Award Data

Recreational drug use by military personnel can impact soldier preparedness and performance especially in difficult and demanding environments. One challenge for monitoring illicit drug use is that current tests rely on the identification of specific chemical structures. Small variants in the chemistry of a drug can evade detection. In this Phase I SBIR, we will develop a lateral flow test that ...

We propose to investigate, in collaboration with the Massachusetts General Hospital Voice Center and Altec, Inc., the application of surface electromyography (sEMG) to assessing cognitive workload, strain, and overload. Specifically, sEMG sensors placed on the face and neck will detect emotional/motor responses to workload strain. The proposed effort will build on the substantial sEMG experience o ...

Systems that operate in constrained environments depend on the acoustics in several ways. Harbor defense systems detect intruders (peopleand/or vessels) by either listening for their noises (passively) or by pinging on them and detecting their echoes (actively). Furthermore, suchsystems may also form the equivalent of an underwater cell phone network using sound to carry the information. The acous ...

Historically, the monitoring and detection of biological threats has been carried out via the deployment of high sensitivity / high complexity monitoring nodes to insure high probability of detection and low false alarm rate. Unfortunately, this detection strategy has inherent limits with respect to coverage and response due to its high deployment/support costs, mandating a new approach to environ ...

Inspecting for and detecting counterfeit, unapproved material substitutions or substandard processed raw material using existing processes is difficult, time consuming and expensive.Ocean Bay, LLC and the Primary Investigator, Karen Bruer, formed a team consisting of Ocean Bay, LLC, Savanah River National Laboratory and Old Dominion University, to apply for DLA15C-001:Detecting Substandard, Noncon ...

Adaptive Optics allow ground-based astronomical observatories to overcome atmospheric distortion limited observation by using natural and artificial guide stars to measure the distortion. Sodium-layer guide stars provide near all-sky coverage for high resolution astronomy. Over the last 20 years, Optically Pumped Semiconductor Laser (OPSL), also referred to as Vertically Extended Cavity Surface ...

The proposed project will develop advanced modeling capabilities for high-fidelity liquid-fuel spray calculations. State-of-the-art multiphase combustion models will be implemented in a volume-filtered Eulerian-Lagrangian framework that can easily be ported into existing CFD codes. Unlike traditional methods, the proposed strategy will ensure convergence under mesh refinement of the interphase exc ...

We propose development of an improved bottom database suitable for use in the frequency range of 1-10 kHz. Measured transmission loss (TL) and reverberation level (RL) will be jointly processed in building the database. The influence of the rough sea surface, rough seafloor, as well as subbottom heterogeneity will be accounted for during database generation. The rough sea surface will be character ...

Near-Field Scanning Microwave Microscopy (SMM) is a technique relying on a raster scan of a microwave probe across a sample surface, while measuring its reflected microwave signal. The existing technologies are limited to the surface analysis, and are not compatible with liquid environment. These limitations are addressed by the proposed wideband 3D tomography SMM with sub-surface analysis capabil ...

Waste generation at forward bases creates significant challenges; its disposal presents an economic cost with no direct benefit and its accumulation or burning is a health hazard. The bioconversion of waste into useful compounds could save thousands annually for every soldier and tens of millions in capital expenditure. However, widespread adoption is impeded by low conversion efficiency. We propo ...