Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Historically blood oxygenator technology either for short-term by-pass surgery or recently developed long-term strategies has been mass transfer limited by liquid side mass transfer fluid dynamics. Recent active mixing designs have led to systems which remove liquid side fluid limitations and have oxygen and carbon dioxide transport limited by membrane transpo ...

In the electrical power, steel production, and aluminum production industries, flame retardant, phosphate-ester hydraulic fluids are used to minimize fires. Although these fluids accomplish the fire-minimization task, they are unstable, which causes performance to suffer with attendant losses in productivity. This project will develop novel, chemically-resistant high-flux membranes that can remo ...

Distillation is a major chemical unit operation and consumer of significant energy. Often, water or another intermediate boiling component can become trapped within the distillation column and accumulate. This causes various operating difficulties such as flooding, slugging, cycling, instability, and an off-spec product. This project will develop a chemically resistant, non-porous water-venting ...

Catalysis plays a substantial role in the synthesis of the most U.S. commodity chemicals, with huge implications for energy usage. Membrane reactors have been proposed for a number of these syntheses. However, to be competitive with conventional technologies, membrane reactors must demonstrate better selectivity, permeability, and/or stability. This project will develop a novel platform with ke ...

The use of ethanol as a fuel would impact U.S. reliance on foreign oil. However, among the economic obstacles to it widespread use are the costs of shipping fuel-grade ethanol by truck. Shipping ethanol by pipeline would be significantly less expensive, but, unfortunately, pipeline ethanol is hydroscopic, which causes too much water to be present in the fuel. This project will develop a simple, ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this proposed project is to achieve a major transformation in the technology used to assess self-care and social disability in children and youth. Measurement and practical requirements to identify disability and evaluate individual progress across pediatric age-groups and care settings present a serious dilemma to current fixed-item instrument ...

Traditional finite element methods require conversion of a CAD model into an alternate geometric representation called the finite element mesh. Tools like Cubit, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, have greatly reduced the time to mesh. However, it is still expensive to produce a complete analysis and difficult to have that analysis affect the design cycle in a timely manner. Our studies ...

Based upon successful research in Phase I, this Phase II proposal describes the creation of a demonstrable prototype that will reduce the threat of cyber attacks. In addition, it will reduce the time (and therefore cost) IT staff need to defend their systems. The prototype will be a software utility called the Cyber SPK™ (System Protection Kit). The SPK will fuse data from four sources including ...

Development and production of semi-permeable and permselective polymer membranes can fill a critical need for standard reference materials for AVLAG, CBART, and IPE acquisition programs. Optimizing the permselectivity of tri-block copolymers to specific chemical agents, non-traditional agents, and toxic industrial chemicals and materials will result in the formation of suitable and affordable ref ...

Over the past few decades, computational electromagnetics (CEM) researchers have been making steady progress towards the development of efficient algorithms, such as the Method of Moments (MoM), for simulating scattering from electrically large targets. Unfortunately, such techniques have proved too computationally demanding because they require the solution of an often very large and dense matri ...