Award Data

Fuels for Army use undergo rigorous analysis to determine many chemical and physical properties before they are used in Army vehicles. The property of fuels to produce smoke or soot is one such specification used to determine fuel quality. Smoke production of a diffusion flame produced by a kerosene fuel can be correlated to the chemical composition of the fuel. Unfortunately, the standard used to ...

Contamination of water supplies with toxic inorganic chemicals and toxic inorganic materials (TIC/TIMs) is a major concern for the U.S. military due to their worldwide prevalence and accessibility. Traditional, analyte-specific approaches are unfeasible to detect the approximately 70,000 potential TIC/TIM contaminants. Biologically-based sensor systems have the potential to provide general infor ...

Propagation Research Associates, Inc., (PRA) and Duke University propose to extend the recent developments of matched filtered chaos into a low-cost high range-resolution chaotic waveform radar. In the Phase I effort, PRA and Duke will design the radar system and build a prototype waveform generator that will exploit three essential properties of chaotic waveforms that can be applied to enhance r ...

Cracks and loose fasteners are continuing structural problems on H-60 helicopters resulting in unexpected downtime to repair/replace structures. This reduces availability to the warfighter, increases risk, and is expensive and time consuming. The proposed embedded system would provide early detection and assessment of loose fasteners and strain allowing planned repairs and mitigating problems. ...

Very compact, robust, and low cost multi wavelengths burst lasers for standoff CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive) detection and identification are proposed. Although a single focused laser pulse on target can do the detection, the probability of hitting the right contaminated spot is low. Therefore, scanning a laser pulse train will cover a larger suspected contamin ...

This proposal is to develop a High Risk Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Tool (HRREAT) that will provide commanders and their staff with a fully-integrated, user-friendly suite of tools for the rapid collection, management, analysis, modeling, and visualization of ethnographic data in denied areas to enhance planning and decision making activities. Ethnographic data has become highly important in ...

While methanol has many properties that make it a potentially excellent fuel for portable fuel cells, the large over potential required for oxidization and its tendency to transport through most electrolytes limits the actual energy densities that can be achieved to a small fraction of its potential. A potential low temperature approach to reducing system complexity and eliminating the problems o ...

Methanol crossover of commercial Nafion membranes is a major issue that results in lowering of the efficiency of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs). The reason for high crossover in Nafion membrane is the bulk water transport associated with proton transfer. It is thus advantageous to have separate transport of protons and water. Nature has answered this problem in biological membranes which conta ...

Recently significant advances have been made in the high fidelity modeling of electromagnetic phenomena in complex geometries in the time-domain. To make high fidelity simulations of scattering and radiation tractable, the computational region must be truncated in a manner allowing outgoing waves to leave with minimal reflection from the boundary. We, HyPerComp in collaboration with Profess ...

The proposed project focuses on a new technology that has a built-in switch to turn the filter on and off, and thus is functionally equivalent to a high-selectivity filter and a low-loss switch, where the switch draws no DC power. Agile calls this new invention the Switchable Trimmable Acoustic Resonator (STAR). An array of such filters could implement a very compact and reconfigurable high-sele ...