Award Data

Future interceptors would benefit from advanced propulsion capabilities, with higher performance in smaller, volume-constrained systems. Innovative propellant chemistry is needed to enable substantially greater performance in smaller packages. One factor limiting the maximum performance achievable in modern solid propellants is the slow ignition and combustion of the propellant’s metal fuel part ...

The major challenge in constellation-wide deployment of tactical payloads in low-Earth orbit (LEO) lies in achieving the performance requirements that are imposed by constellation dynamics while maintaining a design simplicity that is compatible with large-scale production, along with typical constraints on size, mass, and power consumption. Cesium’s proposed solution is a small reconfigurable p ...

Proteus is an inexpensive, long duration, expendable profiler that collects ocean data for the Navy. The data, transmitted via satellite and made available via a remote portal, enhances existing and future capabilities by characterizing seasonal changes in ocean properties including salinity, temperature, optical properties, and ocean background noise. Proteus is capable of being air deployed from ...

The Re-Designed Lightweight Gearbox

Military respirator masks provide the Warfighter with life critical protection against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats. To ensure the safety, comfort, and effectiveness of the American Warfighter, it is essential that every Warfighter be assigned a respirator that is properly sized and fitted. However, current methods for sizing and fitting respirators depend on manu ...

The Navy relies on handling quality ratings (HQRs) for evaluation of its aircraft to ensure that it can maintain, train, and equip combat-ready forces. The aviator’s perspective is vital for assessing aircraft handling, but can be difficult to obtain from Pilots without distracting them or relying on their memory. Pilot physiological state fluctuates with the amount of workload required to handl ...

The assessment of aircraft flying qualities and the resultant impact on pilot workload is critical for the evaluation and tuning of aircraft configurations. A reliance on subjective self-report ratings and an inability to account for cross-pilot variability lead to reliability concerns when evaluating flying qualities for aircraft under specific tasks and conditions. Despite advances in the quanti ...

Traditional RF (Radio Frequency) communications are increasingly susceptible to jamming, interception, and even detection. Free space optics can mitigate these issues while adding benefits such as bandwidth and a highly directional nature. In order to make this happen, a highly developed system must be constructed consisting of exceedingly precise control systems and novel beam steering techniques ...

In Phase I, Shear Form, Inc will apply a severe plastic deformation (SPD) processing technology to ultra-high strength steels (UHSS), specifically 4340M and AF 9628, to enable penetration improvement for munitions casings. Equal channel angular extrusion (ECAE), a fully scalable SPD method, will be used to process the steels under ausforming conditions. This will facilitate microstructural enginee ...

This SBIR delivers two optical ground stations, based on commercial design, to support experimentation and laser communication with AFRL spacecraft.  These assets facilitate research in flexible space operations, secure low probability of intercept (LPI) communications, and management of shared resources with disparate commercial networks.  The standards based design supports day and night opera ...