Award Data

In an Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) scenario, the ability for the rescuers to maintain an accurate and comprehensive situational awareness is critical to allow them to maximize their effectiveness in a chaotic and dangerous environment. Timeliness is, of course, paramount to saving lives, and miscommunications lead to potentially unnecessary deaths. 21st Century Systems Incorporated is pleased to ...

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.

In composites, not only can properties vary with load direction, fiber based composites also offer the unique ability to tailor material properties locally. Localized matrix or fiber architecture changes can meet local mechanical, electrical, or thermal loads within a component or vehicle, without weight penalty or resort to additional external structures. In Phase I, the team used 3TEX 3-D wea ...

Strength and durability of commonly used bonded and bolted composite-to-composite and composite-to-metal structural joints suffer from sharp geometry variations, mismatch of elastic moduli, Poisson’s ratios, coefficients of thermal expansion and thermal conductivity of the adherends, altogether causing high stress concentration and premature joint failure. The proposed work is focused on develop ...

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 ...

The foundation of any counterspace capability is space/counterspace situation awareness. Existing AFRL/VS funded efforts have established a foundation for robust, multi-level situation awareness through multi-source, multi-level, data fusion. However, situation awareness is only useful to the extent that it informs response to threats, whether natural or man-made. AFRL/VS Space Awareness & Respons ...

Over the past few decades, computational electromagnetics (CEM) researchers have been making steady progress towards the development of efficient algorithms, such as the Method of Moments (MoM), for simulating scattering from electrically large targets. Unfortunately, such techniques have proved too computationally demanding because they require the solution of an often very large and dense matri ...

Photonic crystals have led the way for miniaturizing application specific optical integrated circuit (ASOIC) to a scale comparable to the wavelength of light which in turn made them a good candidate for next generation high-density optical systems and interconnects. Polymer based Photonic Crystal structures have potential applications in optical integrated circuits, optoelectronics, optical switch ...

Optically interconnected systems provide a number of additional benefits. For example, by removing metallic traces, many signal integrity issues are also eliminated as the parasitic capacitance and inductance associated with high-speed lines are removed, which further improves systems performance. Additionally, such systems typically require less power and experience less leakage, or wasted power ...

Recycling of composites manufacturing scrap and end-of-life waste is expected to become more important as the use of composite materials expands into different applications. Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) wastes especially are a potentially valuable source of recycled carbon fibers if an economic and environmentally friendly technology for recycling these fibers can be developed. The Pha ...