Award Data

Current deployable solar array systems are based on designs that have been in existence for more than 30 years.  In general, these heritage designs can be divided into two classes: 1) hinged-panel arrays, which are mechanically simple but mass inefficient, and 2) tensioned-membrane arrays, which are mechanically complex but mass efficient.  Arguably, no deployable solar array designs exist that ...

Producing components that satisfy all of the BMDS space and interceptor environment specs traditionally has been not only costly but also untimely. One of the most difficult design constraints is making the components unaffected by the radiation environments of space. We propose to develop and demonstrate a radiation hardened ASIM3 in the IBM 9FLP process. This will be accomplished using the St ...

Advanced Insider Threat Detection and Response is a breakthrough game changing analysis and response capability addressing integrated attacks at a fusion level 3 (identity, path, and intent).  Previous efforts including the Phase 1 demonstrated that high level abstraction of network and host data is not only possible, but measureable and verifiable.  The Phase 1 prototype defines and detects cou ...

Military operations in urban warfare provide an added emphasis to effectively detect, track, and ID ground targets in challenging environments.  Given the high dynamic nature of ground targets and the ambiguity that may result from closely spaced targets, incorporation of feature data from sensors such as hyperpsectral imagery (HSI) cameras provides a means to disambiguate the tracking of these t ...

Almost all of America¿s energy needs are supplied by the combustion of fossil fuels, and a great amount of anthropogenic CO2 is a byproduct of this process. The DOE has expressed a need for the development of CO2 instrumentation that can be deployed on small balloons and other robotic platforms and can achieve 1 ppm accuracy for a temporal resolution less than 30 seconds. This project will desi ...

Although the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process for the production of liquid fuels from coal, natural gas, and biomass is run on a commercial scale in both South Africa and Malaysia, several challenges remain, in particular, the need to supply a clean, essentially-contaminant-free synthesis gas feed stream. This project will develop a low-cost, high-capacity sorbent that can remove trace contaminants à ...

Acrylonitrile is an important chemical intermediate used to produce acrylic fibers, synthetic rubber, and other polymers. Current catalysts for the production of acrylonitrile operate at high temperatures, making the processes energy intensive, and generate large quantities of unwanted byproducts, including carbon dioxide and hydrogen cyanide (HCN). This project will investigate several new cata ...

Refineries in the U.S. are processing increasingly heavy sour crudes that contain metals, sulfur, and high molecular weight aromatic hydrocarbons. Many sour crudes originate in the Western Hemisphere, including heavy crudes from Venezuela, southern California, and the enormous quantities of oil sands in Canada. Processing and upgrading these heavy feedstocks requires considerable quantities of h ...

The National Security Space Office has identified low cost 5 m aperture RF spacecraft payloads as a transformational space technology. The Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office is developing a "common aperture" RF system architecture which would enable $20M class RF payloads meeting a variety of ORS mission requirements. Two critical elements of this architecture are correspondingly low cost ...

The cost of electricity for small wind turbines is too high, and the installation process is too cumbersome, to achieve the widespread deployment goals of industry stakeholders. Guyed towers, which are traditionally the least expensive to erect, represent one approach to cost savings, but these systems have a larger footprint, require more maintenance, and are less visually appealing than the mon ...