Award Data

There is a growing need to accurately characterize nuclear materials not only for nuclear safeguards and nonproliferation treaty verification but also for forensics and provenance. Presently, nuclear material identification requires samples to be collected and sent to laboratories for analysis using large and expensive equipment, such as inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers (ICP-MS) or se ...

The Nu-Trek team is proposing to develop µDet, a low Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) read out integrated circuit (IC) for gamma and neuron detectors. µDet offers pulse shape digitization, which in turn enables gamma-neutron discrimination. This is a game changing capability that brings laboratory-level functionality to the field. In Phase I the Nu-Trek Team will develop a baseline design for the ...

TDA Research, Inc. (TDA), designed, built, and tested a dense array of 100 very low cost infrasonic sensors. Due to their low cost (1/100x-1/10x the cost of other infrasound sensors), they can be economically deployed in very large numbers; such large arrays can gather more information than a few expensive sensors. They are sensitive from 0.1 Hz - 100 Hz down to 0.08 Pa. We tested the sensors in s ...

DTRA uses High Fidelity Computer Codes (HFCC) to investigate weapon effects and techniques for countering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). End-to-end HFCC simulations in support of the DTRA Agent Defeat Warfighter Capability will require calculations including multiple phenomena that occur in vastly different time scales (µ-sec to hours). As DTRA becomes increasingly reliant on computational mo ...

During the Phase I effort, Semandex Networks and its team developed a prototype capability to detect trends in research publications by automatically identifying emerging concepts within the data. The implemented capability provides insights into past and

Terrorist use of radioactive nuclear materials via nuclear and/or radiological dispersion devices (dirty bombs) is a serious threat. Therefore, it is crucial to detect proliferation of nuclear material. Critical challenges include: (a) high sensitivity detection of signature emissions from radioactive isotopes, and (b) cost-effectiveness for deployment of sensor networks across large storage facil ...

For effective protection against radiated threats, it is important to understand not only the physics of the threats, but also to quantify the effects they have on mission-critical electrical systems. Radiated vulnerability and susceptibility testing requires delivery of high peak power and peak electric fields to distant targets. The most practical solution to simulate such environments on large ...

With the advent of high-density low-power sub-20nm technology processes and circuits with tens-of-billions of transistors, radiation-induced single-event effects present a new set of design challenges for terrestrial applications. Developing reliable single-event effect resilient microelectronics in these modern technology nodes is a resource and time-intensive endeavor that further requires valid ...

Aret Associates and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) propose an interdisciplinary effort to further develop and validate a robust, operational biomonitoring application that can process soil microbiome data to reliably detect episodic and low-level chronic contamination while maintaining low false alarm rate.The Phase II SBIR work will build upon the successful Phase I proof-of-concept demonst ...

Deep Learning for standoff detection of Special Nuclear Material (DLeN) applies the same deep learning techniques that allow computers to beat human performance in image recognition and the game of Go to detecting Special Nuclear Material. Spectral analysis and signal processing can in some cases be augmented by the use of much larger neural nets that conduct much deeper analysis of features of th ...