Award Data

Today''s military equipment has become increasingly reliant on powerful and sophisticated electronic components that require a wide range of batteries providing: high energy and power per unit mass and volume, operation in a wide range of temperatures, long storage life, and safety. Hence, the Army has migrated to the use of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries with significantly reduced weight as compa ...

U.S. Navy submarine and submersible vessels incorporate numerous unique and high performance structural components. To meet their challenging mission requirements, these components must meet substantial performance requirements including resistance to considerable depth pressure, seawater corrosion and other unique U.S. Navy performance requirements. One such structural component is the watertight ...

In recent years, the need for highly reliable, durable and non-intrusive systems for monitoring the health condition of naval structures becomes more and more recognized. Such Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems should be able to detect failures in their early stages so that the repairs would be less expensive or, even better, it should be able to predict the critical conditions so that pre ...

Multi-channel array manifolds are required for wideband AESA applications. In modern solid-state AESA arrays, MMIC-based T/R modules generally utilize digitally-controlled phased shifters to steer the beam on transmit and receive. The given phase value is only accurate at one frequency, and so for wide bandwidths of several hundred MHz (at X-band for example), the beam does not get formed properly ...

Key obstacles to extending OFDM to wireless links and networks at high-frequencies and dynamic channels are inherent low performance to Doppler and power amplifiers operation with high back-off. Other significant obstacles are multipath and impulsive noise. PEARL-OFDM combines a layered architecture with technologies that mitigate such obstacles and enable full-range rates that maximizes connectiv ...

The proposed advanced, compact, lightweight turbine-pump (ACLTP) assembly takes advantage of the available pressure in the overboard RO seawater stream via hydraulic Turbine expansion which provides additional boost and pressurization up to the target 1,200 psid at the RO module. The ACLTP boost is added to the inboard seawater stream being discharged from the low pressure electric motor driven (m ...

Thermopile arrays manufactured using integrated process compatible materials and micro-machining will provide high performance with low manufacturing cost. Black Forest Engineering (BFE) teamed with Case Western Reserve University will design thermopiles using silicon based semiconductors and compare performance. Low cost thermopiles, differentially coupled with advanced BFE CMOS readout, will pr ...

The Dual Band Compact Hyperspectral Imager (DBCHI) delivers high performance, co-registered, simultaneous MWIR & LWIR hyperspectral data from a compact, man-portable sensor. The DBCHI sensor currently employs a dual band focal plane array (FPA) designed to operate in a broadband flux environment. The read out integrated circuit (ROIC) of this FPA uses a direct injection input circuit and is not op ...

Black Forest Engineering has developed readout integrated circuit (ROIC) methods that provide large charge integration capability in a small pixel pitch. A small pixel pitch allows high image resolution and large image formats with significant reduction in optics size and weight. The large charge capability results from in-pixel dark current pedestal subtraction and switched capacitor signal integ ...

The design and development of piezocrystal sonar transducers is a challenging multidisciplinary and technological effort that spans many fields and skill sets. We look to extend and improve our transducer assembly technologies to reduce cost and implementation time for sonar technology transition and in particular our methods for Active-Passive single crystal ring development and fiber glass wrapp ...