Award Data

Objectives and Intellectual Merit: The infrastructure of modern civilization is a set of complex systems1 that dynamically interact across multiple layers of abstraction. Researchers from many disciplines2 are designing analytical tools for predicting the global and local behaviors of these complicated, multi-layer networks. Easily usable, available (open source) and inter-operated tools are neede ...

Terrorist use of radioactive nuclear materials via nuclear and/or radiological dispersion devices (dirty bombs) is a serious threat. Therefore, it is critical to detect the proliferation of nuclear material. Critical challenges facing this objective include: (a) high sensitivity detection of signature emissions (e.g., gamma rays) from common radioactive isotopes behind shielding, and (b) cost-effe ...

For effective protection against radiated threats, it is important to understand not only the physics of the threats, but also to quantify the effects they have on mission-critical electrical systems. Radiated vulnerability and susceptibility testing requires delivery of high peak power and peak electric fields to distant targets. The most practical solution to simulate such environments on large ...

This program will demonstrate how additive manufacturing technologies can be used with reactive and high energy materials to create rapid and flexible fabrication of payload and munitions. Our primary approach to this problem will be to use powder bed binder printing techniques to print reactive structures. The anticipated feedstock will consist of composite particles containing all reactant spe ...

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has been supporting research of energetic materials and incendiaries as payloads for weapons to defeat targets containing chemical and biological agents. Several universities and Navy labs have been involved in this research, and have narrowed down on a few material formulations that are efficient biocides. These formulations contain a chemical ingredient ...

While aluminum casing materials provide some enhanced performance and thermal loading to explosive ordinance, their overall effectiveness is highly limited by incomplete combustion and long residence times. In order to reduce these problems, the casing material must be designed to facilitate rapid fragmentation through either specialized casing geometries or greatly refined initial particle sizes. ...

The goal of this workis to establish a radiation-aware capability in a commercial EDA design flow that will enable first-pass success in radiation resiliency for DoD ASIC designs in much the same way that existing EDA design suites ensure first pass functionality and performance success of complex ASICs destined for commercial applications.Such an integrated capability does not presently exist.The ...

In a pandemic or exposure to weaponized Marburg virus the morbidity, mortality and social unrest that will ensue before vaccines orMilitary operating on foreign soil as well as to the population of the US Homeland. Practically all threat agents of biological origin (except forcertain non-proteinaceous toxins, typically produced by marine organisms and fungi) have their structure and vital function ...

On this effort Toyon Research Corp. and The Pennsylvania State University are developing deep learning-based algorithms for object recognition and new class discovery in look-down infrared (IR) imagery. Our approach involves the development of a hybrid classifier that exploits both transfer learning and semi-supervised paradigms in order to maintain good generalization accuracy, especially when li ...

The modern warfighter faces the constant threat of endemic infections, multi-drug resistant bacteria and Biological Warfare Agents. In order to provide accurate front-line treatment that will curtail the overuse of antibiotics, a rapid and robust molecula