Award Data

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research phase I program will develop a new class of surface plasmon enhanced photovoltaic devices that exhibit increased current collection. Photon management, the manipulation of the incident optical field to increase the probability that a photon is absorbed in the active region of the cell, is critical to the development of next generation thin film sol ...

Conversion of sunlight to chemical fuels by artificial photosynthesis has been a long-sought goal. The major goal of the proposed effort is to develop a novel fuel-generating (e.g., hydrogen) photolytic device, which consists of a semiconductor nanowire decorated with metal nanoparticles. The project targets a low-cost technology by fabricating and utilizing the nanowire-nanoparticle conjugate de ...

Modern military and civilian aircraft technologies are pushing the performance envelope through design and use of new advanced materials with superior property combinations. Aircraft powerplant manufacturers are facing intense competition to efficiently deliver ever increasing thrust, while meeting the highest standards of reliability and performance over an expanded service life. These performanc ...

This Phase I STTR proposal will demonstrate nanostructured “metal-black” coatings to enhance absorption by thin film solar cells. The problem is that silicon has low absorption due to its indirect gap. The opportunity is that nano-scale metallic scattering centers increase the effective optical path length and enhance the solar electric-field strength in thin-film solar cells, leading to more ...

Currently, computation of the geopotential acceleration and its partial derivatives consumes a large portion of numerical integration time in special perturbations (SP) applications. The standard geopotential formulation is expressed as a spherical harmonic expansion in geocentric latitude, geocentric longitude, and radial distance. Recent research by Dr. Beylkin of the University of Colorado ha ...

Our objective is to develop advanced mediator architectures for efficient electron transfer in enzymatic fuel cells (EFCs) for low power systems. The proposed EFC will leverage ongoing research at both CFDRC and Michigan State University to provide a fully-integrated lightweight, low-cost, manufacturable, and renewable power supply, for various military and civilian applications. EFC systems offer ...

Covariance realism and consistency are critical to precision tracking and long-term orbit prediction of resident space objects (RSOs). This proposal tackles the key challenges that would yield realistic state estimation error covariance measures for tracking RSOs with relevant covariance consistency metrics. The anticipated result is a proposed estimation architecture that provides state estimatio ...