Award Data

"The environmental Protection Agency is soliciting innovations for the development of small unit drinking water systems that will inactivate contaminants including pesticides, organic pollutants, pharmaceuticals, personal care products, and pathogens. In the US, 85% of all public water systems serve fewer than 3,300 people, thus these water systems are considered small. For providing these small ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will develop and ready for commercialization a scalable, low-cost process for purification of water containing Contaminants of Emerging Concern (CECs) using anodic oxidation with boron-doped ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD®) thin films. Resent research demonstrated that there is considerable potential for the development of electrochemica ...

Outdoor wood-fired boilers (OWB) are gaining in popularity for heating homes. As energy prices have risen, sales of OWBs are doubling each year because they provide a lower cost solution and use renewable fuel. There is concern about their air emissions, however. OWBs typically emit 18 times the pollution of an EPA certified wood stove and there are currently no emission controls for OWBs. The ...

"OPTRA proposes a Fourier transform phase shift cavity ring down spectroscopy (FT-PS-CRDS) system for high sensitivity detection of air toxic compounds. Our system operates in the 400-4000 cm-1 spectral range wherein lie vapor phase resonance bands for most air toxic compounds and hazardous chemicals; the spectral resolution is 4-16 cm-1, depending on the discrimination requirements. Our approac ...

"With the rapid growth of biodiesel industry, the production of crude glycerol as one of major biodiesel byproducts has been dramatically increased. Fully utilizing such a large quantity of crude glycerol is critical to the sustainability of biodiesel industry. Lactic acid is an important industrial chemical that is widely used as a food additive for flavoring and preservative, a moistener in co ...

"Nitrate (NO3) in surface water runoff from agriculture activities is a serious environmental problem. Nitrate levels in United States waterways have increased dramatically in the past half-century, two0fold in the Mississippi River since 1965 and as much as ten-fold in the northeast since 1990. This widespread nitrate contamination has led to significant environmental consequences. In particul ...

Infrared tunable diode laser spectrometers provide a highly effective means of measuring trace concentrations, with either remote sensing or with advective sampling. It is often desirable to measure more than one trace gas at a time. This is especially true when gas emissions are strongly correlated, such as in combustion emissions where measuring both the CO2 concentration and another minor con ...

The use of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to detect contaminants such as solvents, fuels, and pesticides in soil and water samples is now well established. Although ELISA and related methods can facilitate analysis of samples, several washing and separation steps are involved that require 30 to 120 minutes per sample to reach equilibrium. Recently, near infrared fluorescence immunoassa ...

Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) can sometimes be used as a diagnostic device in biology and medicine. In general, LIF has difficulties in relating the fluorescence spectra to the concentration of the emitters within the tissue, in identifying different species, and in the possibility of destroying the molecules being probed if the wrong excitation wavelength is chosen. Many of the problems asso ...

Major improvements in process control, compliance monitoring, and objective environmental decisionmaking could be made if accurate, rugged, and affordable sensors were available. Of particular interest are environmental sensors that can continuously and quantitatively determine both toxic metal vapor emissions and organic compound emissions from complex matrix sources such as power plants, incine ...