Award Data

With the advent of more efficient hydrogen reforming systems, a practical hydrogen source has lead to investigations on the operating characteristics of diesel (JP-8) engines with a hydrogen/syngas additive. Several sources have reported that higher thermal efficiencies and lower pollution occur when hydrogen is added to the fuel stream. The objective of this proposal is to experimentally quanti ...

Active standoff detection of chemical and biological agents with lasers has proven to be very effective. Specific targets include chemical vapors, chemical aerosols, and biological particles. Most notably, the FAL (Frequency Agile Laser) sensor developed by ECBC (Edgewood Chemical Biological Center) has shown capability to detect all of these targets with a single device. Also, optical technique ...

Hostile conflicts leave behind millions of armed landmines in developing countries throughout the globe. Humanitarian demining is hazardous and labor intensive. A promising development in landmine detection is using small, olfactory sensitive animals trained to act as biosensor detectors. But current methods require skilled trainers following strict protocols, and this extensive time and effor ...

A plan is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of a radio-frequency Hayes-Corron (H-C) chaos-based communication system employing an optimal spread-spectrum chaotic communication theory to achieve superior low-power, low-probability of interception, multiple-user access, and portability goals. By integrating three concepts: 1) chaotic spreading sequence generation, 2) Hayes en ...

Robotic Research in partnership with Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) proposes to develop the Mobility Optimization via Enhanced Robotic Sensing (MOVERS) system for any two-wheeled, four-wheeled or tracked robotic platform to autonomously perform hazardous terrain detection and classification and adjust its driving control strategy to safely negotiate hazardous terrain. Our goal is to develop auto ...

Very compact, robust, and low cost multi wavelengths burst lasers for standoff CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive) detection and identification are proposed. Although a single focused laser pulse on target can do the detection, the probability of hitting the right contaminated spot is low. Therefore, scanning a laser pulse train will cover a larger suspected contamin ...

The project will remove a key difficulty that currently hampers many existing methods for computing unsteady electromagnetic waves in unbounded regions. The accuracy and/or stability of the simulations may deteriorate over long times due to the treatment of the outer boundaries via artificial boundary conditions. We propose to develop a universal algorithm and software that will correct this probl ...

The objective of this research is to develop materials that may replace the current generation of visible smoke formulations used by the U.S. military. In particular the materials must produce low flame so that they do present a fire hazard, have relatively low toxicity, and are efficient. The efficiency is defined in a figure of merit that combines fill factor, yield factor, extinction coeffici ...

A particle-systems approach is proposed for rendering obscurants in tactical missile scene generation. Obscurants are currently rendered using arrays of voxels, small homogeneous cubes containing concentration and temperature data. Voxels have been highly successful but they require huge data files and are very slow to render. The particle systems would not replace voxels for high-fidelity applica ...

A technique that enables new methods of obscurant modeling with faster rendering while maintaining or improving physical fidelity is proposed. the proposed technique not only exhibits the qualities of voxel based obscurants, but matches real-world data as well. The main objective from Phase I efforts will be a specification for the technique of generating physically correct and efficient obscuran ...