Award Data

The harsh environment posed by hypersonic flight makes antenna design challenging due to extreme temperature exposure coupled with often competing mechanical/aero and RF performance requirements. FIRST RF proposes an advancement to its numerous conformal antenna technologies utilizing additive manufacturing of dielectric materials. This approach will decouple the competing RF and mechanical requir ...

Estes Energetics and Battelle Memorial Institute will apply a fast, affordable manufacturing technology—proven to Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 and Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) 4—that manufactures a layer of carbon-carbon directly on composite structures without requiring use of an autoclave or densification process holds, resulting in reduced manufacturing time while improving com ...

Thermal batteries are single-discharge reserve batteries that provide a very long shelf life, minimal self-discharge, wide storage temperature range, fast activation under sudden power demand, and also a wide range of temperature operating conditions. 32Upon activation, thermal batteries are heated with an internal pyrotechnic heat charge above the melting temperature of the molten salt electrolyt ...

Diode-pumped alkali lasers (DPALs) have inherently high optical-to-optical efficiency and thus the potential to reach megawatt-class average power lasers with near-diffraction limited beam quality. However, as DPALs scale up in power, a plasma is formed in the gain medium, resulting in lower efficiency and increased gas heating. This ultimately leads to a degradation in laser beam quality and a po ...

Numerica proposes to leverage extensive expertise in advanced battle management algorithms, advanced guidance and control algorithms, hypersonic defense, and high-g missile threat modelling to develop a physics-based, real-time prototype battle management and advanced guidance algorithm that produces optimal launch scheduling and optimal guidance for mid-trajectory interception of hypersonic threa ...

The MDA has identified a need for decreasing the time required for simulations and rendering by orders of magnitude. To address this need, Stellar Science and the University of New Mexico (UNM) propose the development and use of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which have been shown to reduce execution times dramatically while still maintaining small errors compared to traditional physics ...

An AI/ML-enabled simulation optimization tool can exploit existing simulation models to streamline the scenario planning and analysis process. Our Phase II project will focus on using AI/ML techniques and simulation optimization to solve the problem of generating a minimal collection of test scenarios, using the minimum number of shared scenario components that meets a required set of test objecti ...

OptTek will apply our novel mapping, adaptive sampling, and optimization capabilities to help MDA better understand the operational effectiveness of the MDS under multi-threat missile raids. While digital simulations provide faster feedback on missile defense performance than a ground test, the computational costs are still too high to handle the combinatorial explosion of parameter combinations a ...

Quality control tools for compound semiconductor operations are desired to provide cost and time savings. 8D Photonics (www.8Dphotonics.com) has been providing the infrared community with the capability to perform cryogenic wafer mapping of minority carrier lifetime and photoluminescence spectra since its inception in 2016. The 8D IR Pioneer wafer mapping system has already demonstrated cooling an ...

Under the Phase I effort, NAVSYS developed a design for an alternative navigation (ALTNAV) external aiding solution that utilizes signals of opportunity (SoOP) from a combination of commercial and military space systems leveraging NAVSYS PNT as a Service (PNTaaS) technology developed under contract to DARPA, Air Force, and Navy customers. Under the Phase II effort, we propose to build and test a P ...