Award Data

The U.S. Air Force is interested in developing hypersonic vehicles including reusable transport aircraft, cruise missiles, and unmanned systems. Hypersonic flight regimes result in multifaceted and very difficult design challenges that can be encapsulated into an aerothermoelastic problem, which is a complex interaction of structural, thermal, and aerodynamic mechanisms. When a flexible structural ...

Military systems operate in complex, adversarial environments where their initial planned operations are often overcome by events, but soldiers use those systems in creative ways to achieve their mission objectives. For example, complex ground robotic systems that were initially deployed for surveillance and explosive ordinance disposal have instead been used as decoys, ammunition carriers, and ot ...

This project will develop a statistical-relational framework and enabling technologies for context-aware object classification and selection. The proposed framework is capable of reasoning about the scene as a whole while incorporating the entire corpus of available information including features and classification labels from heterogeneous sensors and properties of other objects in the scene. The ...

The goal of this STTR is to design UAVs capable of adaptively changing wing geometry utilizing novel active materials that overcome limitations of previous attempts at developing and implementing practical and operational relevant morphing concepts.The basic idea of a morphing aircraft wherein the vehicle changes its shape to optimally perform in multiple flight segments holds the promise of achie ...

The great progress and accomplishments demonstrated in the early prototyping Phase I effort are very exciting.Phase II effort will continue the development of innovative materials science processes to produce ultra high purity materials and robust mid-infrared optical fibers for extreme environments.At the end of Phase II, we will demonstrate production of long lengths (>100 m) mid-IR fiber for tr ...

For prediction of hypersonic aerothermodynamics, knowledge of the relevant disturbance levels is required to determine transition locations in flight at the altitudes of interest. Tao Systems and University of Maryland (UMD) propose to develop a flight platform and measurement system capable of acquiring pressure, temperature, density, velocity fluctuations, and particulates using a miniaturized, ...

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) can be reliably used to perform on-line health monitoring of any type of structures with minimal human involvement. Current SHM systems can perform the functions required but are heavy, bulky and difficult to integrate with the structure to provide on-board real-time structural integrity assessment. Embedding of currently available sensors and electronics used by ...

A diagnostic is proposed for obtaining instantaneous three-dimensional volumetric distributions of density in a flow field at velocities ranging from subsonic to supersonic. Multiple Sheet Filtered Rayleigh Scattering (MSFRS) will be developed, which enables a series of two-dimensional images to be rapidly obtained making up a volumetric image while suppressing background scattering from wind tunn ...

Current scene projection hardware is challenged to simultaneously meet the requirements for high peak temperature (> 2000K), high resolution (2Kx2K), response time < 4 ms, cryogenic and temporally uniform photon flux. MEMS, Resistor arrays, liquid crystals, and photonic crystals all suffer in one or more areas. MEMS suffer from flicker and low dynamic range. Resistor arrays suffer from low frame r ...

Advanced imaging techniques and, novel intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) methods are of great interest to the U.S. Air Force and other Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, but associated high-costs of III-V and II-VI MWIR and SWIR materials prohibit their practical widespread deployment and integration with other optoelectronic devices. In this program, we intend to investigate ...