SBIR-STTR Award

The DoD is faced with a large and growing inventory of surplus and obsolete propellants, currently in excess of 75,000 short tons. Environmental restrictions are significantly increasing incineration costs, with prohibition a potential occurrence. A need exists to develop an environmentally acceptable means of disposal. High temperature industrial processes offer one such opportunity. TPL is active in the demilitarization of explosives and propellants for both commercial and military applications. Concurrently, TPL is developing industrial processes which employ propellants as a fast release, gas source. This expertise provides the capability to develop an industrial process use for surplus propellants. Potential industrial processes will be identified and requirements compiled. Related end use properties of surplus propellants will be determined and matched with possible applications. Critical issues regarding the specific end use will be defined. Feasibility experiments to evaluate these issues will be pperformed. Alternate uses will be evaluated. Phase II recommendations will be formulated.

Current Geographic Information Systems (GIS's) offer at best very limited statistical data analysis and modeling capabilities. S-PLUS is a modern object-oriented language and system for graphical data analysis and statistical modeling. The innovation consists of integrating S-PLUS with GIS systems, so as to provide broad statistical analysis and modeling tools to GIS users. During Phase I our goal was to integrate S-PLUS with the GRASS GIS. We met our research objectives fully by completing an integrated S-GRASS prototype. Our prototype work establishes the feasibility of producing viable commercial products by integrating S-PLUS with GIS's. In Phase II, we shall focus our research on developing a robust interface to the leading public GIS (GRASS) as well as the leading commercial GIS (ARC/INFO). In support of this research objective, we will develop a Paradigm View Controller for data transport, an object oriented method for External Objects, concurrent S-PLUS which functions as a server analytic engine, and a user friendly graphical interface.