Award Data

We propose the development of a 6-inch wafer bonding process to allow bonding of a multi-junction inverted metamorphic (IMM) tandem solar cell structure to an upright single-junction Ge solar cell. The process will use SU8 epoxy to provide the mechanical connection between the substrates with an embedded metallic grid to provide electrical conductivity across the bonded interface. This process w ...

The goal of the Phase I effort is to design, develop and demonstrate a novel solid-state ceramic-based voltage isolator and demonstrate its potential to provide a highly radiation tolerant digital voltage isolation solution applicable to a wide range of NASA mission requirements. The related design success QorTek has will lead to development in Phase I of a completely new gate drive technology wi ...

This project will develop advanced DC link capacitors using flexible ultrathin glass dielectric materials. The glass capacitor will be able to be operated in a broad temperature range (-150 degree C to 500 degree C), frequency (1 kHz to 1 MHz), and high voltage (>1,000 volts). This SBIR project will be focused on examining the technical performance of the glass dielectrics at very high (>200 deg C ...

Wick properties are often the limiting factor in a heat pipe design. Current technology uses conventional sintering of metal powders, screen wick, or grooves to fabricate realtively simplistic wick geometries. Additive manufacturing (laser sintering) of a porous structure would allow much greater freedom in defining the wick geometry and properties. One example is the RDU thermosyphon wick. Valuab ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop a multifunctional electrolyte for high energy density abuse-tolerant lithium ion batteries with 5 V cathodes such as LiCoPO4. The multifunctional electrolyte comprises of a non-flammable ionic liquid as solvent and a porous ionomer membrane which serve as both separator and lithium cation source. No additional lithium salt such as LiPF6 or LiTFSi is required. ...

Aeroelasticity plays an important role in the design and development of highly flexible flight vehicles and blended wing body configurations. The operating margins on these flight systems are limited by non-linear unsteady phenomena such as stall, flutter, gusts, limit cycle oscillations, vortex roll-up which exhibit strong coupling between the aero-loads and structural deformations. The use of hi ...

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and, in particular, intelligent, autonomous aircraft operating in the National Airspace (NAS) have the potential to significantly impact modern society. They could perform difficult and dangerous tasks such as fire fighting, border patrol, and search and rescue, and dull tasks such as surveying crops. The elimination of a cockpit and the pilots makes UAS operation at ...

The ultimate aim of proposed efforts are to develop innovative material and process (M&P) engineering technology to reduce thermal resistance between space power components and cold plates of the space system. This proposal will use AMSENG produced few layer graphene with carbon nano tubes (CNT) to design and process the Advances Thermal Interface Material Systems (ATIMS) to achieve the performanc ...

CU Aerospace proposes the development of a new parallel nonlinear program (NLP) solver software package. NLPs allow the solution of complex optimization problems, and there exist today a number of capable NLP solvers typically used within the astrodynamics community. Unfortunately, none of them take into account the capabilities of a high performance computer with thousands of processors, nor use ...

The primary objective of the Phase I investigation is to develop and demonstrate an innovative solution that can enable very high precision pointing accuracy (