Award Data

Development of a reflection control and direction device (RCDD) is proposed. This innovative device will progress the state of the art for propulsion of solar sails used to fly space weather monitoring sensors to sub-LaGrange point orbits for earlier warning times of impending destructive space weather events. A reflection control device (RCD) utilizes polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) mater ...

Drought is responsible for $327.7B in economic loss since 1980 in the United States and typically precedes, cooccurs, or initiates other hazards like wildfires or prolonged periods of intense heat. The compounding or cascading of these hazards routinely threatens the wellbeing and stability of communities. The economic impact from drought can be especially harsh when the drought begins rapidly in ...

Multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization of hypersonic aircraft require automated adaptive mesh generation across disparate length scales. In the current state-of-the-art, geometry-aware adaptive meshing techniques are still lacking and the such geometric discrepancy can lead to significant errors in the prediction of critical physics, such as shock-boundary layer interaction and fatig ...

Advancements in optical transport and signal processing for digital and Microwave Photonics (MWP) technology have enabled higher bandwidth, throughput, Dynamic Range (DR), and communication link budgets. Optical transport eliminates heavy shielded twisted pair or coaxial cables, reducing Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) and provides Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) immunity compared to traditional ...

The effect of particle ingestion in gas turbine engines has become a significant problem in recent decades. Commercial and military aircraft and helicopter engines currently operate over various terrains with particles. Vehicles near the ocean, for example, typically come across sea spray, which contains fine particulates of salt and can lead to the quick corrosion of metallic engine parts inside ...

The Navy requires a low-cost, industrial microwave system for curing aerospace composite materials. In this Phase I STTR proposal, Physical Sciences Inc outlines the development of a microwave applicator that uses low-cost RF sources and can be installed in heritage autoclaves for curing large aerospace composite parts. This technology has the potential to improve cured mechanical properties, and ...

Infrared imaging systems mounted to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are critical for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. While much progress has been made in miniaturizing the electronics/cooling package of these imaging systems, the optical components, which are typically large and bulky, can exceed size and weight requirements as well as increase the time needed to reac ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), in collaboration with Stanford University, will develop an electromagnetic simulation package used for the development and optimization of large-scale meta-optics, and demonstrate the functionality of the package in the long-wave infrared (LWIR). Our team will combine recent progress in physics-augmented deep learning neural networks with rigorous far-field diffractio ...

Physical Sciences Inc. partnered with Alfred University will develop an F/1, 90 degree full field of view MWIR/SWIR gradient index (GRIN) compound lens for reduced size and lens integration cost. The element-by-element achromatization and athermalization of GRIN provide useful performance improvements to GRIN systems. Element count is reduced (= 2), diversity of optical material needed is fixed, a ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), in collaboration with the University of Rhode Island, proposes to develop an advanced algorithm suite for data translation across sensing modalities to support the development of automated target recognition and classification algorithms for Unmanned Underwater Vehicles. The proposed Deep Diffusion Sensor Translation (DDST) leverages recent advancements in generative ...