Award Data

The Iris Technology team which also include Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems (NGAS) and the University of Wisconsin, is attacking the problem of high-efficiency, low-volume, space-qualified cryocooler systems.The team has a firm starting point by leveraging the Northrop Grumman Microcryocooler and the Iris Technology mLCCE (Miniature Low Cost Control Electronics).TMU enhancement will start with ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) proposes to design, develop, and demonstrate a portable, non-invasive, real-time sensor to assess the chemical and physical health of solid rocket motors as a function of age without affecting the motors integrity nor having direct contact with the propellant. In Phase II, a sensor to monitor specific gas species that are markers of the chemical and mechanical aging pr ...

Thermally induced fatigue and residual stress introduced during fabrication are sources of failure in microelectronics, which raises reliability concerns for MDA and its system integrators. CFDRC has teamed with experts in the reliability of microelectronics packaging to develop a physics based modeling and testing protocol to correlate material properties and thermal loading conditions to stress ...

Our proposed second order uncertainty (SOU) product is a decision making software solution that addresses the problem of providing accurate and precisely defined decision courses of action (COAs) of complex, time-constrained problems in a fraction of the time required by alternative methods striving to achieve the same level of precision. Complex decision situations can deal with large volume of ...

The goal of this program is to design a lightweight optical bench capable of remaining stable under temperature and moisture changes, while isolating the precision optical array from vibrations such as engine noise and air turbulence. By integrating a customizable periodic stack in the bench, vibrations are attenuated more effectively than commercially available mounts. Additionally, the periodic ...

Control Theory tools and processes for analyzing the interactions of complex System of Systems (SoS) are lacking, specifically when sub-systems are independently designed and/or higher levels of SoS controls are applied. Integrating these sub-systems into the SoS, can result in dynamic interactions between these sub-systems and the SoS controls resulting in unexpectedly large deviations between ex ...

There is an urgent need to develop and demonstrate innovative control, design and analysis techniques to characterize the stability and performance of a system of systems (SoS) as a function of sub-system dynamics, network structure and control/decision processes. This is particularly true in the missile defense scenario, which involves a coordinated defense against threats. However, there is no e ...

In this research effort, GTD Unlimited will design tools for efficiently specifying, representing, and analyzing the interactions between control systems in System of Systems (SoS). Our approach will be to model the problem as an uncertain system and analyze the resulting models using control methods. Control methods can be related back to the standard Nyquist criterion for stability, ensuring t ...

DfR Solutions and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have formed a team of experts in solder joint reliability and gold embrittlement to perform a series of experiments that will provide the data necessary to create mechanistic reliability models. Critical to any application of these models and of interpreting experimental results is the ability to determine solder joint gold contaminatio ...

Gold contamination in Circuit Card Assembly (CCA) solder joints leads to brittle intermetallic compounds (IMCs), which is one of the major factors in solder joint failure. The conventional rule of thumb considers 3 wt% of gold (Au) as a safety threshold, which is not always reliable due to varieties of package platforms, solder types, reflux settings, operational and environmental conditions, etc. ...