Award Data

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DTRA, currently uses technologies capable of detecting IEDs using airborne sensors that are demonstrated as reliable. These systems are only used for detection purposes and are not capable of neutralizing the IED. Due to IEDs being located in remote, dangerous, and hostile locations, there is high casualty risk for personnel to manually neutralize the target by ...

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are a dangerous and effective weapon system that today’s military warfighters and innocent civilians regularly experience. IEDs are created with randomly assembled materials and their payloads may include projectiles, biological toxins, and other dangerous items that can cause injury or death to personnel and equipment. Detection and neutralization of these we ...

Small multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are well suited for sensing and situational awareness missions in closed, confined, and constrained (C3) environments. However, autonomous navigation of small VTOL UAVs is very challenging in C3 environments. Current state of the art navigation methods uses vision and LIDAR to build a map, localize, and plan paths. These methods tend to be computati ...

This is a proposal to develop a unique, Ultrashort Pulsed Off-axis Digital Holography (USPODH) system, enabling the high frequency imaging of detailed 3D structures within aerosol fields under harsh thermodynamic conditions and high optical depths where ordinary imaging is essentially useless. Many powerful imaging methods have failed to provide this capability because noise from multiple scatteri ...

There is a need to improve the understanding of physical and chemical processes involved in the evolution of chemical warfare agent (CWA) simulant aerosols and vapors that are interacting with combustion, deflagration, and detonation products. However, the measurement of aerosols and vapors is very challenging because of limited knowledge of the photophysics at varying temperatures and pressures, ...

The Radionuclide Aerosol Sampler and Analyzer (RASA) is a completely automated monitoring system that detects airborne radioactive particles and is one of the detection systems used in the U.S. and global International Monitoring System (IMS) of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) to detect nuclear detonations. Mainstream proposes develop a high-efficiency cyclone separa ...

In this project, we propose to identify and examine solution growth approaches for engineering perovskite single crystal for gamma spectrometry in a hand-held sensor format. We will demonstrate that the solution growth approach is able to produce perovskite single crystal in sufficient volume and quality to yield a detector crystal whose utilization presents no inherent environmental, health, or s ...

Miniaturized smart munitions are seeing increasing use across all branches of the Department of Defense (DoD) in order to meet the ever evolving mission needs for the U.S. warfighter. These smart micromuntions have been enabled by advances in capabilities and miniaturization of critical microelectonic and microelectromechanical systems such as sensor, navigational, communications, and triggering ...

It is challenging to detect CBRN weapons production facilities that are hidden in residential and industrial neighborhoods. Once the weapons are manufactured, they will be sealed and removed from the site of production, so developing techniques to reveal the presence of the weapons will likely be fruitless. In this project, we will develop indicators that can be applied covertly around suspect a ...

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the U.S. Strategic Command Center for Combating Weapons of Mass Destruction (SCC-WMD) requires transformational materials technology to support the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) of personnel and materials associated with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) development, manufacturing, and proliferation. Voxtel, Inc. proposes to fa ...