Award Data

The primary objective of CU Aerospace's Phase I work will be to investigate innovative iodine injection concepts for the chemical oxygen-iodine laser (COIL) that improve mixing at higher total pressures. The designs will be made to significantly improve the pressure recovery of COIL systems while retaining efficiency. The results of the Phase I research will lay the foundation for developing a h ...

Many advanced HgCdTe (MCT) infrared detector structures are grown by the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) technique, which is especially sensitive to small imperfections, impurities, precipitates, and polishing damage on the substrate surface. In order to achieve very high crystalline quality MCT structures, the substrate surface must be of superior quality (MBE-quality). EPIR demonstrated the ability ...

The MDA's request to detect, track and discriminate long range targets requires infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs) that have higher sensitivities, longer cutoff wavelengths (>14 µm), larger formats (> 256 x 256), and higher operating temperatures than the current infrared technology. PbSnTe is an ideal material for the MDA's requirements. Its carrier mobilities and quantum efficiencies are comp ...

Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) maintenance costs are high, making up as much as 60-70% of the total system life-cycle cost. Moreover, inefficient maintenance policies and procedures can have adverse national security ramifications. We propose a Global visibility and Central Command approach to meet the maintenance and inventory management challenges. The proposed system consists of thre ...

End-to-end communications systems are often so complex that system designers have difficulty keeping track of the constraints, trades, interface requirements, and interdependencies among components. The Communications System Taxonomy (CommTax) and Toolkit proposed herein represents further refinement of an innovative tool that Infinite Global Infrastructures has recently developed internally to as ...

C2BMC is an important component of BMDS. The logistics support tail sustainment challenges in C2BMC are related to the unusual spiral development process employed by C2BMC. Formal metrics such as MTTR and MLDT have not been defined. Nor have spare parts analysis, training needs analysis or documentation support issues been formalized. There is enormous scope for both process re-engineering and tec ...

Very long wavelength infrared (VLWIR) detectors are highly needed for midcourse phase missile defense. Blocked impurity band detectors are capable of sensing at these wavelengths but require extremely low temperatures, in the 10K or less range. The InAs/GaSb Type II heterostructure system offers unique design flexibility for new innovative detectors. By incorporating dark current reduction techniq ...

The goal of this SBIR project is the development of a fiber-coupled diagnostic system for the comprehensive Tx/Rx-mode calibration and performance-monitoring of large-scale phased antenna arrays. In the proposed calibration system, innovative electro-optic (EO) field sensors will monitor near-field amplitude and phase emanating from the array under observation during Tx-mode calibration, while com ...