Award Data

ABSTRACT:Recent technical demonstrations in hostile fire sensing and classification have highlighted the use of costly cryogenically-cooled electro-optical sensors.While capable, these types of sensors come with a higher initial purchase price as well as high life cycle costs per platform.This activity will implement a broad area hostile fire sensing architecture that uses lower cost discrete sens ...

ABSTRACT:The objective of this proposal is to design an inexpensive hypersonic test article with an associated instrumentation package capable of providing measurements necessary for advancing the understanding of aerothermal behavior in the hypersonic flow regime. Significant advances and accuracy validation within multi-physics computational science and engineering (CSE) toolsets (such as comput ...

ABSTRACT:The warfighter needs an accurate and reliable source of Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) when GPS is not available. Fortunately, technical advances in navigation sensors and algorithms can reduce dependence on the venerable, yet vulnerable, GPS system. Inertial sensors are becoming increasingly smaller and more accurate. Low cost, powerful embedded computing platforms enable real ti ...

Montana BioAgriculture Inc., MBAI, is developing fungal insect pathogens as mycoinsecticides for bark beetles. With climate change and globalization, outbreaks of both native and introduced species of bark beetles are occurring at an unprecedented scale; killing trees on millions of acres of forest and causing substantial economic loss in timber harvest and in value of both private and public fore ...

The purpose for this research is to develop a Snow Water Equivalency (SWE) sensor that will broaden our understanding of snow and the water we receive from it. Current methods used to measure SWE are labor intensive, utilize hazardous antifreezes, economically prohibitive, and/or vulnerable to the environment. These limitations greatly restrict the number of locations where SWE measurements are ma ...

Explosive Electron Emission (EEE) is typical to cathodic arcs. The physics of multi-phase phenomena associated with self-sustained formation of explosive emission centers (ectons) is not fully understood. This SBIR project will conduct experimental, theoretical, and computational studies of phase transitions at electrode surfaces, formation of plasma jets, and gas dynamics in cathodic sparks and a ...

Tungsten and its alloys are candidates for plasma facing component (PFC) armor due to their low sputtering rate, high melting point, high thermal conductivity, high strength at elevated temperatures, and low tritium inventory. Although copper alloys have been selected for the heat sinks for ITER, a working fusion reactor will require the use of higher strength, low activation materials. For exampl ...

Next generation advances in subsurface technologies will enable access to large amounts of clean, renewable geothermal energy, as well as safer development of domestic natural gas supplies. The subsurface also provides hundreds of years of safe storage capacity for carbon dioxide (CO2) and opportunities for environmentally responsible management and disposal of hazardous materials and other energy ...

Significant improvements in the technology to monitor greenhouse gases are required. In particular there is need to be able to simultaneously monitor both small (~m) and large area sites (~ 100km) and in rugged/inaccessible terrain. For example, sensitive, accurate, and real-time monitoring of hydrobiogeochemical processes are needed in subsurface environments, including soils, the rhizosphere, se ...

Large-area, high-resolution hyperspectral imaging is needed to accurately understand the carbon-cycle between the atmosphere and terrestrial systems. To do this cost-effectively, small UAVs will be needed, for which there are currently no hyperspectral imagers that meet both the performance requirement of DOE and the size/weight requirements for deployment on small UAVs. How the Problem is Being ...