Award Data

Night vision has been a key enabling technology for the past 30 years that has allowed US pilots to"own the night". One of the big disadvantages of current night vision systems is that they have not provided pilots with good peripheral vision, since most have a total field of view (TFOV) of only 40 degrees. A large survey of USAF pilots found that the most often requested improvement to night visi ...

As with all service branches within the Department of Defense (DoD), the mission objectives of the Navy are expanding to encompass not only major combat operations, but also asymmetric warfare scenarios. This expanding role requires the Navy to increasingly operate in littoral waters where effective identification of small craft and semi-submersibles is a critical capability for both fleet protect ...

Over-The-Horizon (OTH) radar plays a crucial role in naval situational awareness and the ultimate safety of the naval warfighter and navy assets. Traditionally, OTH detection has been enabled by large land based radars exploiting the interaction of high frequency (HF) radio waves with the ionosphere, but this method is susceptible to instabilities in propagation and the limitations of HF systems. ...

Modern supersonic jet aircraft engines produce a high amplitude noise field with complicated characteristics due to turbulent behaviors of the hot jet. Researchers need better understanding of the turbulent structures in the jet plume to develop treatments to engines that might reduce the noise emissions. A significant obstacle to making these simulations practical and realistic for engine design ...

A diagnostic is proposed for aircraft engine exhausts that provides three velocity components at each point in an image of a slice through the plume. The method measures the Doppler shift of laser light scattered from soot particles naturally present in the exhaust, and may also be useful for measuring non-combustion flows outside the exhaust using naturally occurring environmental aerosols. An im ...

Non-invasive methods are required to measure the turbulence in supersonic jet plumes in 3-D with high temporal and spatial resolutions. The turbulent supersonic jet plume changes rapidly both in space and time, and hence any viable approach must acquire the entire 3-D velocity field at even faster speed for comparison with the temporal and spatial velocity field solved in Large Eddy Simulations. ...

Precise rotation sensors are critical components for stabilization, navigation, and targeting applications. The most sensitive commercial devices are fiber optic gyroscopes based on the Sagnac effect. There is the potential to enhance the performance of these gyroscopes using media with large positive (''slow light') or negative (''fast light') dispersion. In order to ...

CSquared Innovations LLC has developed a novel plasma/laser manufacturing process for solid state thin-film Li-ion batteries which consolidates conventional material synthesis and deposition onto a single platform. This revolutionary technique can produce a fully solid state thin-film Li-ion cell in atmosphere with the ability to conformally apply the battery to nearly any surface. The equipment c ...

Analysis of optical network performance provides key insights and enables comparison of technology and architecture alternatives beings considered for implementation of WDM LAN-based optical backbone networks within on-board aircraft platforms. Additional development of the models and algorithms used in commercial simulation and optimization tools is needed to characterize the complex interactions ...

Wavelength-division multiplexing has been employed to great success in long-haul transmission systems to increase capacity and provide a new means (wavelength) of routing. Their application to local-area networks (LANs) on aircraft is promising due to the light weight and narrow cross section of optical fiber, as well as fiber"s immunity to EMI. However, the dominant transmission impairments for a ...