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 ...

Current materials which are available to designers of hypersonic seeker windows are often difficult to manufacture and made in small quantities at significant cost due to the demanding conditions encountered by these materials during hypersonic flight. High temperatures, aerodynamic pressures, and dynamic loading due to maneuvering of hypersonic vehicles produce an extreme thermomechanical environ ...

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 ...

Carbon-Carbon (C-C) composites have a thermal protection systems (TPS) pedigree for next generation hypersonic flight systems due their retention of mechanical properties at temperatures exceeding 2,000°C. Continued research and development on C-C composites is required to increase the national capability, capacity, and speed of delivery for C-C composite materials. Innovative low-cost C-C compos ...

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 Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has a need to decrease the yield time and increase the through put of optical ceramic conformal windows. Optical manufacturing has been a rapidly growing field with advancements in all technology spectrums. High performance optical systems are needed in aerospace, defense, medical, and commercial components. Industry is requiring these components to be manufactured ...

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 ...

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 ...

Using Combustion Research’ Flowfield Module (FM) approach, the Phase I effort laid the groundwork for the Hypersonic Vehicle Flowfield Module (HVFM) for axisymmetric/two-dimensional powered hypersonic missiles. As with all our FM tools, HVFM has an Intelligent Automated Architecture (IAA) agent which controls all aspects of the high-fidelity simulation pipeline allowing for non-experts in comput ...