Award Data

FMW Composite Systems, Inc., in collaboration with Aerojet (OEM), proposes to develop nano-enhanced titanium alloy components for advanced light weight Divert and attitude control systems (DACS), which are capable of replacing current materials to achieve improved performance, net weight reductions, improve producibility, improve reliability, and lower cost. A plan of approach will be developed us ...

Grid computing makes significant computational and data resources accessible to distributed teams of scientific researchers. In doing so, it also poses a challenge: how best to apply social and collaboration software techniques to improve the efficiency of collaboration between distributed teams working on grid systems. In recent years, new social software technologies have produced breakthroug ...

Many of the coal gasification technologies that exist today produce a low-methane content syngas that is high in carbon monoxide and hydrogen. New gasifier designs are needed to produce a high-methane-content syngas that can be more easily utilized by industrial users, upgraded to synthetic natural gas (SNG) for pipeline transport, or economically utilized by utility-scale fuel cells. This proje ...

Extreme heating conditions of future MDA missions are too severe for existing low-density systems (i.e., PICA – Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator); and existing high-density systems (i.e., carbon-carbon, carbon-phenolic) are too heavy and thermally inefficient. The proposed effort seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of wrapping a lightweight, rigid carbon foam with a carbon-carbon outerlayer ...

Concerns over the escalating use of petroleum-based liquid fuels include climate change, trade imbalances, global security issues, and environmental harm resulting from petroleum extraction and processing. Although ethanol is the leading replacement for petroleum-based gasoline, the current corn-based source of ethanol is hindered by serious social and environmental issues. The production of cel ...

A radiation-hard, 1064-nm sensitive, single-photon-sensitive avalanche photodiode (APD) detector with photon detection efficiency (PDE) and dark count rate (DCR) superior to state-of-the-art Geiger-mode APDs, and with two orders of magnitude faster maximum count rate (MCR) will be developed. Geiger APDs are constrained by a fundamental tradeoff between DCR and MCR: if the APD is cooled to reduce D ...

Detectors used in nuclear physics experiments require improvements in sensitivity, readout speed, radiation hardness, and sensor thickness. Of the available detector technologies, CMOS pixellated imagers offer several advantages, but, to date, CMOS detectors, due to readout and fixed pattern noise, have not been widely used for scientific instrumentation. They are also difficult to thin. This p ...

The brilliance of the latest generation of synchrotron beam lines enables the possibility of carrying out X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) experiments. Such experiments promise new insights into dynamic phenomena in condensed matter, which occurs at shorter length scales than can be probed by visible light and at longer length scales than can be investigated with the neutron-spin-echo ...