Award Data

High-power Hall thrusters operating at high thrust-to-power ratios will consume and emit unprecedented amounts of xenon propellant. The inherent costs associated with xenon use have significantly hindered development of such devices. Metallic propellants, specifically bismuth, have recently emerged as potentially higher-performing, lower-cost alternatives to xenon. When used in a Hall thruster ...

The overall objective of the Phase II program is to develop a database of geopolymer-derived functional materials systems for ceramic matrix composities, including candidate materials for matrices and fiber-matrix interphase layers, which provide appropriate materials properties for performance in high temperature hydrothermal operating conditions at acceptable composite processing costs. Bot ...

Ceramatec Inc. and World Energy Systems Corporation (WESCO) successfully demonstrated SOFC stack operation with JP-8 reformate produced using a soot free cold plasma process. The patented SynGen cold plasma reformer which operates on the GlidArc plasma physics principle was developed by WESCO of Conroe Texas. This reformer has shown the ability to reform JP-8 and diesel fuel using an electric powe ...

This project is developing a real-time software "health monitoring" system for high-powered laser systems. By "health monitoring", we are referring to a system that can independently monitor the status of the laser over time, alerting operators to diminished performance and preventing catastrophic failure. A variety of different high power lasers are under development, including the Airborne Laser ...

The Air Force requires a system that connects multiple onboard systems and provides a translation mechanism to allow all of them to effectively speak one language. This Intelligent Distributed Decision Management system will be designed to minimize the cognitive load on Decision Makers and Shooters. This system will: 1) Provide a mechanism that can read from and write to multiple hardware and p ...

This proposal describes a Portable Virtual Collaborative Maintenance System (PVCMS) that can support maintenance personnel in austere locations. Efficient communications between personnel is especially important when maintaining the complex machinery currently used by the military. In addition to technical documents and schematics, technicians frequently need support from other maintainers that ha ...

Low-power Hall thrusters offer potentially important advantages for certain military applications but issues of lifetime and efficiency degradation at lower powers are issues hindering its utilization. A factor impacting efficiency is that the state-of-the-art techniques for electron generation used for neutralization (such as hollow cathodes operating on the same propellant as the thruster) do n ...

The future military communication, sensing and electronic warfare systems such as the proposed national missile defense (NMD) system require increasing functionality and performance endurance in harsh space environments. There is a persistent need for reliable tunable filters with a wide bandwidth of operation. In response to this need, EMAG Technologies in collaboration with Purdue University pro ...

The multiple-view genlocked camera (MVGC) developed and demonstrated duringthe first phase of this program will be extened to the long infrared domain. In addition, real-time structure from motion (SFM) and video-based anvigation algorithms will be coded on the Phase I and Phase II ontrol computers. Captive Flight Tests in winter and summer conditions will be executed to gather data and to evalu ...

The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) is an emerging SAE standard language for describing the software and hardware architecture of performance-critical real-time systems. In addition, the AADL standard allows the definition of annexes, i.e., formal extensions to the standard language to enhance the design specifications of hardware or software components. We propose to lever ...