Award Data

Advance warning of chemical and biological (CB) threats is of critical importance to our warfighters and continues to be a major challenge for the CB Defense Science and Technology (S&T) community. Recent research and development in the CBD S&T community has emphasized Integrated Early Warning (IEW) architectures that rely upon a layered sensing strategy that includes CBD-specific sensors such as ...

This SBIR effort proposes using live and continuous monitoring of metal tanks, pressure vessels, and pipelines using carbon nanomaterial-based sensing skins to detect excessive physical strains, cracks, and to inspect impact damage. The proposed research and development work leverages 15+ years of fundamental research. The key objective is to advance the TRL level and the scalability of carbon nan ...

In a battlefield or other active environment where hundreds or thousands of aerosol plumes may be generated every day, it is a challenge to identify the rare plume resulting from a deliberate dissemination. Machine learning (ML) algorithms can be trained to identify patterns and features based on training data and have the potential to distinguish between intentionally disseminated plumes that may ...

The standoff detection of potential threats to military personnel is of primary importance to the Department of Defense as a whole. Millimeter wave imagers are one class of sensor systems that have been employed for the detection of a variety of threats including chemical/biological agents, improvised explosive devices, land-mines, and unmanned aerial systems (UASs). More specifically, W-band (75 ...

Elastic backscatter lidar has proven to be a powerful tool for high-sensitivity long-range detection and tracking of airborne aerosol plumes and in its application to the characterization of chemical/biological (CB) aerosol agent release events. Advanced sensor platforms and networks are now integrating lidar systems in order to improve situational awareness and increase early warning in the event ...

This Phase-II SBIR proposal directly addresses the need to improve the size, weight and power, SWaP, of optical cryocoolers. In particular, the proposers will work toward increasing the efficiency of optical cryocoolers by incorporating cooling materials that require less input laser power to achieve a given heat lift. The new cooling materials will be high-purity crystals doped with active rare-e ...

This Phase-I SBIR proposal directly addresses the need to improve the size, weight and power, SWaP, of optical cryocoolers. In particular, the proposers will work toward increasing the efficiency of optical cryocoolers by incorporating cooling materials that require less input laser power to achieve a given heat lift. The new cooling materials will be high-purity crystals doped with active rare-ea ...

Public and commercial application of NOAA developed products such as climate observations, weather products, and datasets are underutilized by public decision makers, infrastructure asset owners, or the public. Communities realize the risk posed by increases in storm intensity, flooding, and heat waves. However, communities lack understandable models targets to stakeholder questions that are affor ...

Recent theoretical studies of eddy flux correlation have suggested that the commonly used assumption of dry air having no net flux is erroneous and can lead to significant errors in reported observations. Presently, dry air density is calculated indirectly from measured temperature, pressure and relative humidity, all of which contribute to increased uncertainties in the result. If instead the den ...

Passive microwave sensors aboard satellites provide valuable information regarding weather conditions by measuring atmospheric attenuation over a broad range of frequencies from 0-200 GHz. Additional ground-based sensors are desirable to provide complementary upward looking measurements that can be used to refine existing attenuation models. Operating over such a large bandwidth, however, places ...