Award Data

Miniaturized smart munitions are seeing increasing use across all branches of the Department of Defense (DoD) in order to meet the ever evolving mission needs for the U.S. warfighter. These smart micromuntions have been enabled by advances in capabilities and miniaturization of critical microelectonic and microelectromechanical systems such as sensor, navigational, communications, and triggering ...

ABSTRACT: Adversarial installations, such as those housing the means for nuclear weapons production, are increasingly being constructed in heavily fortified locations and often using ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) as the construction material. As such, the U.S. Air Force has considerable interest in further developments of ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) to maintain an advantage o ...

ABSTRACT: Feature extraction and target recognition suffer from a lack of a reliable model for both exploitable target features and the electromagnetic signature they possess. Signature data are often hard to interpret and invert to recover the target robustly. Bayesian learning approaches to statistical pattern recognition are based on the use of training sets of inputs and outputs, a data mode ...

ABSTRACT: Current and projected limitations on the maximum power from a high power single mode fiber laser amplifier impose architectural limitations on a high power phased array laser weapon system. Prior studies strongly indicate that when faced with this limitation the optimal approach is (to borrow the term for Paul McManamon) a Phased Array of Phased Arrays (PAPA) geometry wherein large(r) ...

ABSTRACT: We propose to develop extremely compact and rugged laser systems for emerging cold-atom-based sensors of time, gravity, and inertial forces. This phase II will provide complete and disruptive cold-atom laser / electro-optic control systems. We will design and build distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) laser diodes with 400 mW output power. We will incorporate these lasers into very com ...

ABSTRACT: The ionosphere has significant effects on DoD radio systems. The Air Force needs electric field measurements in order to nowcast and forecast ionospheric behavior. SBIR Topic AF112-083"Electric Field Instrument for Cube- or Nano-sized Satellites"called for the development of"a cubesat- or nanosat-scale Direct Current Electrical Field instrument for measuring high precision electric fiel ...

ABSTRACT: Air and space gimbaled Infrared, multi-spectral, and hyperspectral sensor systems require cryogenic cooling to operate. Current cryogenic systems are inefficient, costly, subject to vibrations, are typically the high-maintenance portion of a sensor system, and take up a considerable amount of size, weight and power (SWaP) onboard air and space platforms. Current Cryocooler technology us ...

ABSTRACT: The surfaces of rocket engines are exposed to high pressure combustion products at temperatures up to 6000°F. Regenerative cooling can cause coke to form on the heat exchanger surfaces and the intention to reuse engines creates the potential for excessive coke accumulation, reduced cooling efficiency, and eventual engine failure. Therefore, there is a need to develop a method to char ...

ABSTRACT: This SBIR Phase I project is targeted at the development of a novel ultracapacitor using ionic liquid electrolytes. Commercially available ultracapacitors exhibit high power density, in excess of 6000 Wh/kg, but relatively low energy density of under 10 Wh/kg. Boulder Ionics proposes to develop a ultracapacitor with an energy density of over 30 Wh/kg through the use of ionic liquid elec ...

ABSTRACT: As airborne sensors become more prolific and sophisticated, the amount of data they produce overwhelms the current ability to offload that data based on the meager performance of ground station terminals. A high gain antenna supporting Ka-Band sensor data offload and Command and Control Uplink is required. Gimbaled reflectors are the standard choice, but their design requires very so ...