Award Data

Commercial aviation offers a low cost platform from which to make extensive humidity measurements, provided the instrumentation can run autonomously and endure the rigorous flight schedules. Advances in state of the art diode laser gas sensing technology make possible compact, fully automated, self-calibrating instrumentation with the sensitivity needed to measure humidity levels throughout the tr ...

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The proposed program will investigate fabrication of low-cost and stable Si- based filterless solar-blind UV detectors on radiation-hard silicon-on-insulator (SOI) structures. By fabricating detectors on silicon thin films, the active device layer thickness can be chosen so that shortwave photons are detected within the active layer, while the longer wavelengths are absorbed in a substrate which i ...

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 ...

As fire protection engineering moves towards the implementation of performance- based fire codes, the use of validated fire models is becoming a necessity. Part of the validation process involves demonstrating model capabilities for predicting key fire environment parameters. One of the key parameters for estimating time to ignition and fire growth is the heat transfer rate to compartment surfaces ...

Recent catastrophic failures of Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA) aluminum gas cylinders and similar air tanks have generated the need for a highly reliable, low cost inspection method to insure the integrity of these tanks. The failures of these tanks have been the result of crack formation in the neck and shoulder area. The cracks originate from the interior wall and can re ...

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 ...