Award Data

Obsolescence, aging, reliability, and performance issues are driving nuclear facilities to replace conventional analog I & amp;C systems with digital technologies. The increased complexity of digital systems, compared to their analog counterparts, has resulted in faults that are often more difficult to detect, classify, and correct. Experience in the nuclear industry has shown that traditional s ...

No method currently exists for detecting intermittent faults in nuclear power plant cable circuits, which include circuit components, connectors, and end devices. Conventional techniques can locate hard faults, such as open or short circuits, but not the intermittent faults that occur occasionally. Furthermore, conventional testing techniques require circuits to be removed from serv ...

Reliable, readily-manufacturable technologies are needed to create the next generation of high-density, high-functionality 3D integrated circuits (ICs) for integrating silicon pixel detectors with CMOS read-out ICs. Current methods for 3D IC development are severely limited by the thickness of the CMOS wafers and the restrictions that result due to the diameter of the through-silicon vias (TSVs) t ...

In the U.S., almost all the 104 operating commercial nuclear power plants have applied or plan to apply for license renewal, many of which have recently received approval. This has given rise to questions about the aging of structures, systems, and components (SSCs) that are important to plant safety and longevity. Recently, many national laboratories and agencies, including the Nuclear Regulat ...

The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Physics maintains gamma-ray detector arrays as user facilities. The Modular Planar Germanium (MPGe) detector systems to be developed here will provide a lower cost, higher resolution, basis for such detector arrays. The MPGe detector systems will be experimentally developed by understanding the radiation-damage limitations of these detector systems, ...

The negative-electron-affinity (NEA) photocathodes which produce polarized electrons are a vital component of electron accelerators such as that at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and DoE Jefferson Lab. Future systems, such as the International Linear Collider (ILC), will require a polarized electron beam intensity at least 20 times greater than produced by strained GaAs, which is us ...

ABSTRACT: Military missions increasingly rely on satellites for surveillance, communication, and navigation. While performing these mission-critical tasks, satellites must respond quickly to new enemy threats and changing mission objectives. Under prior AFRL SBIR awards, SIFT and TRACLabs have developed the Highly Autonomous Mission Manager for Event Response (HAMMER) to provide on-board auto ...

ABSTRACT: As with all other combustion devices, the augmentors in high-performance gas turbine engines are at risk of combustion instability. While it is tempting to apply brute force CFD to address this problem, at best high fidelity CFD may reveal what happens but not why it happens. While thousands of high fidelity CFD runs could be used to generate empirical type trends, that path is impract ...

ABSTRACT: A better understanding of the thermo-mechanical response, characteristics and properties of materials can lead to improved device performance as well as facilitate the design of new devices and materials for various applications. Although there has been significant progress in the development of micro/nanomechanical testing techniques and tools over the last decade, commercially availab ...

ABSTRACT: The objective of this work is to demonstrate a prototype of an innovative method to protect military space microelectronics from unauthorized tampering. The method will employ the joint cooperation of multiple countermeasures that operate at several levels of system abstraction. The target is a class of embedded systems that are implemented using high-density FPGAs. A dual-use commercia ...