Award Data

Lack of fresh water hinders economic development, devastates human health, leads to environmental degradation and foments political instability. We obtain our water from limited and unevenly distributed surface and underground fresh water sources. Over withdrawal from these quasi-renewable sources causes myriad environmental, economic, political and human health problems. In the developing wor ...

This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research Project develops methods of recycling rare earth alloys from used nickel metal hydride batteries. Alloys of rare earth metal, nickel and other metals provide functional hydride storage materials that are critical to the operation of nickel metal hydride batteries and their applications. The current fleet of hybrid electric vehicles relies upon nick ...

Okeanos Technologies is developing a desalination system that used Ion Concentration Polarization (ICP) elements and modular arrays. ICP can separate water from solutes and contaminants far more efficiently than Reverse Osmosis (RO) or Electrodialysis(ED) because no extreme hydraulic pressures or heat sources are needed. The improve efficiency translates into order of magnitude savings in operat ...

"Cellulosic ethanol is a desirable transportation fuel for environmental and economic reasons. One of the issues limiting the commercialization is the utilization of xylose which is not fermented to ethanol by conventional brewing yeasts. Trillium Fiber Fuels is pioneering the use of xylos isomerase to convert xylose to fermentable xylulose. While this can be accomplished with existing industri ...

Interior wood composite panels are widely used for furniture, bookshelf, kitchen cabinets, flooring, and other building materials, and are predominantly made with carcinogenic urea-formaldehyde (UF) resin. New formaldehyde-free wood adhesives that mainly consist of abundant, renewable, and readily available soybean flour and novel curing agents have been developed in a laboratory and successfully ...