Award Data

ABSTRACT: The Air Force Flight Test Center (AFFTC) is interested in upgrading their test aircraft fleet (or a portion thereof) to have onboard smart sensors (OSS). The target SBIR product for this project is a set of hardware components that allows the integration of IEEE 1451.4 Smart Sensors into the Common Airborne Instrumentation System (CAIS) which is the most common data acquisition system c ...

The innovations proposed here are Ka-band (38 GHz) group III-nitride power FETs and the dislocation density reducing epitaxial growth methods (LPE) needed for their optimal performance and reliability.Ka-band power transistors with>60% Power Added Efficiency (PAE) are not commercially available. The primary limitations to their manufacture are lack of mature process technology at major GaN foundri ...

Firefly, in collaboration with Rochester Institute of Technology, proposes developing a space solar cell having record efficiency exceeding 40% (AM0) by the introduction of nanowires within the active region of the current limiting sub-cell. The introduction of these nanoscale features will enable realization of an intermediate band solar cell (IBSC), while simultaneously increasing the effective ...

This Phase II SBIR will execute the research to commercialization process developed in Phase I, when WorldWinds, Inc. developed and implemented a procedure to showcase graphical NOAA products for on-air consumption by the general public. Through collaboration with Baron Services, Inc., of Huntsville, AL, the Phase I project developed a prototypical composite Blended Total Precipitable Water produ ...

This phase I proposal addresses the need for microwave and millimeter wave Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs) for remote sensing applications of the earth's atmosphere. In this work, IIIAN proposes using group III-nitride materials, specifically AlGaN/GaN HEMT structures, to fabricate LNAs for microwave radiometers operating from 165 GHz up to 270 GHz. The group III-nitrides have excellent physica ...

This SBIR will develop and demonstrate acoustic sensor technology enabling real-time, remotely performed measuring and monitoring of sound pressure levels and noise exposure levels in long-duration space vehicles. The acoustic sensor technology developed will enable a network of continuously monitored, real-time acoustic sensors providing sound pressure level information as a function of frequenc ...

Adaptive control offers an opportunity to fulfill present and futureaircraft safety objectives though automatedvehicle recovery while maintaining performanceand stability requirements in the presence of unknown orvarying operating environment.Future aircraft are a natural application of adaptive control. Theseaircraft will be more fuel efficient, have longer operating ranges thoughmore flexible ai ...

ABSTRACT: Current air, ground and space networks are very dynamic with large-scale mobility needing human in-the-loop configuration to adapt to unforeseen situations. Humans and current automated systems cannot reconfigure consistently or fast enough. This leads to network performance not meeting mission needs. Airborne, space and ground networks are very dynamic, complex, and hard for the cur ...

This proposal is directed toward the development of innovative high-efficiency UV photocathodes based on the wide bandgap III-nitride semiconductors for reliable operation at high temperature and high radiation environments for future NASA missions near the Sun and in deep atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter. The proposed work includes the incorporation of these photocathodes on Al2O3-based high-tem ...

ABSTRACT: The future Airborne Network (AN) will include airborne nodes on wide body platforms that will perform internet working between heterogeneous networks operating with various protocols and communication link technologies. These nodes will have the capabilities to form the backbone routing structure of the AN. In such an environment, the topology and link statuses will dynamically change o ...