Award Data

Zeotrope refrigerant mixtures have been proposed and used for energy saving. Matching the temperature glide of the refrigerant to the temperature change of the heat sink and source, while simultaneously reducing the pressure difference seen by the compressor will result in significantly improved efficiency. A new cycle based on a mixture cascade combined with a rectifier column has recently been i ...

OPTRA is proposing the development of an all-reflecting stationary Fourier transform spectrometer, based on the use of Fresnel mirrors and a linear uncooled amorphous silicon microbolometer array to produce spectra in the 1 to 5 micron region with resolution of 5nm. Concentration, temperature and soot volume fraction will be derived from the measured emission spectra of a flame. An amorphous silic ...

This project is investigating the application of magnetic recording and micromachine technologies to the development of a novel magnetic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) system. Magnetic NDE methods based on Barkhausen signal detection and analysis can provide valuable information about the state of stress of steel materials. However, Barkhausen signals do not appear to be correlated with the ext ...

The purpose of this Phase I proposal is to investigate the feasibility of developing a comprehensive Failure Engineering and Analysis Toolkit (FEAT) that can be seamlessly integrated with a variety of data tools over ODBC/SQL. The research will focus on mechanical parts failure data and analysis for both the production and design stages of a product's life cycle. Elements of FEAT will include a ...

A growing number of fire fighters are suffering third degree burns; this has led to questions about the adequacy of thermal protective performance (TPP) measurements for protective clothing. A new heat flux sensor, whose response approximates that of skin, will be developed to provide better measurements of heat transfer in TPP tests. This sensor will be used with nonlinear parameter estimation an ...

Digital imagery is an increasingly prevalent in the computerized workplace; however, the increasing volume of this data is stressing storage and communications systems. One of the most competitive solutions to these stresses is wavelet-based data compression. A wide variety of wavelet image compression methods exists, and given an application, there is a need to compare different methods before ...

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Fire fighter burn injuries continue to be a frequent problem despite significant advances in protective clothing. A reason for this is the buildup of moisture in fire fighting garments as a result of sweating or fire fighting activities. This buildup of moisture increases the heat transfer through the garment and can result in scald burn injuries as the water is quickly heated. Currently, there is ...

The research proposed herein in intended to solve two problems, namely (1) to define a specification framework for access control policies that enables policy composition for both centralized and distributed systems in a precise and systematic manner, and (2) to explore the impact of different security architectures on policy composition. Although most commercial systems support applications that ...