Award Data

At the present state of the art it is not feasible to generate a signal directly at the microwave operating frequency having the required short-term or long-term stability The best is a high-performance crystal oscillator, usually realized as an ovenized crystal oscillator (OCXO). The OCXO forms the master oscillator for the system; from it, all required system frequencies are derived coherently ...

The United States faces the risk of losing a technology vital to national security. Coatings of Titanium Carbide (TiC) applied by a novel Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Process are applied to the balls used in ball bearings in several important strategic and tactical missile defense systems. A Swiss company was the sole source of these coatings and their production capability has now been phase ...

Thermal batteries are mission-critical components utilized in virtually every weapon system. Thermal batteries require four types of pellets that comprise the energy-producing portion of the battery. These include: (1) anode pellets, composed of Li(Si) alloy and electrolyte salt, (2) cathode pellets, consisting of either FeS2 or CoS2 and electrolyte salt, (3) separator pellets, consisting of MgO ...

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 ...

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 ...

DNA microarray technology, in combination with statistical and predictive modeling tools, could be used to evaluate thousands of genes against distinct gene expression patterns induced by chemical/biological agents to provide early identification and speed therapeutic intervention. The overall objective of this Phase II effort is to leverage existing public domain resources and commercial tools t ...

We investigate the development of a secure fuselet runtime environment built on a foundation of aspect-oriented web services. Aspect-oriented techniques enable the modularization of crosscutting concerns such as remote access, security, and monitoring using code instrumentation. We compose aspect-oriented instrumentation with web service technologies in a noninvasive and orthogonal manner, and lev ...