Award Data

According to existing data, there are more than 1.5 million of Americans sustaining a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) each Year. Balance disorders represent one of the main regular problems that patients have to deal with, and thus everyday. Rehabilitation programs do exist but they are dependable of the clinician or physiotherapist and they do not take in account the multimodal aspects of balance co ...

Cooking appliances in U.S. Army field kitchens are currently heated by burning JP-8 fuel using electrically powered burners. Power is supplied by a separate JP-8 fired generator that serves multiple appliances simultaneously. This is inefficient, as generators are only 20-25% efficient, and unreliable since failure of the generator results in the failure of the entire kitchen operation. This is a ...

Aerodyne Research, Inc. (ARI) and The University of Massachusetts at Amherst will collaborate to develop a novel technique for efficient mass spectrometric analysis of high molecular weight analytes such as proteins and polymers. Laser desorption and ionization with minimal analyte fragmentaton will be carried out on metal nanoparticle substrates in a particle beam sampled by Aerodyne’s proprie ...

The objective of this proposed Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) effort is to develop an experimentally-validated, highly detailed chemical kinetic reference model of surface chemistry for C-SiC-SiO2 rubber composite materials exposed to high temperature, high pressure, oxidizing environments. This reference model will then be reduced into simplified reduced-order models that could be easi ...

Robotic platforms, such as humanoid robots and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are significantly contributing to the capabilities of the U.S. Army. The BEAR humanoid robot offers exceptional capabilities for a robotic platform, but its mission duration is substantially constrained by the low volumetric energy density of rechargeable batteries. For maximum operational flexibility, the power sourc ...

Agiltron and the University of Massachusetts Lowell will develop a transformational terahertz (THz) imager based on Agiltron’s established optical readout photomechanical imaging technology. The photomechanical imager contains a MEMS-based focal plane array that transduces THz radiation into a visible signal for capture by a high-performance CCD imager. By leveraging the advances made in the fie ...

A stand-off mid-IR based system offers great promise for the detection of chemical, biological or explosive (CBE) agents. Such a system has yet to be realized due mostly to broad spectral features and interfering substances. In this proposal we will demonstrate the feasibility of a system that collects laser induced thermal emission (LITE) from a substance and identifies it as known CBE agent with ...

Leveraging on Agiltron’s industry leading development of optical MEMS devices and the PI’s experience with FTIR spectrometer design, we propose to develop a new class of high performance compact and rugged FTIR spectrometers for LWIR optical range. The design is based on the MEMS lamellar mirror technique. Although this approach is not new, it has not yet been efficiently applied to LWIR, and ...

Agiltron proposes to use patterned metal-vanadium oxide layers as a fast, high contrast infrared optical switch. The desired effect, based upon extraordinary optical transmission, has been demonstrated for visible light and should have greater contrast in the infrared. The effect of grain size, thickness and composition (oxygen content) of VO2 on the phase transition temperature and width of hyste ...

The proposed innovative in-fiber beam expansion technology and the all inorganic micro-optic fiberoptic device designs intrinsically have advantages in power handling, speed, insertion loss, reliability, and potentially cost as compared with other approaches. Our approaches overcome all the major hurdles in high power 2m fiberoptic device fabrications without trading-off of optical performance ...