Award Data

Water expansion during freeze-thaw cycles can cause deterioration in concrete, leading to scaling, cracking, and crumbling over a period of years. Resistance to this damage is achieved with a system of voids formed by adding surfactants to the fresh concrete to stabilize air bubbles naturally entrained during mixing. The volume fraction, size, and spacing of these voids are critical. It is importa ...

Broken rails are a common cause of mainline derailments and a particular concern given the increasing use of our rail system for passenger traffic and petroleum products. The progressive nature of the defects provides an opportunity for early detection of cracks before they become significant enough to cause a derailment. Unfortunately, current inspection technology does not allow these inspection ...

Use of motorcycles helmets significantly reduces the risk of fatality or serious brain injury to riders in the event of a crash, but riders often do not wear helmets in warm weather because of thermal discomfort. We propose to develop an innovative ventilation and cooling system that will maintain a cool, dry environment inside the helmet while also meeting applicable safety standards. The key the ...

Chemiresistors are an important class of electronic sensors that detect the presence of analytes/chemicals via a change in the resistance of a sensor element. A typical interdigitated electrode array is deposited onto an insulating substrate with metallic electrodes that have feature sizes in the 5-500 m range. The metal electrodes are typically sputter coated onto the substrate, using lithogra ...

Current radar systems are driven by sensing requirements in the field. Today, and even more so in the future, the operation of these systems will be plagued by heterogeneous threats, each seeking to counter the sensing capability with different types of countermeasures. The traditional approach to solving this problem would be to introduce multiple individual systems (sensors and effectors) into t ...

Low cost polyurethane laminate tent materials are designed to solve the cold crack issue with PVC tent fabrics. The use of novel construction of urethane/textile laminates offers a breakthrough in environmental durability over current offerings. This new laminate configuration provides for a new class of economical lightweight shelters with extended operating capability.Using a composite textile r ...

The Army has an ever-growing need to provide electric power to soldiers on the battlefield. Of particular need is an efficient, power dense, jet fuel-powered system for charging batteries. The Army has invested heavily in thermal-to-electric power conversion, most notably in thermoelectric generators or TEGs. Because the conversion efficiency of TEGs is relatively low, and because the hot side ...

High-fidelity representation of terrain morphology is a critical requirement for accurate modeling and simulation of infrared background scenes. The current state of the art in terrain representation for missile seeker systems and other military applications is based on digital elevation models, which are relatively coarse in resolution and have smooth contours that do not resolve the presence of ...

Degraded visual environment (DVI) presents a challenge for helicopter pilotage, particularly in close proximity to potential hazards such as vegetation, poles, wires, buildings, vehicles, personnel, equipment, nearby terrain, other aircraft, or ship superstructures. To safely negotiate these hazards, the aircrew must maintain a continuous awareness of the environment that can include both static a ...

Under the proposed effort, PSI will continue to develop a novel pmmW imaging technology developed under a prior Navy program to realize dense form factor arrays. This technology is based on an optical upconverted distributed aperture technology that can make large effective apertures in low SWaP form factors thereby maximizing achievable resolution. This sensor technology has already reached TRL 6 ...