Award Data

This SBIR project will develop a new technology for the removal and destruction of NOx pollutants from diesel engine exhaust. Four important issues will be addressed in the project. The first issue will be applying a zeolite coating to reticulated catalyst supports with the correct chemical composition and pore size distribution. The second issue will be doping the zeolite metal with an ion exc ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop micro-fabricated diamond Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) pad conditioners as a replacement of traditional grit-based conditioners for semiconductor and optical polishing. This project will utilize Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) based ultrananocrystalline diamond technologies to create a narrowly size-distributed a ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will result in an efficient and scalable method for design and formal verification of Chip-Multi-Threaded multicore processors, where the individual cores have hardware support for multi-threading. This method will be developed and optimized on the OpenSPARC T2 processor, a publicly available version of the Sun UltraSPARC T2?the indust ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes a robotic grasper based on a novel torque switching mechanism, and a structurally compliant finger with embedded sensing. Robotic hands in industry tend to be fragile and lack the dexterity to perform a wide range of grasping and manipulation tasks. Robotic hands in academia tend to be more dexterous yet tend to be bulky, poss ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project focuses on developing a novel thermographic phosphor thermometry technique, combined with a thermal barrier coating (TBC) material, for monitoring gas turbine surface temperature and TBC condition (i.e., to monitor the coating for spallation and deterioration). Design of efficient and low-emission power generation gas turbines requires detail ...

This small business innovation research Phase I project explores novel wireless antenna technologies based on metamaterial volumetric folded antennas structures. The approach is to compress, twist, and fragment metal strips or discs in a multi-layer structure to form self-tuned, bandwidth optimized, and miniaturized antennas. The design methodology of engineering the coupled-line common and dif ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop a Liquid Tin Anode Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (LTA-SOFC) to generate energy from biomass. The LTA-SOFC is an advanced fuel cell that has improved efficiency of directly generating electrical power from fuels such as biomass, diesel, natural gas, and coal. This project will study the efficiency of an LTA-SOFC to produce electricity from biomass for long periods o ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop a device for pretreatment of algal cells with a pulsed electric field to facilitate oil extraction. The innovation is the optimization of a pulsed electric field to an algal culture. The main activities of the Phase 1 project will be to develop the pulsed electric field device, optimize the parameters, and assess cost effectiveness. The long term goal is t ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop transgenic fungal endophyte to produce and sequester degradative enzymes during plant growth and for post harvest use of these enzymes to reduce recalcitrance and facilitate biomass conversion. Efficient production of biofuels from lignocellulosic biomass is limited by several factors including (1) producing large amounts of low-cost biomass sustainably (2) ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop an improved Open-Path FTIR Spectrometer for monitoring of atmospheric gases over extended distances. This will be achieved by developing a high-brightness infrared source that is heated to 2000 K by means of a diode laser. This will enable the instrument to be less bulky and expensive, and will have improved monitoring range over current systems. The broade ...