Award Data

ABSTRACT: An ability to reduce the weight of cables has the potential to provide significant cost savings, reduce maintenance and improve reliability of satellites. The costs of developing and producing satellites are linearly proportional with the satellite"s weight, with each kilogram costing around $1 million when delivery-to-space costs are included. With global satellite launches expected to ...

ABSTRACT: The Department of Defense requires a reliable non-volatile radiation hardened memory for Space and Airborne platform applications. MGRAM, a form of graphene and magnetic memory, promises to satisfy these requirements and to provide a solution path to achieving low cost, high reliability solid state drives for personal computers and systems. MGRAM is based upon a nano scaled bar magnet w ...

ABSTRACT: Cavitation which leads to head falloff and feed system instabilities are a constant source of problems for the low net positive suction head (NPSH) pumps that are needed for advanced liquid rocket engines. Head falloff limits the pumps capability to deliver propellant at the required pressure and cavitation induced instabilities are a significant source of structural failures in rocket ...

AlN is an attractive material for power electronics device applications due to its wide bandgap and resulting high electric breakdown field. One of the major challenges that need to be addressed to achieve full utilization of AlN for power electronics applications is the development of a doping strategy for both donors and acceptors. Ion implantation is a particularly attractive approach since it ...

The negative-electron-affinity (NEA) photocathodes which produce polarized electrons are a vital component of electron accelerators such as that at DoE Jefferson Lab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Future systems, such as the International Linear Collider (ILC), will require a polarized electron beam intensity at least 20 times greater than produced by strained GaAs, which is us ...

We are developing a subsurface monitoring technique for providing spatially resolved profiles of soil moisture in the vadose zone that can be easily deployed using either cone penetration testing (CPT) technology, conventional drilling, or in some applications, direct burial. The technology has application to a wide variety of earth and environmental science and infrastructure monitoring challenge ...

ABSTRACT: SIFT, with subject matter expertise from the UAS pilots and sensor operators (SOs) at UAV Associates and in sensor processing capabilities from Ball Aerospace, will develop FLA2SH (Flexible Levels of Adaptable Autonomy for Sensor Handling) to extend and integrate with AFRL"s successful Flexible Levels of Execution-Interface Technologies (FLEX-IT) architecture for multi-modal delegation ...

Architecture Technology Corporation (ATCorp) proposes the Cloud-based Efficient Data Analysis and Reduction (CEDAR) system, a novel hardware and software solution to efficiently increase and manage shared compute resources located within an autonomous vehicle to run mission-specific software that analyzes, combines, and filters sensor data in real-time or near real-time according to changing needs ...

ABSTRACT: Current Air Force mission planning systems require that users manually enter flight paths. For the emerging class of airborne communications platforms this is sub-optimal. The mission of these platforms is to extend communications ranges and enable enhanced (particularly IP-based) connectivity for other mission elements. This calls for a new type of planning system. Rather than having e ...

ABSTRACT: IP-based tactical networks which are being deployed increasingly must possess the capability to gracefully shed mission functions in accordance with the intent of the commander when network congestion occurs. Such congestion events are expected to be prevalent in tactical wireless networks because of two major factors: (1) the increasing use of bandwidth-hungry applications, such as ful ...