Award Data

This proposal develops an extremely low cost fiber grating corrosion sensor system that could be deployed on a vehicle. Costs are estimated to be approximately $0.25 per sensor in volume allowing hundreds to be deployed if necessary on difficult to access areas of a ground vehicle. In order to keep costs to an absolute minimum it is anitipated that the read out unit would be maintenance rather t ...

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 ...

US Army seeks innovative coating technologies for gun barrel surface applications to replace currently available highly toxic electroplated hard chrome. Cylindrical magnetron sputtered tantalum (Ta) coatings developed by US Army labs revealed some success in explosive bonding experiments, however, issues include cost and softness of the unalloyed Ta. Inframat proposes to fabricate a novel tungst ...

There is a need to develop minimally-invasive devices that will allow continuous and simultaneous measurement of more than one metabolic analyte. Two such analytes are glucose and lactate. The benefits of continuously measuring these analytes in subcutaneous interstitial fluid include early detection of physical exhaustion, for example in firefighters or warfighters, and critical care monitoring o ...

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 ...

In a current Phase I program, an extremely capable team is developing an innovative approach to the design and fabrication of ceramic-based armor panels for commercial vehicles. The concept consists of two key features, namely (1) the use of 1-piece, large contoured reaction bonded ceramic tiles and (2) backing the tiles with low cost ballistic polymer. The resultant panels match the shape of in ...

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 ...

An extremely capable team of M Cubed Technologies and Simula is proposing to replace existing ceramic-based small arms protective insert (SAPI) personnel armor plates with hard-faced metal matrix composite (MMC)-based products. This new product will offer much greater durability due to the relatively high fracture toughness of MMCs relative to ceramics. In short, the program will produce MMC til ...

The overall objective of this Phase II program is to produce, by the end of the two-year effort, a low-cost, ready-to-use, field-deployable simple kit comprising paper, wood or plastic strips that detect the principal chemical warfare agents (CWAs) - Mustard, Sarin, Soman, and VX - in liquid as well as vapor forms, by fast and dramatic color changes. Our Phase I work produced prototype demonstra ...