Award Data

Terrorist use of radioactive nuclear materials via nuclear and/or radiological dispersion devices (dirty bombs) is a serious threat. Therefore, it is crucial to detect proliferation of nuclear material. Critical challenges include: (a) high sensitivity detection of signature emissions from radioactive isotopes, and (b) cost-effectiveness for deployment of sensor networks across large storage facil ...

Current scene projection hardware is challenged to simultaneously meet the requirements for high peak temperature (> 2000K), high resolution (> 1Kx1K), response time < 1 ms, cryogenic and temporally uniform photon flux. MEMS, Resistor arrays, liquid crystals, and photonic crystals all suffer in one or more areas. MEMS suffer from flicker and low dynamic range. Resistor arrays suffer from low frame ...

Current fielded sensor protection is limited to fixed wavelength filters. Broadband filters designed to circumvent multi-wavelength laser threats are plagued by low transmittance, which degrades the sensitivity and performance of the sensor. Future warfighter threats include frequency agile lasers and thus have the potential of defeating fixed filters. Self-activating (passive) devices where prote ...

The focus of this STTR program is the development and maturation of a novel, room-temperature process to fabricate multi-layer metal-polymer (including PVDF and other smart materials) composites in an additive approach. This overcomes the limitation arising from the large temperature difference between metal and polymer manufacturing processes, and presents a new technology for additive manufactur ...

Oceanit proposes to first is to use radiative transfer techniques pioneered for astrophysics, instead of Monte Carlo simulation. In particular, we used a variant of the Bohm-Vitense method, which expresses the solution as a weighted sum of basis functions, allowing us to convert the radiative transfer equation into a set of linear equations that we can solve with standard linear algebra methods. S ...

The development of compact and telescope-deployable laser sources emitting in the yellow portion of the visible spectrum is critical for the advancement of DoD-relevant adaptive optics capabilities. The objective of this project is to continue the development of novel laser architectures based on optically-pumped substrate-transferred epitaxial gain media capable of efficient thermal management an ...

In this effort, tOSC and the University of New Mexico COSMIAC (Configurable Space Microsystems Innovation Applications Center) will combine to generate a Target-in-the-Loop (TIL) system concept that can simultaneously measure the strength of atmospheric turbulence and scintillation, as well as the refractivity occurring at the measurement time. For this system concept, we will leverage existing tO ...

Adaptive Optics allow ground-based astronomical observatories to overcome atmospheric distortion limited observation by using natural and artificial guide stars to measure the distortion. Sodium-layer guide stars provide near all-sky coverage for high resolution astronomy. Over the last 20 years, Optically Pumped Semiconductor Laser (OPSL), also referred to as Vertically Extended Cavity Surface Em ...

Currently fielded multi-beam CDL systems have been developed in an ad-hoc manner consisting of a collection of poorly integrated off the shelf technologies where controllers, radios, routers, firewalls, encryptors, and antennas are bolted together to reduce time to field. Proprietary API’s, electrical interfaces, and hardware interfaces impede the success of the approach and result in a sub ...

High-pressure turbulent combustion occurs in many combustion devices critical to the Air Force. Notwithstanding significant progress in computational modeling of these devices; several challenges have remained. A fundamental challenge is identification of reaction pathways and reactions in small molecule foundational chemical kinetics requiring improvements under these high-pressure turbulent cond ...