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 ...

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 ...

A Battlefield Airman (BA) has one of the most challenging positions in the military. BA personnel are tasked with the dual roles of being warfighters as well as Combat Controllers, Pararescuemen, Tactical Air Control Party (TACP) members and Special Operations Weather Technicians often while behind enemy lines. These complex duties require high fidelity training. In some cases, such as Pararescuem ...

ExoAnalytic Solutions, teamed with Texas A&M University and Georgia Institute of Technology, will develop Highly-mobile Autonomous Rapidly Relocatable Integrated Electro-optical Resources (HARRIER) with the goal being to design and demonstrate tracking of resident space objects (RSOs) in near-geosynchronous orbit (GEO) using a rapidly-constructed low-cost ground based electro-optic (EO) sensor wit ...

Addressing a key technology gap in deployment of fiber-optic sensor networks, IFOS and multidisciplinary collaborators are developing an integrated fiber-optic component reliability modeling software toolkit. The RelOptics toolkits analytical engine is based upon predictive failure models developed for the first time in aerospace industry via rigorous environmental testing of optical fiber splices ...

Engines will be getting smaller and hotter for efficiency reasons, requiring novel sensors with extended and enhanced performance. Emerging fiber-optic sensing approaches could provide a unique solution to the widening technology gap between next-gen engine requirements and conventional sensors limited capabilities. The overall objective of this program is to develop techniques to integrate new pr ...

Theoretical studies have shown that the electrical current in a CNT Field Effect Transistor (CFET) is intrinsically linear. Inherently linear CNTs offer significant improvements in performance without sacrificing power and have the potential for greatly improving range and sensitivity in state-of-the-art receivers such as those used in satellite systems and other communications applicationsModelin ...