Award Data

The path towards high-power Hall thruster development lies in the fundamental understanding and modification of electron tranport processes within the plasma discharge channel. This development effort will build on the successes in phase I and focus on analytical and computational modeling leading to a high-power Hall thruster configuration design.

Lithium oxyhalide batteries offer energy densities several times higher than thermal batteries. Like thermal batteries, lithium oxyhalide batteries have unactivated storage lives in excess of 20 years and are mechanically rugged. Some of the main advantages that lithium oxyhalide batteries offer are flat discharge voltage profiles and potentially long operating lives. However, battery performanc ...

The projected cost for the Mentis Sciences, Inc., (MSI) prototype PAC3 radome is 1/6th of the total cost of the present system. A Pareto analysis of the current MSI process indicates that the two largest costs in radome production are the direct labor associated with fabrication and the cost of the raw materials. In Phase I MSI demonstrated that COTS paint spraying technology reduced the direct ...

Ultra-high performance multi-function RF electronics are required by the United States Department of Defense to enable next generation radar and sensor networks in response to an increasingly diverse array of threats to our military and our homeland. An elegant potential solution is that of gallium nitride (GaN) RF electronics, which has shown great promise on currently available yet foreign subs ...

Advanced space-borne infrared detectors require cooling at temperatures near 10 K. Cooling loads for these detectors will range from 0.25 W to 1.0 W at 10 K, with additional loads at higher temperatures. A multistage cooler, capable of cooling multiple loads, will offer large potential gains in system efficiency and weight. Turbomachine-based Brayton cryocoolers are ideal candidates for these m ...

Three-dimensional woven and braided fiber architectures provide important advantages to composites, including suppression of delamination, high damage tolerance, improved through-the-thickness properties, simplicity and cost-effectiveness of manufacturing complex composite structural components. However, in order to diversify applications and reach high volumes of utilization of these materials in ...

In this work, we will demonstrate military specification compatible 1.8 - 1.85 µm InP-based diode pump laser arrays with a power output exceeding 10 W, the critical milestone necessary to enabling system insertion. These sources can help in the critical development of a variety of military and home security applications, including optical pumping sources for 3-5 µm lasers, chemical sensing, las ...

Taggants are small objects used to label things or people that need to be traced. Synthetic DNA Taggants are ideal for this, since very small amounts can be detected if the sequence is known, and can be disguised by natural DNA in the environment. Known protocols for DNA amplification (e.g. PCR) allow for very sensitive DNA detection, but suffer from disadvantages: the apparatus is not very portab ...

In this SBIR project we aim to exploit a new invention in quantum cryptography to secure free-space optical links and networks. Unlike the techniques based on single-photon states that are limited to low bit rates and short distances, our approach is based on coherent states emitted by ordinary lasers, permitting scaling to high speeds and deployment over realistic distances. We have already demon ...

Application of a unique separator material, ceramic fiber separator (CFS), developed by Inventek, can serve as the foundation for advanced thermal batteries to triple EKV battery capacity at high power. A new rapid method of thin-cell production would use the fiber separator CFS as a carrier for tapecast cell assembly and reduce unit cost by 25%. In this method, a tunnel kiln process can produce ...