Award Data

The goal of this program is to develop nanosacle electronics and packaging technology that is hardened to space and nuclear radiation. Vanderbilt will assist AET in the development of packaging technologies for lateral emission-based diamond devices characterized for temperature insensitivity and radiation hardness. A laterally configured diamond emission device can offer significant advantages ...

Aqwest proposes to investigate an innovative staged magnetocaloric refrigerator (SMCR) for thermal management of spacecraft payload electronics. SMCR offers a high-performance approach for thermal management of laser communication equipment and infrared (IR) sensors, while improving the overall payload energy efficiency and reducing its weight. The proposed project will leverage previous work by ...

Foreign missile threat will increase as ballistic missile technology becomes available on an international scale. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) requires high performance, high sensitivity and low noise infrared sensors for space based sensing applications that operate in environments where radiation hardness is essential to mission operation. Radiation hard by design (RHBD) readout integrated circu ...

Thermal batteries are a mission-critical component utilized in virtually every weapon system. All thermal batteries require four types of pellets that comprise the cell stack(s), i.e., the energy-producing portion of the battery. Pellet size (diameter and thickness) and the number of pellets required vary by battery type and application. Pellets are manufactured by compaction of their powdered co ...

Although there are numerous types of primary and secondary batteries which now fulfill a variety of roles within the Department of Defense (DOD), primary thermal batteries are arguably among the most important in terms of their impact across all service branches, to include the Missile Defense Agency. Along with increased performance capabilities and packaging flexibility, thermal battery manufac ...

Thermal batteries are employed in virtually every strategic defense and tactical weapon system. As systems capabilities continue to increase, future thermal batteries will be required to deliver higher power and energy in packages smaller and lighter than those available with baseline lithium-silicon (LiSi) / FeS2 technology. Although ENSER’s proprietary LiSi / cobalt disulfide (CoS2) system p ...

The FIRST RF approach to multi-beam phased array antennas proposed for this phase I program uses innovative application of techniques traditionally used in communication networks in order to simultaneously perform RF analog beamforming of multiple beams simultaneously on a single RF manifold. The proposed methods are scalable to a large number of simultaneous beams, and are independent of both the ...

Phased array antenna systems are growing in use within military systems. These arrays of thousands of elements need precise control of the aperture distributions to meet requirements for gain, sidelobes, etc. Errors in these phase and amplitude distributions over time will degrade the performance of these apertures. FIRST RF favors simple concepts with little or no hardware impact that fully ch ...

Our PHASE II effort intends to take forward the 3 best Black Surface Processes as a result of the PHASE I study effort. The processes chosen: Deep Space Black (DSB), Deep Cobre Black (DCB), Deep Immersion Black (DIB), have shown the potential to meet the surface quality needs of the community on a variety of substrate materials. All require additional effort in PHASE II to open the "application ...

Next generation BMD sensor systems are anticipated to be highly networked. One radar concept has a single or a few illuminators and multiple receive antennas. It is desirable that the receive arrays be electronically steerable and support multiple simultaneous receive beams. Therefore, these future surveillance radars need to be more agile. To meet their mission objectives, they require wideband, ...