Award Data

Aerosol delivery of pharmaceuticals is an effective means of treating numerous diseases. Proper administration of drugs in this form requires knowledge of the droplet size and concentration of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) within the aerosol. Optical imaging is a robust method for obtaining this information. Physical Sciences Incorporated proposes to develop, build, and test a novel m ...

The Department of Energy is promoting geologic carbon sequestration (GCS) as a means to mitigate CO2 emissions from fossil-fueled plants. To verify that GCS performs its intended function, the sequestered CO2 must be monitored. For this purpose, novel tools are needed to cost-effectively detect, locate, and quantify sources of escaping CO2, by monitoring either the CO2 or surrogate leak indicato ...

Proper management of soils and vegetation can increase their uptake of CO2 and therefore allow them to become more effective ¿land-sinks¿ for the mitigation of global climate change. This project will apply spark-induced breakdown spectroscopy (SIBS), a technique that has been used to perform elemental composition measurements in both aerosol and soil matrices, to the measurement of carbon ...

Lunar dust creates a number of hazards to lunar operations including, effect on human health, degradation of life support systems, wear to mechanical systems and loss of efficiency of solar arrays. Lunar operations require a system which mechanically removes dust from key systems and prevents its redeposition. While there is no wind on the moon, electrical phenomena allow the transport of lunar ...

Situation or Problem: Use of high quality transplants (seedlings or rooted cuttings) is critical for success in horticultural crop production. The transplant quality can be evaluated using various aspects including visual quality, vigor and status of pests/diseases. As high quality transplant production is a specialized technology, more growers purchase their transplants from specialized propagato ...

Measurement of vertical profiles of H2O vapor density in the troposphere can provide new understanding of H2O vapor mass transport. Increased density o9f such measurements can improve predictive capability for precipitation in meteorology and can increase our understanding of feedback mechanisms involving the interaction of H2O vapor, radiative balance and precipitation that are important in glob ...

We propose to develop innovative statistical signal processing algorithms that discriminate between human and animal footsteps when processing seismic signatures acquired by Unattended Ground Sensors (UGS) and UGS constellations. The innovation is to extract and statistically analyze features (e.g., energy, pattern, and spectral properties) of the seismic signatures. Furthermore, to increase the p ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal addresses a need for an improved technology for early cancer detection and rapid screening. Recent advances in nanotechnology and high resolution imaging have led to the development of new investigative t ools capable of probing biological tissues at the cellular level. These tools can be used to localize abnormal neoplastic cells and expedite th ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposal addresses a real need for an improved technology for early detection and rapid screening of ductal pancreatic cancer. Very recent advances in nanotechnology and high resolution optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging have led to the development of new investigative tools capable of probing biological tissues at the cellular level. These tools ...

Next generation nuclear plants will operate with helium as the working fluid and, for highest efficiency, at temperatures approaching 1000°C. However, the steel alloys used in reactor construction lose their strength at temperatures above 850°C. SiC/SiC composite systems might be suitable candidates, but these systems generally have helium permeabilities that are too high for duct components ...