Award Data

Current Zumwalt Class destroyers (DDG 1000) sea chest openings are unique because they must be flush to the hull, limiting implementation of common sea chest designs (e.g., bubble shields or raised inlets). This design results in the ingestion of higher amounts of ice, debris, and air, resulting in increased maintenance costs, potential pump failure, and degraded overall cooling performance. The N ...

Hydrometeors consisting of liquid water droplets or solid particles of ice can disrupt the boundary layer near hypersonic vehicles, and ultimately impinge on the surface causing surface roughness and further altering the flowfield. To advance the knowledge of hydrometeors and their impact on hypersonic flight, it is critical, therefore, to develop practical, high-fidelity and spatio-temporally res ...

The "Hybrid Integration of Photonics and Cryogenic Electronics with Magnetic Shielding (HIPCEMS)” effort will develop a scalable heterogeneous packaging plan which results in extreme energy efficiency information transfer at high clock rates and low bit error rate of digital data between superconducting and photonic technologies, each at 4K. HIPCEMS will feature a mechanically robust package tha ...

Accurate prediction of the state of boundary layers and regions of separated flows is of fundamental importance in the design of hypersonic vehicles. The ability to predict boundary layer characteristics and how these affect surface shear stress and its influence on the surface skin friction is directly related to flight performance.  This STTR is concerned with developing a system for measuring ...

The proposed approach provides innovative sensor data association algorithms capable of performing correct data association in multi-target tracking environments with one or more sensors. Current air and missile threats have the ability to fly non-ballistic, highly maneuvering hypersonic trajectories, and the ability to maintain closely spaced trajectories. Improved detection/track association is ...

The most direct way to meet the technical objectives for the Secure Virtual Environment (SVE) for Cyber Resiliency Validation would be to replicate the missile defense system’s tactical hardware, software, and network. However, this is cost prohibitive due to the amount of hardware procurement required for the Cyber test environment. Luckily, with the exception of supply chain threats, firmware, ...

Fatigue life of parts produced by metal additive manufacturing is determined by the complex interaction of defects, surface properties, and material microstructure.  Each of these constituents is affected by the choice of processing parameters, as well as the feedstock, machine performance, etc.  In addition, stochastic events often contribute significantly to the fatigue life of individual samp ...

Performing accurate simulations of large- and multi-scale electromagnetics problems has far-reaching implications in a variety of engineering and scientific disciplines. The same physics governs a diversity of applications including problems of importance for NAVAIR such as complex radome-antenna and antenna-platform interactions.  Such simulation problems involve complex materials, multiple feed ...

Radiation effects in microelectronic components are a significant concern for the reliability of DoD systems that operate at high altitudes or in outer space. Typical characterization efforts focus on macroscale degradation signatures from electrical measurements at device terminals. However, a comprehensive analysis of radiation-induced physical defects is not possible based solely on terminal me ...

Vescent Photonics, LLC (Vescent) in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT-LL) proposes to develop a compact, low-phase-noise optical frequency comb (OFC) stabilized to a novel, fiber-based, ultra-narrow linewidth reference laser that will meet the Air Force’s needs for a high performance, fieldable clock. OFCs are a core tool of quantum timing, enabling a range of new technologies criti ...