Award Data

The Missile Defense Agency is seeking innovative material and manufacturing processes for advanced metallic components for hypersonic flight systems. Triton Systems and their academic partner are proposing to develop the manufacturing and qualification evaluation techniques for reliable production of hypersonic environment appropriate metallic components at reduced cost and timelines compared to t ...

The Advanced Composite Structures group at Physical Sciences Inc. has partnered with the University of Virginia to develop a high temperature, ceramic syntactic foam that can be fabricated using additive manufacturing (AM) techniques. The AM ceramic insulator is compatible for co-processing with other CMC components such as aeroshells, fins, and additional hypersonic flight vehicle control surface ...

Diode-pumped alkali lasers (DPAL) offer the potential for scaling to high output powers required for directed energy weapons systems. As power-scaling studies have progressed, increasing concern has emerged about uncertainty in the roles of higher-lying states and the degree of ionization, and their effects on device performance. Ionization by multi-photon absorption and collisional energy pooling ...

This topic focuses on developing fast-running, computationally efficient, surrogate models to be used in place of slow running, computationally expensive, high-fidelity physics-based models inside of end-to-end missile defense simulation frameworks. Recent advances in physics informed machine learning (PIML) have made possible the substantial speed improvement of physics-based models. Corvid Techn ...

Diode-pumped alkali lasers (DPALs) have inherently high optical-to-optical efficiency and thus the potential to reach megawatt-class average power lasers with near-diffraction limited beam quality. However, as DPALs scale up in power, a plasma is formed in the gain medium, resulting in lower efficiency and increased gas heating. This ultimately leads to a degradation in laser beam quality and a po ...

Reusing prior work is an adaptive strategy that allows an organization to learn from missteps and extend its most promising insights and capabilities. Reuse grows as a challenge as the artifacts of effort accumulate. For example, stove-piped or hidden data streams make keeping abreast of internal reports and reviews difficult for engineers. The challenges are not merely in the variety and volume o ...

Running and testing highly complex models and simulations has historically been a very computationally intensive and extremely inefficient process, since full simulations are run from start to finish for each realization of a set of stochastic variables until a full distribution of simulation outcomes has been established. Recently, the concept of cloning has been used to speed up stochastic simul ...

The MDA has identified a need for decreasing the time required for simulations and rendering by orders of magnitude. To address this need, Stellar Science and the University of New Mexico (UNM) propose the development and use of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), which have been shown to reduce execution times dramatically while still maintaining small errors compared to traditional physics ...

BlazeTech is collaborating with University of Colorado using their hypersonic CFD code LeMANS as a platform on which to integrate a novel combustion code that iteratively adapts its chemical model based on the local flow structure. In this way, the chemistry and fluid mechanics are closely coupled, and simplified models may be leveraged for their low computational cost when more detailed models ar ...

In Phase I Goodman Technologies (GT) will perform a feasibility study of Silicon Carbide (SiC) materials from a database of optical system and materials vendors compiled over the years, which investigates the design and manufacture of innovative telescope optics that trade cost, weight, optical performance, and stability in the endo- and exo-atmospheric environments, and in a manmade radiation env ...