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 by means of two separate efforts underneath its Small Enterprise Innovation Analysis (SBIR) program. Almost $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, growth, and testbeds to stop, put together for, and reply to coronavirus.” These awards had been carried out underneath the SBIR Quick-Monitor Program, which makes use of a aggressive choice course of to award Part I and Part II applications concurrently fairly than by means of two separate competitions. This course of permits Quick-Monitor awardees to conduct analysis and growth of their applied sciences (Part I), adopted by growth of a prototype (Part II). 

In Quick-Monitor Part I, awardees will obtain as much as $200,000 to ascertain the benefit, feasibility and business potential of the proposed analysis and growth. 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 by means of 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 programs measurements and superior manufacturing.

These Part I awardees will obtain as much as $100,000 to ascertain the benefit, feasibility and business potential of the proposed analysis and growth. After finishing their Part I initiatives, awardees might 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-Monitor 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 deal with entry to applicable 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 may result in extra accessible and sturdy high quality management testing of air filtration and air flow programs in precise built-up environments.  

Vuronyx Applied sciences (Woburn, Massachusetts) $799,970
Peracetic Acid Primarily based Disinfectant for PPEs — a powder for disinfection of non-public protecting gear (PPE), in order that the PPE could possibly be reused.

2022 Part I SBIR Awardees

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

Creation 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 embrace 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 device that may present scalable and reasonably priced 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 approach that makes use of near-infrared spectroscopy to evaluate the standard of in-pharmacy 3D drug printing, to assist 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 area emitter that doesn’t depend on a historically required heating component and that could possibly be utilized to superior applied sciences reminiscent of 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 decrease prices for the method of making new vegetation.

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

Answer Spray Applied sciences LLC (Storrs, Connecticut) $100,000
Actual-Time Thickness Measurement Know-how for Course of Management of Plasma-Spray Primarily based Coating Manufacturing — a system that may measure the thickness of coatings on small objects with advanced geometries through the use of lasers to generate ultrasound waves on the coatings.

SPEC Sensors LLC (Newark, California) $99,956
Supplies for Gravure Printing of Chemical Fuel Sensors — a brand new course of to fabricate excessive volumes of miniaturized chemical fuel sensors that would probably be embedded in wearable merchandise for quite a lot of security purposes.

Stratio Inc. (San Francisco, California) $98,381
Low-cost Moveable Brief Wavelength Infrared Spectrometer (SWIR) — a feasibility research to advance analysis in SWIR expertise that may assist the expertise to develop into rising markets reminiscent of precision agriculture, evening 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 may allow real-time monitoring of first responders in environments the place GPS is just not an choice.

USEncryption (Orlando, Florida) $100,000
Establishing the Safety of Ciphers Designed Utilizing Statistical Physics Ideas to Allow Direct Computation on Encrypted Information — an method to allow computation on encrypted knowledge utilizing a brand new model of an encryption methodology referred to as a block cipher in addition to a patent-pending methodology to encrypt each the information 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 Vitality Environment friendly Manufacturing of Printed Circuitry — a venture to judge the printing and mixing parameters of a brand new nanocomposite materials to search 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
Revolutionary Emulsion Polymerization Manufacture of Twin-function, Nanoscale, Calibration Spheres Over the Vary of 100 to 400 nm Diameter — a venture to increase its skill 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 dimensions requirements.

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

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 units.

Multiscale Techniques (Worchester, Massachusetts) $400,000    
Contract-free Optical Metrology for Vitality-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-Techniques Probe for Skinny Movie Supplies Characterization — a hybrid metrology system that mixes the distinctive capabilities of atomic power microscopes (AFM) and four-point probing right into a single unit that expands the capabilities of current single tip AFMs into multipoint probing platforms to permit for quick, cost-effective and nondestructive characterization of skinny movie supplies and semiconductor units.

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 would vastly develop SWCNT use and practicality for purposes together with the separation of elements in mixtures.