Award Data

The growing reliance on wireless electronic systems presents us with a need for new diversity antennas for civilian and military platforms. These antennas must take account of platform curvature, material treatments and nearby interactions, all of which affect the antenna performance. To support the development and design of these antennas, a new generation of analysis is required which retains ...

Warhead design calculations and weapons effectiveness estimates require a methodology to predict structural response and the associated damage to air targets from reactive munitions. The objectives for the proposed Phase I study effort are to develop candidate launch conditioning, reaction initiation and reaction rate methodology, to incorporate existing ballistic, blast and quasi-static pres ...

In spite of their high speed and precision, contemporary computing platforms fail to deliver the computational density required for real- time image processing towards the realization of truly intelligent and autonomous behavior in today's weapons systems and computers. And yet the simplest of living systems are able to perceive and interpret their environment effortlessly, using only a ...

A novel Separate Process Diesel (SPD) engine design with an unconventional gas cycle is presented which uses three interdependent chambers to process the working fluid; a piston compressor, a rotating combustor unit and a piston expander. The SPD cycle outperforms current lightweight high power density engines primarily due to its increased mass induction per cycle. The SPD compressor cylin ...

The Virtual Engineering firm is a reality, with a team of scientists and engineers scattered at home sites working together to solve tough engineering problems. This SBIR will perform research and development to provide collaborative system engineering tools for network engineering projects. We will explore new directions for collaborative systems engineering (SE) that enable distributed req ...

Scientific innovations are commercially worthless until they are matched by corresponding manufacturing innovations. This dilemma characterizes the current status of nanometer metal powder technology. On one hand, years of scientific research have unambiguously demonstrated the utility of nanoscale metal materials for a myriad of high technology applications; on the other hand, current manu ...

A feasibility investigation is proposed for designing a HIRF aircraft test facility which reduces existing test time by at least a factor of two without comprising the HIRF requirements for aspect angle/polarization and field strengths (both average and peak). SEA proposes a hybrid TEM cell/reverberation facility which will reduce test time involved with repositioning test equipment or test ...

We propose a new method for adaptive nonstationary spectral estimation and harmonic analysis for stepped-frequency inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging. The essential idea is to construct a set of orthogonal windows that have little spectral leakage and use each of these windows to create an independent spectral estimate. A data dependent and frequency dependent weighted average ...

Thermal Wave Imaging, Inc. will study the feasibility of a handheld device for quantitative identification and measurement of hidden corrosion, using pulsed thermography. The device will be capable of field operation under battery power, and in confined spaces where physical access to the sample is limited. The device will be designed as an add-on to a generic IR camera, using an open archite ...

As the field has developed, three primary methods for performing IR Nondestructive Inspection (NDI) have emerged, each employing a different mode of excitation (pulsed, stepped, lock-in) of the sample. Researchers have demonstrated impressive results on a wide variety of materials using all three techniques, and each method appears to possess inherent strengths and weaknesses. However, an exh ...