Award Data

Of the18,000 miles of pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipe (PCCP) within the drinking water transmission infrastructure laid between 1945 and 1996 in the United States, almost one-half, or 8,600 miles of pipe, is considered to be end-of-life infrastructure, awaiting funding for replacement. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the United States a grade of D for its drinking water inf ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) project will employ Nanofiltration to generate sulfate ion feedstocks and high current density on-site generation (synthesis) of the powerful oxidant peroxodisulphate (“persulfate”) with novel, high reliability boron-doped untrananocrystal-line diamond (UNCD) electrodes to dramatically lower the cost of unconventional fossil fuel (FF) waste water ...

A team of EP Purification and the University of Illinois engineer and chemists is pursuing the commercialization of low cost microchannel plasma modules capable of efficiently producing ozone for water treatment. The conservation of water resources for human consumption is a growing national priority. Contamination of ground municipal water by animal manure, fertilizer and pharmaceuticals, for e ...

This natural organic retention project proposes using lignin from emerging biorefineries to allow borates to be used as wood preservatives for exterior applications exposed to rain. Enhancing retention of environmentally-friendly borates has been the“holy grail” of the industry for decades. We believe this team and technical approach are very well suited for this challenge because: • The ...

Phosphorus (P) remediation is an extremely difficult and costly environmental problem and could cost $44.5 billion dollars for treatment using conventional water treatment plants to meet EPA requirements. Phosphorous runoff can lead to“dead zones” due to eutrophication and can also cause hypoxia, leading to death of aquatic life that thrive in an oxygen-rich environment. None commercial prod ...

In 2011, there were 60,000 dairy farms in the US. Of there, 56,600 had herds of fewer than 500 animals. Currently, manure digester installations are only considered economical for herds of at least 500 animals. There require turbine or diesel generator sets of 100 Kilowatt size and larger. The need exists for a smaller waste to energy conversion approach for implementation on small farms were ...

Current anaerobic digester systems are designed for capturing energy from waste from large heads of farm animals. GHD, Inc., a leading manufacturer of anaerobic digesters, has stated that a minimum dairy heard size for economical implementation of a biogas system as 800 cows. These require turbine or diesel generator sets of 100 Kilowatt size and larger, a limiting factor in economically scaling ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will explore the synthesis and use of novel lignin-derived carbon-magnetite nanocomposites for removal of aqueous phosphate– a run off pollutant from agricultural farms that leads to eutrophication of lakes and other water reservoirs. The intellectual property related to nanocomposite synthesis (and associated applications) is exclu ...

The designers, manufacturers, and end users of metal components are increasingly turning to titanium (Ti) alloys, which can provide a substantial increase in performance. However, for most of these applications, the cost of Ti components is prohibitively high. The cost of Ti sponge powder is still a small portion (e.g. 5%) of the final Ti64 component cost. The predominant cause of the high cost ...

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 ...