Award Data

Practical use of a RFC for solar powered winged aircraft and lighter-than-air craft has been limited due to weight constraints and the paucity of test data from and practical experience with closed loop RFC hardware. The lightweight cells and endplates developed in Phase I of this program will be applied to the practical implementation of a closed-loop regenerative fuel cell. This RFC will build ...

The goal of this collaborative effort between InsituTec Inc. (NC), TRS Technologies Inc. (Pa) and Center for Precision Metrology at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC is to demonstrate the closed loop control of a high-speed, long-range rotational stage. This proposal addresses design, manufacture and testing of a high-bandwidth steering-mirror employing a monolithic mirror-flexure stru ...

The goal of this program is to develop manufacturing technologies/methods that will allow for the fabrication of advanced regenerators made from erbium-based, intermetallic compounds for application in space-based cryocoolers. These regenerators, when used as a replacement for Pb-powder regenerators, will result in an increase in efficiency of cryocoolers by a factor of 3-4. When used as a repla ...

A conterflow heat exchanger operating between 6 and 70 K will be fabricated to transfer approximately 70 W between counterflowing streams of helium with an effectiveness exceeding 99.6%. The pressures of the two helium streams will be 1.4 and 1.0 atmospheres. Design specifications for the heat exchanger are as follows: i) Will sustain 30 g acceleration in any axis ii) Burst pressure of ...

Kyma Technologies, Inc. will demonstrate high-performance gallium nitride (GaN) microelectronic devices for X-band radar applications using single crystal semi-insulating GaN substrates. FETs for power amplifiers will benefit from lower defects resulting from growth on a native GaN substrate. The thermal conductivity of the GaN substrates will be characterized and device structures will be modeled ...

Gallium nitride substrates are now being produced by several manufacturers, however significant market penetration is being limited by high prices and low quantities. This Phase II program is aimed at addressing both of these issues by developing a growth process for the production of 1cm thick boules at a growth rate of 1mm per hour. The Phase I program met and exceeded the goals of demonstrati ...

Department of Defense (DOD) interset in developing laser weaponary in the 1960's. Solid-State lasers have been a canidate technology from the earliest time, but for various reasons, this technology has not been developed to a point where they are scalable to high average power lasers. The development of diode laser pump arrays has improved efficiency, but at a considerable increase in systems cost ...

Photonic devices providing high performance spectral filtering, multiplexing, optical waveform processing, and signal routing will be designed, fabricated, and characterized. The devices are based on photolithographic scribing of holographic structures onto the surface of planar waveguides and operate on intra-guide signals. The holographic structures provide a manufacturable approach to 2D phot ...

M Cubed manufactures many commercial components out of reaction bonded SiC and B4C on a large scale. The key advantages of these materials are high specific stiffness (high modulus and low density) and high thermal stability (high thermal conductivity and low CTE). However, these materials have limited toughness precluding their use in many potential applications including some missile defense com ...

This small business innovation research is aimed to generate tens of mJ pulse energy in a pulse width of < 10 n-sec from an air-cooled multicore fiber laser array. This laser can be packaged into a compact and light-weight enclosure that requires a minimum thermal management. PC Photonics has demonstrated coherent power-combining of a 7-core and also a 19-core Yb-doped fiber laser array embedded ...