Award Data

The Army is in need of an improved armor solution for ground vehicles that possesses modularity, reduced weight, attractive cost, high ballistic resistance, durability, and tolerance to environmental affects. To meet this need, the use of large panels made by casting metal around an array of ceramic tiles is proposed. Such a product will possess high mass efficiency due to the presence of the ce ...

Malicious alterations of COTS circuits poses major concern in terms of their reliable and trusted field operation. It is extremely difficult to discover such alterations, also referred to as “hardware Trojans” using conventional structural or functional testing strategies. In this proposal, we propose a novel non-invasive, multiple parameter side-channel analysis based Trojan detection appro ...

FuelCell Energy, Inc., in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, is proposing to develop an innovative fuel processor for person-portable fuel cell power system applications. The system will be designed to reform butanol into a hydrogen-rich stream suitable for use in a low-temperature Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) fuel cell. The technical approach will focus on the development of a no ...

Mass spectrometers necessitate a partial pressure zone to allow for the process of mass characterization of the analyte under consideration. The reasons for transforming neutral molecules into charged ions include (1) the ability to control the trajectories and destinations of charged species by appropriate combinations of electric and magnetic fields and (2) detectability that is generally much g ...

To detect and identify vapors of contraband currency, not to mention a selection mode for explosives, narcotics, chemical warfare agents, biological threats or other analyte species at trace levels in air, is an important problem with many ramifications. One widely used approach is based on transforming the molecules of those species into gas phase ions, which are then characterized by measurement ...

CDMA is a successful network technology for the wireless industry which relies totally on conventional integrated circuits. The same architecture is equally appealing for telecommunications and is considered an optimum choice for next generation FTTH networks if only low cost implementations were available. The persistent high costs are driven by disparity between optical and electrical components ...

Develop a high power to weight, compact, heavy fuel MCC engine using advanced high strength materials. This new MCC engine design will also offer high durability and high efficiency with an extremely low acoustic and IR signature for use in future small UAVs. The overall objective of this Phase I development program is to develop a JP-5, JP-8 or DS2 MCC engine using advanced high strength to weigh ...

Free-play nonlinearity of the control surfaces has a direct impact on aircraft’s dynamic stability characteristics. . It is impossible to design and manufacture a control surface with zero free-play. As control surface free-play increases, tighter limits must be imposed on the aircraft mission capability. Typically, researchers have utilized an oversimplified piecewise-linear torque-rotation rel ...

The proposed effort leverages the capabilities of data-driven and physics of failure (PoF) based prognostic techniques for electronic systems by combining them within a hybrid approach. Data-driven and PoF-based techniques both have shortcomings; combining them into a hybrid framework allows using their capabilities in a complementary fashion, and thereby providing a reliable way of prognostics an ...

This STTR project seeks to develop a new manufacturing system for large-scale, low-cost production of bulk ultrafine grained (UFG) or nanostructured metals in plate, sheet or bar forms. These capabilities will be based on scale-up of a new class of machining-based processes called large strain extrusion machining (LSEM) that has been effective at creating high strength, nanoscale microstructures i ...