Award Data

Historically, the monitoring and detection of biological threats has been carried out via the deployment of high sensitivity / high complexity monitoring nodes to insure high probability of detection and low false alarm rate. Unfortunately, this detection strategy has inherent limits with respect to coverage and response due to its high deployment/support costs, mandating a new approach to environ ...

BakerRisk proposes to use their extensive experience with shock testing, pressure transducers, and accelerometers, along with expertise in animal testing and the study of traumatic brain injury provided by their collaborator, Dr. David Cook, to produce a biomechanical surrogate of a rat. This device will stand in for the animal specimen in a variety of laboratory and in the field tests, recording ...

Through the proposed STTR program, NanoSonic and Virginia Tech will fabricate flexible perovskite solar modules (12 x 12) that are capable of providing conversion efficiencies greater than 20% under AM 1.5G standard solar spectrum, and which demonstrate stability against temperatures up to 50C and relative humidity up to 80%. The photovoltaic market is dominated by crystalline silicon solar panel ...

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 ...

Nalas Engineering and Johns Hopkins University collaborated in a Phase I STTR program to study reactive mixtures of HI3O8 and nanocomposite fuels previously developed by the Weihs Group. These fuel/oxidizer mixtures are uniquely able to simultaneously produce heat and biocidal iodine gas, a combination designed to destroy biological weapons. The team at Nalas focused on evaluating conditions for p ...

The proposed effort will investigate several nanophotonic structures to engineer the phase and amplitude of an incident optical beam to form a protective surface layer. Dielectric metasurfaces are used to engineer the optical properties of a protective layer on a sub-wavelength scale. Evaluations will be performed on the interactions of the metasurfaces with high energy lasers to form a basis ...

Explosive & chem-bio sensors are necessary to provide situational awareness and early warning against threat events from homemade explosives and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), to protect personnel and assets in missions ranging from integrated-base defense to forward operating bases and reconnaissance. The Department of Defense is interested in reducing costs, labor, and footprint while enhanc ...

Illicit drug trafficking has increasingly been used to fund terrorist groups since the end of the Cold War. As illicit drugs increasingly finance terrorism, soldiers in the U.S. Army are increasingly playing an active role in identifying these drugs in difficult and demanding environments. Unfortunately, these devices have many shortcomings, such as being too expensive, bulky and heavy, being non- ...

Solid oxide fuel cells have long suffered from degradation due to impurities in the fuel and complexities associated with dissimilar materials and high operating temperatures.This degradation lowers the usable cell power output and requires ancillary equipment for fuel sulfur removal and reformation.A unique microstructure for the tubular anode will be produced using a novel freeze-casting techniq ...

To Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction (CWMD), DTRA must analyze data from numerous sources about a diverse set of technologies and activities. The extreme diversity in content and the volume of DTRAs data combine to produce one of the most challenging analysis problems in the government. The CWMD mission therefore requires deep analysis - an in-depth understanding of all available data and correl ...