Award Data

Advances in materials and automation are rapidly reshaping the American manufacturing economy, and must be embraced to sustain a strong manufacturing sector in the United States. Additive manufacturing is possibly the fastest growing example of this trend, growing at an astonishing compound annual growth rate of 25.7%. The plastic materials market for additive manufacturing, valued at $700M in 202 ...

Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in food packaging, as coatings for cloth (e.g. Scotchgard), firefighting foams, electronics, and industrial and automotive components. Being perfluorinated species, they are engineered to breakdown slowly (half-life >92 years in water), and thus persist for very long times. Their high water-solubility makes them especially dangerous, and much like perchlo ...

Chemical warfare agents such as the lethal nerve agent soman are a major source of risk to military personnel. Currently, pyridostigmine bromide (PB) is the only FDA-approved pretreatment to counteract the effects of soman. The rationale behind PB administration is that it acts as a “temporary” inhibitor of AChE. This precludes nerve agents from irreversible inactivation of AChE, thereby mitig ...

To address the Chemical and Biological Defense (CBD) need for a field-portable mass spectrometer for small molecule drugs in clinical samples, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a new FiEldable DRug Mass Analysis (FERMA) system based on a combination of portable mass spectrometry technology with laser desorption/ionization for use with aqueous clinical samples. The FERMA system ...

To address the CBD’s need for real-time analytical technology for multicomponent vapor identification and quantification, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to continue the development of a new Photoacoustic Gasses Optical Detector and Analyzer (PAGODA) autonomous, network-enabled photoacoustic spectrometer (PAS) for the correlation, analysis, and identification of measured spectra. In t ...

A program to develop a compact, MLA-based, LWIR, full-motion-video hyperspectral imager for chemical detection is proposed. The proposed Hyperspectral Chemical Imaging Sensor (HyCIS) builds upon Surface Optics’ real-time hyperspectral imaging activities, including our 3D full-motion-video spectral imaging (FMV-SI) technology and our MIDIS hyperspectral image processor. Simultaneously sampling 16 ...

SA Photonics is please to submit the proposal for the HawkEye compact LWIR hyperspectral imaging system. HawkEye leverages SA Photonics previous visible, SWIR, and LWIR programs to result in a compact, hand held, battery operated hyperspectral imager in a low cost design approach. Furthermore, HawkEye will leverages SA Photonics expertise in warfighter body worn equipment and ground troop personal ...

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, DTRA, currently uses technologies capable of detecting IEDs using airborne sensors that are demonstrated as reliable. These systems are only used for detection purposes and are not capable of neutralizing the IED. Due to IEDs being located in remote, dangerous, and hostile locations, there is high casualty risk for personnel to manually neutralize the target by ...

Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are a dangerous and effective weapon system that today’s military warfighters and innocent civilians regularly experience. IEDs are created with randomly assembled materials and their payloads may include projectiles, biological toxins, and other dangerous items that can cause injury or death to personnel and equipment. Detection and neutralization of these we ...

This is a proposal to develop a unique, Ultrashort Pulsed Off-axis Digital Holography (USPODH) system, enabling the high frequency imaging of detailed 3D structures within aerosol fields under harsh thermodynamic conditions and high optical depths where ordinary imaging is essentially useless. Many powerful imaging methods have failed to provide this capability because noise from multiple scatteri ...