Award Data

Low level meteorological data over the world’s oceans is hard to collect, due to the cost and difficulty of sensor emplacement. Crewed aircraft are deployed when major weather events arise, but between those major weather events, in-situ data sources are very limited. Uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) present a unique opportunity to inexpensively collect meteorological data from remote areas, but ...

In battlefield environments, the atmosphere is littered with aerosols from a variety of sources: dust from vehicles and foot traffic; smoke from firearms and explosives; and, potentially, plumes of weaponized aerosols. In order to improve situational awareness, it is critical to develop a real-time knowledge of the presence, type, and structure of aerosol plumes on the battlefield. Elastic LIDAR s ...

Tropical Cyclone meteorological data from the Atlantic main development region (MDR) is difficult to collect due to the remoteness of the location and difficulty of deploying manned aircraft to the region. Data collection is frequent upon development of a major hurricane but many tropical disturbances in the MDR leading up to hurricane development are of interest. Being able to collect meteorologi ...

Many municipalities in the United States have begun to use impermeability measurements to incentivize storm water retention as part of the architectural and landscaping design process. These measurements are performed through analysis of high-resolution aerial photography and updated on an annual or semi-annual basis. The practice of using high resolution aerial or even satellite photography is pr ...

The current Joint Service Lightweight Integrated Suit Technology (JSLIST) chemical protective ensemble for the US military is nearing the end of its mission life, requiring the development of new personal protective equipment (PPE) suits for all of the Armed Services. While new suit designs have addressed many design drawbacks of the JSLIST MOPP suits such as thermal stress and flexibility, they s ...

The recent COVID-19 world pandemic demonstrates most effectively the urgent need for near real-time detection of ambient airborne pathogens. It has been demonstrated that electrospray ionization, utilized in many mass spectrometers today, has the unique ability to capture bioaerosols non-destructively out of the air for subsequent interrogation. This proposal leverages on this electrospray capture ...

"The Aerielle SONAR UAS Phase II proposal is in response to Topic 9.4.01, “Unmanned Aircraft System: Rapid Response for Natural Disaster” and proposes to improve and further develop the “Aerielle” with a Humminbird underwater sonar imaging commonly used by emergency responders. The goal of the Aerielle SONAR UAS was to perform SONAR scanning of underwater structures for hazardous debris id ...

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are a relatively new class of materials that have extremely high porosity and provide chemical tailor ability that is particularly useful for gas and liquid sorption and catalytic applications. Some MOFs have been optimized for the decontamination of Chemical Warfare Agents (CWAs) and significantly outperform current activated-carbon technologies in this area; howev ...

LIDAR is a powerful tool for the measurement and characterization of aerosols in the atmosphere. In battlefield environments, a wide variety of aerosol constituents and plume types are present. Traditional LIDAR analysis methods aim to characterize plumes in well controlled environments with a minimum of atmospheric clutter. To extend the abilities of plume characterization and identification in c ...

The threat of organophosphate (OP) chemical warfare agents (CWA) to United States military personnel is a persistent problem due to the relative ease of manufacturing chemical threats compared to nuclear and biological agents. Human butyrylcholinesterase (HuBChE) has been identified as a probable bio-scavenger of OP CWAs that could be used to protect individuals that could be exposed to OP CWAs. T ...