Award Data

American Energy Technologies Co. (a woman-owned small business concern of Arlington Heights, IL), will be joined by subcontractor Advanced Technology Laboratories of Lockheed Martin Corp. (St. Paul, MN) in order to develop and fully furnish functional prototypes of two anti-corrosion technologies with the goal to deploy them in a variety of MDA-owned equipment platforms. The first technology is a ...

There is a need for new types of IMUs, with better accuracy than the state of the art. Digital Optics Technologies (DOT) has been developing a Fast Light Optical Gyroscope (FLOG) that can improve the accuracy of rotation sensing by nearly six orders of magnitude. Alternatively, for a given accuracy need, the FLOG can be very small. DOT has also developed a Fast Light Optical Accelerometer (FLOAC ...

We propose the development of long wavelength infrared (LWIR) sensors based on HgCdTe in a novel noise-suppressing high temperature barrier (HTB) architecture, which combines the benefits of unipolar nBn and non-equilibrium, Auger-suppressing high operating temperature (HOT) structures. The proposed design is beneficial for controlling carrier conduction to minimize the number of majority and min ...

Absorber layers based on Type-II superlattices (T2SLs) composed of III-V compound semiconductors (e.g. GaSb and InAs) are a promising sensor technology for infrared imaging; however, dark currents and short carrier lifetimes in the Ga-containing T2SL are significant problems. It is presently suspected that the short carrier lifetimes and some dark current arise due to a native point defect, possi ...

Tracking and recognition of fast moving targets require fast, sensitive, uniform focal plane arrays (FPAs). However, high performance single-band FPAs are sometimes unable to discriminate a target from its background when they present similar infrared radiation at a given wavelength. This may occur even if the temperature of the objects is very different. In such a case, two-color FPAs offer an ad ...

Hydrogen isotopes have been shown to reduce the electrical effects of various semiconductor defects. Specifically, monoatomic hydrogen and deuterium passivate the electrical activity of defects such as dislocations in long-wavelength HgCdTe grown on Si. We propose a novel method of controlling the intake of hydrogen in HgCdTe IRFPAs by using the H2/He plasma afterglow formed by flowing plasma-gene ...

Fiber Materials Inc. (FMI) has developed and delivered carbon fiber reinforced silicon carbide (C-SiC) composite nozzles and thrust chambers for solid and liquid/gel fueled divert and attitude control systems (DACS) to Aerojet. The C-SiC material system has been validated with 3700 degrees F solid propellant. The proposed program will address identified barriers to transition of the material sys ...

Current state-of-the-art infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs) are based on HgCdTe material epitaxially grown on bulk CdZnTe substrates. The size of the IRFPAs is limited by the size of the available CdZnTe substrates and the thermal mismatch between CdZnTe and the Si readout circuit, which misaligns the photodiode array with respect to the circuit during heating and cooling cycles. Having HgCdTe ...

Current state-of-the-art infrared focal plane arrays are based on HgCdTe grown on bulk CdZnTe substrates. The use of Si-based substrates would eliminate a number of drawbacks related to the HgCdTe/CdZnTe system and permit larger formats. We have developed growth protocols that produce material with good crystal quality for such a highly mismatched heteroepitaxial system. Double crystal rocking c ...

Recent development of Antimonide-based Type-II superlattice infrared detectors has resulted in significant breakthroughs in terms of device performance as well as FPA imaging quality. Improvement in material quality and processing technique, as well as evolutionary modifications in device architecture have demonstrated the advantages of the material system over alternatives, and proven it as a via ...