NIST Awards Funding to Small Companies to Advance Applied sciences for COVID Response, Manufacturing, Medical Diagnostics and Extra

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — The U.S. Division of Commerce’s Nationwide Institute of Requirements and Know-how (NIST) has awarded greater than $7 million in funding to 23 U.S. small companies in 14 states via two separate efforts underneath its Small Enterprise Innovation Analysis (SBIR) program. Practically $3.2 million in funding will go to assist 4 companies advance applied sciences in response to the coronavirus, and almost $4 million will go to 19 companies to advance applied sciences in manufacturing, privateness, medical diagnostics and extra.

The American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act of 2021 enabled the 4 awards for “analysis, improvement, and testbeds to forestall, put together for, and reply to coronavirus.” These awards had been performed underneath the SBIR Quick-Observe Program, which makes use of a aggressive choice course of to award Part I and Part II packages concurrently relatively than via two separate competitions. This course of permits Quick-Observe awardees to conduct analysis and improvement of their applied sciences (Part I), adopted by improvement of a prototype (Part II). 

In Quick-Observe Part I, awardees will obtain as much as $200,000 to ascertain the advantage, feasibility and business potential of the proposed analysis and improvement. After profitable completion of their Part I initiatives, awardees are eligible to obtain Part II funding of as much as $600,000 to proceed their efforts. 

The almost $4 million in funding that was awarded to 19 small companies was made via NIST’s annual SBIR solicitation. The competitively chosen proposals had been submitted in response to a name for modern merchandise addressing particular technical wants in areas together with superior communications, cybersecurity and privateness, well being and organic methods measurements and superior manufacturing.

These Part I awardees will obtain as much as $100,000 to ascertain the advantage, feasibility and business potential of the proposed analysis and improvement. After finishing their Part I initiatives, awardees could vie for Part II funding of as much as $400,000 to proceed their efforts. Part III depends on non-SBIR funds for expertise commercialization.

2022 SBIR ARP Quick-Observe Awardees

3D Array Know-how LLC (Storrs, Connecticut) $800,000
Nanostructure Array Built-in Medical Masks Design with Excessive Filtration, Low Respiration Resistance, and Antimicrobial Performances — a brand new kind of nanostructure array (nanoarray) of built-in microfibers to allow medical masks with excessive filtration effectivity, low respiration resistance and good antimicrobial capabilities.

IC3D Inc. (Columbus, Ohio) $800,000
Regionalized High quality Management Facilities for Mobilization of Distributed Additive Manufacturing — a pilot regional additive manufacturing high quality management middle to handle entry to acceptable high quality management testing services for the manufacturing of crucial provides in a pandemic.

Ratiocinative Engineering Companies LLC (Boulder, Colorado) $771,619
Multispectral Fluorescence Sensing of Airborne Proxy Infectious Particles in Precise Indoor Environments — a testbed that can result in extra accessible and strong high quality management testing of air filtration and air flow methods in precise built-up environments.  

Vuronyx Applied sciences (Woburn, Massachusetts) $799,970
Peracetic Acid Based mostly Disinfectant for PPEs — a powder for disinfection of private protecting tools (PPE), in order that the PPE might be reused.

2022 Part I SBIR Awardees

AAPlasma LLC (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) $99,936
Direct Deposition of Sturdy Composite Highway Marking Materials onto Pavement Through Quasi-Equilibrium Plasma — a expertise to handle the wants of our nation’s bodily infrastructure and resilience by lowering prices and bettering the reliability of street markings.

Introduction Diamond Inc. (Scottsdale, Arizona) $100,000
Phosphorous-doped Quantum Diamond for Electrical-readout Quantum Measurements — a brand new quantum materials consisting of a layer of phosphorus-doped diamond supplies for quantum applied sciences together with nitrogen-vacancy center-based sensors. Close to-term purposes embody measuring magnetic fields for analysis, space-based purposes and protection.

Criticality Sciences Inc. (Alexandria, Virginia) $100,000
Community Resilience to Cascading Failure — a software program software that can present scalable and inexpensive resilience metrics, in addition to mitigation and restoration steerage, to assist utilities and communities construct resilience in opposition to cascading infrastructure failures. 

InfraTrac Inc. (Silver Spring, Maryland) $100,000
Analytical High quality Administration for 3D-Printed Small Molecule Medicine — a nondestructive testing method that makes use of near-infrared spectroscopy to evaluate the standard of in-pharmacy 3D drug printing, to help custom-made pharmacy formulations.

Julia Jean LLC (Irvine, California) $100,000
Streamlining Lithography for Scalable Electron Emission from Microfabricated Porous Silicon Carbide: Advancing a NIST-Patented Know-how — to hold ahead NIST-patented expertise for an electron subject emitter that doesn’t depend on a historically required heating component and that might be utilized to superior applied sciences corresponding to lithography, electron microscopy, X-rays, radar and microwave communications.

NuPhy Inc. (Pullman, Washington) $100,000
TreeTracker: An Clever Plant Manufacturing Optimization — a cloud-capable software program platform that gives insights into how greatest to optimize plant development, maximize manufacturing output, and reduce prices for the method of making new crops.

Refined Imaging LLC (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) $100,000
Cyber-Bodily Belief Anchors with Definable Prices and Safety — a way that can assist defend in opposition to counterfeit manufactured parts by connecting a bodily half with a safe database protected by blockchain expertise. 

Resolution Spray Applied sciences LLC (Storrs, Connecticut) $100,000
Actual-Time Thickness Measurement Know-how for Course of Management of Plasma-Spray Based mostly Coating Manufacturing — a system that may measure the thickness of coatings on small objects with complicated geometries by utilizing lasers to generate ultrasound waves on the coatings.

SPEC Sensors LLC (Newark, California) $99,956
Supplies for Gravure Printing of Chemical Gasoline Sensors — a brand new course of to fabricate excessive volumes of miniaturized chemical gasoline sensors that might probably be embedded in wearable merchandise for a wide range of security purposes.

Stratio Inc. (San Francisco, California) $98,381
Low-cost Moveable Quick Wavelength Infrared Spectrometer (SWIR) — a feasibility examine to advance analysis in SWIR expertise that can assist the expertise to broaden into rising markets corresponding to precision agriculture, night time imaginative and prescient, sensible mirrors and robotic surgical procedure.

Tiami LLC (Elk Grove, California) $98,681
Digital TV-based Positioning for First Responder Monitoring in GPS-Denied Environments — a expertise that can allow real-time monitoring of first responders in environments the place GPS will not be an possibility.

USEncryption (Orlando, Florida) $100,000
Establishing the Safety of Ciphers Designed Utilizing Statistical Physics Rules to Allow Direct Computation on Encrypted Information — an method to allow computation on encrypted knowledge utilizing a brand new model of an encryption technique often called a block cipher in addition to a patent-pending technique to encrypt each the info and the mathematical capabilities that function on encrypted knowledge.

2022 Part II SBIR Awardees

ChemCubed LLC (Stony Brook, New York) $399,999
Nanocomposite Dielectric Materials and Printing Course of for Power Environment friendly Manufacturing of Printed Circuitry — a undertaking to judge the printing and mixing parameters of a brand new nanocomposite materials to seek out its optimum mechanical properties, and to scope its electrical properties to facilitate new use instances and improved manufacturing.

Colloidal Metrics Corp. (Mountain View, California) $400,000
Modern Emulsion Polymerization Manufacture of Twin-function, Nanoscale, Calibration Spheres Over the Vary of 100 to 400 nm Diameter — a undertaking to increase its potential to fabricate 100 nanometer (nm) polystyrene latex dimension requirements to incorporate 200 and 400 nm latexes and add correct particle focus knowledge to all the scale requirements.

Exum Devices Inc. (Lakewood, Colorado) $399,839
An Modern Mass Spectrometer to Simplify Supplies Characterization for Additive Supplies — a single analytical instrument that gives fast, high-sensitivity measurements of additive manufacturing (AM) feedstock powders and printed elements.

Irradiant Applied sciences Inc. (Cambridge, Massachusetts) $399,943
Excessive Throughput Experimental Discovery and Optimization for 3D Nanofabrication of Optical & Photonic Supplies and Units — an experimental discovery system able to screening for and implementing new supplies for the 3D manufacture of novel optical and photonic gadgets.

Multiscale Programs (Worchester, Massachusetts) $400,000    
Contract-free Optical Metrology for Power-efficient Manufacturing of Mechanical Metamaterials — the design and manufacturing of mechanical metamaterials for light-weight high-strength sandwich panels that outperform comparable foam and honeycomb supplies for semi-trailer car lightweighting.

Xallent LLC (Ithaca, New York) $400,000
Nano-Electro-Mechanical-Programs Probe for Skinny Movie Supplies Characterization — a hybrid metrology system that mixes the distinctive capabilities of atomic pressure microscopes (AFM) and four-point probing right into a single unit that expands the capabilities of present single tip AFMs into multipoint probing platforms to permit for quick, cost-effective and nondestructive characterization of skinny movie supplies and semiconductor gadgets.

Zymosense Inc. (Ames, Iowa) $400,000
Automated Aqueous Two-phase Separation of Single Walled Carbon Nanotube Species for Enrichment Course of Optimization and Scale Up — prototype purified single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) that might vastly broaden SWCNT use and practicality for purposes together with the separation of parts in mixtures.