Award Data

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project aims to develop highly sensitive and inexpensive uncooled microbolometers using ultra-thin films of metals, metal oxides, or semi-metals. These microbolometers will be attractive for use in portable night vision devices and other thermal imaging applications that require a Noise Equivalent Temperature Difference (NETD) of less than 20 mK. We ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells as a power source for automobiles and stationary or portable power applications. Currently, the high cost of the PEM fuel cell limits their commercial applications. A significant cost of a PEM fuel cell comes from the use of Platinum. This project intends to develop a low cost core shell nanostructured catalyst whic ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project aims to develop roll-to-roll processing of highly efficient, thin film photovoltaics on inexpensive polycrystalline substrates. The innovation lies in an architecture that yields near-single-crystalline thin films even on polycrystalline substrates. This innovation will be combined with the benefits of hot wire chemical vapor deposit ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project aims to develop a highly-efficient and cost-effective plasma-based method for graphene mass production. The approach is to utilize unique properties of magnetically controlled arc discharge to couple the plasma production of carbon species and the synthesis of graphene. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the potenti ...

This STTR Phase I project will develop a process to produce silica products from the waste stream of a patent pending activated carbon manufacturing process (carbonxt process). The project focuses on using the silica for Silica-Titania Composites but would also take into account markets that employ precipitated or gel silica which would have differing properties than the silica used in Silica-Tit ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project aims to fabricate anti-reflective coatings (ARC) for solar energy applications. The approach is to use a convective and evaporation-induced assembly to deposit organized nanostructures and create sub-wavelength quasi repeating structures at lower cost than the repeating structures from photolithography. In this project, a Microreacto ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project will develop a new type of nanostructured substrate for applications in arsenide detection using surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). Arsenic is a well known toxic chemical which exists in both nature and industrial processes, and its detection and monitoring at very low concentration is highly desired. SERS, which relies on Raman sig ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project addresses the unmet analytical needs for monitoring cyanide leaching of gold, a process widely used in the mining industry to refine gold ores. The goal is to establish the feasibility of sensors that permit the selective measurement of free and complexed cyanide in the cyanide leach reactor, detoxification reactor, and in the tailings ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to address the unmet need for high-throughput, cost-effective research tools to model the metastasis of cancer cells. The proposed research objectives are to (1) discover cost-effective, commercially scalable methods allowing the production of aligned nanofibers in a 96-well plate format and (2) verify that the fiber alignment is ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project shall develop and model phase separating materials for passively-driven graphical displays, which are needed for smart cards that can display graphic images. Nearly all consumer credit cards used today have no functional display. Since the numbers and security codes on the cards cannot be changed, fraudulent use is estimated to be as high as ...