Award Data

In 2001 the US EPA lowered the maximum contaminant level for arsenic in drinking water from 50 ppb to 10 ppb. This change is expected to impact 10 percent of the nation's drinking water systems; the vast majority of those impacted are small, rural water suppliers. New approaches, particularly simple, adsorption-based technologies are needed to provide cost effective treatment options for small wat ...

The goal of this Phase II SBIR is to investigate using an electronic beam steering device in place of a gimbaled mirror to produce multiple beams for satellite communication links. The two principle thrusts associated with this goal are maturation of the Optical Phased Array (OPA) component technology and specification of component/terminal requirements for implementation in a multi-access laserc ...

The Air Force requires a new cost effective methods of deploying a test relay capability over long ranges. To meet this need Carolina Unmanned Vehicles, Inc. will develop the Helikite Elevated Platform - test Relay (HEP-TR), consisting of a small tethered blimp mounted in a special Carrier that allows operation by only two people. It can be towed by a HMMWV or other small vehicle. Other HEP-TR ...

This project is developing a real-time software "health monitoring" system for high-powered laser systems. By "health monitoring", we are referring to a system that can independently monitor the status of the laser over time, alerting operators to diminished performance and preventing catastrophic failure. A variety of different high power lasers are under development, including the Airborne Laser ...

CleverSet proposes to apply the variable-resolution Bayesian technology developed in Phase I to distributed counterspace situation awareness. Variable-resolution modeling provides the proven effectiveness of Bayesian data fusion in an efficient, scalable, distributed architecture. A recent breakthrough, relational Bayesian networks, provides an underlying entity-relationship data model, providin ...

The objectives of this proposed Phase II project are to develop the appropriate optics for an 8 wavelength CWDM system and demonstrate both the multiplexed data link and the integration of the link with an aircraft actuator. Fly-by-light (FBL) systems have been the subject of research for many years; however, there are still several hurdles to overcome before FBL systems can provide the next adva ...

It has long been known that optical phased array (OPA) beam steering can be performed by liquid crystal devices, yet available liquid crystals are either too slow for many applications (1 ms - 100's of milliseconds) or they are incapable of producing the necessary range of analog phase modulation. Developments in a new class of ferroelectric liquid crystals (FLCs) during the last couple of years h ...

Low-power Hall thrusters offer potentially important advantages for certain military applications but issues of lifetime and efficiency degradation at lower powers are issues hindering its utilization. A factor impacting efficiency is that the state-of-the-art techniques for electron generation used for neutralization (such as hollow cathodes operating on the same propellant as the thruster) do n ...

Advances in fabrication technology have made it possible to prodce features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. As such a new class of optical devices based on submicron periodic structures has emerged and is referred to as photonic crystals (PhC) or photonic band gap devices (PBGs). Preliminary research indicates that these devices will be capable of performing a wide variety of functi ...

The main objective of this proposal is to provide a modeling, assimilation, forecasting, and data analysis platform to support the Communication / Navigation Outage Forecasting System (C/NOFS) mission of the AFRL. The system will combine several components developed by Fusion Numerics Inc. along with new specialized modules. The goal of the C/NOFS mission is to understand the physics of the ion ...