Award Data

Nanofiber nonwoven spunbonded materials technology is adapted for use in a personnel lowering device. The resulting device will be simple, easy to use, and relatively low cost.

An electronically controlled Variable Transmittance Visor (VTV) will permit a pilot to use a Helmet Mounted Display (HMD) system at maximum effectiveness in all lighting conditions without having to add or remove fixed-tint visors. This project will investigate the material and process advancements necessary to adapt AlphaMicron's patented VALiD™ guest-host liquid crystal technology and its pat ...

To support its use of MEMS sensors for vehicle health monitoring, the Air Force seeks to couple the harvesting of ambient energy sources with a micro energy storage device. Microbatteries have demonstrated their viability as a high density power source, but their short operating life limits their usefulness. To extend the operating life of microbatteries, ambient energy sources can be used to co ...

Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) for Combat Identification (CID) represents one of the most demanding disciplines in sensor technology facing the United States Air Force today. Central to this process is the development of validated synthetic. Unfortunately, the synthetic database generation process is hampered by uncertainty. Under a previous program, Analytic Designs, Incorporated developed ...

The first critical step in welding or brazing is cleaning to remove surface contamination. The Air Force has a need for an environmentally cleaning method that has no waste stream, minimal requirements of personal safety protection, and does not impact component integrity. The Arc Scrubber is an emerging non-chemical cleaning technology that utilizes and electrical arc to remove surface contamin ...

Applied Optimization, Inc., in working with EWI, Inc. and Boeing Phantom Works, proposes to demonstrate feasibility of using friction stir welding [FSW] for the manufacturing of large Al 7050-T7451 preforms in four steps as follows. In the first step, representative preform will be generated from the finish shape of a large load-bearing airframe component of current interest to the USAF. The prefo ...

The current state-of-the-art for providing electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding is to use a polymer coating that has been loaded with up to 87% silver or another metal filler. This approach is both expensive and heavy. Under this Phase I SBIR program, Applied Sciences, Inc., will incorporate regular and metal-coated carbon nanofibers (CNF) into an appropriate polymer matrix to produce a ...

This effort is concerned with improving aircraft battle damage collection through systematic collection and documentation of battle damage sustained by aircraft. Accurate damage collection is an integral part of aircraft survivability, since much can be learned through its examination and exploitation. Presently, damage geometry and location is typically performed by physical measurements made w ...

The Air Force is interested in substantially improving the productivity of their unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) radar systems to provide all environment detection of targets as well as detection and tracking of air and ground threats. SAR/GMTI radar systems deployed on mini-UAVs are expected to be very effective at covering large areas of the battlefield, providing persistent, continuous ISR and se ...

The goal of signature prediction is to provide electromagnetics modeling to support detection and identification technologies for a wide range of target configurations and sensor characteristics. Signature prediction technologies have been extensively developed by AFRL, leading to a suite of integrated codes used for generating radar signatures of both air and ground targets. An important input ...