Award Data

US forces are increasingly involved in asymmetric warfare, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance missions. These scenarios can place soldiers in direct contact with harmful biological and chemical warfare organisms and agents, toxic industrial chemicals, and explosives. Current portable sensor technology solutions rely on visible and near-IR Raman or Fluorescence spectroscopy. But operations ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project will develop ultradense, low-power plasmonic integration components and devices for on-chip manipulation and processing of optical signals. Both passive and active components will be studied. Detailed performance predictions will be obtained through finite element modeling (FEM) of the harmonic Maxwell’s equations. The FEM provides detai ...

The overall goal of this proposed Army STTR is to demonstrate low-cost, non-destructive methodologies for non-agglomerating drying of anisotropic nanomaterials. NanoSonic and Virginia Tech will work in tandem to demonstrate novel approaches involving both high performance coatings and CO2 processing that facilitate gentle, simultaneous drying and exfoliation of nanoparticles, preventing agglomera ...

SET Corporation, together with Carnegie Mellon University''s National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC), will develop a system that leverages state-of-the-art sensing, perception, and machine learning to provide trafficability assessments for UGVs for agricultural, security and military applications. It will consist of a set of proprioceptive and exteroceptive sensors that provide rich data about ...

Military shelters currently use electrically driven Environmental Control Units (ECUs) to provide cooling for the air inside the shelter. The ECU is vapor compression cycle powered by a diesel generator, operating on JP-8 fuel. Other than fueling jet engines, the largest drain on U.S. military fuel supplies in current operations comes from running generators at forward operating bases. In hot cli ...

Digital electronics is approaching its limits in meeting the demand for increased processing speeds. Photonics, while promising high processing speed, is lacking integration capacity. Plasmonics promises to combine the information capacity of photonics with the integration density of electronics. The team of Luna Innovations, UCLA and Virginia Tech proposes to develop plasmonic logic devices and c ...

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are critical elements in electrical, water, oil/gas, and manufacturing services involving supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distributed control systems (DCS), and programmable logic controllers (PLCs). These systems allow operators to monitor sensor data and remotely control field devices. Initially, these devices were designed for closed-network or ...

This proposal is for the use of state-of-the-art computer wargames to be used in the research on the impact and optimal use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in realistic combat scenarios. High fidelity, historically calibrated wargames ranging from sub-tactical ground-centric game engines through operational, strategic, air campaign, and naval-centric game engines will be used to address the fu ...

Photovoltaics, while promising clean and reliable energy source, is not yet compatible with fossil energy for most applications. Organic-based solar cells have potential to reduce the cost of solar energy due to low-cost active materials, high-throughput reel-to-reel deposition technologies, low-temperature processing and application versatility. Currently organic photovoltaics (OPV) cannot commer ...

Higher efficiency solar cells are needed to reduce solar array mass, volume, and cost for Air Force space missions. Intermediate-band quantum-dot (QD) solar cells can yield dramatically higher efficiencies than current multi-junction (MJ) technologies. However, several issues must be addressed to demonstrate manufacturable, high efficiency devices. CFDRC aims to develop: 1) High-efficiency, ligh ...