Award Data

Design analysis of parachute recovery systems has relied on a combination of core design principles, historical empirical data, and extensive testing for decades. Parachute motion involves complex phenomena involving porous bluff-body aerodynamics and highly deformable cloth. The proposed project is a plugin for the DoD CREATE-AV Kestrel simulation suite that will enable high-fidelity simulations ...

The main objective of this STTR Phase I effort is two-fold. First, to develop a robust approach for coupling the flow solver Kestrel with the multidisciplinary software tool AERO Suite in order to enable the physics-based modeling and simulation of the dynamics of Aerodynamics Decelerator Systems (ADS) such as parachutes from deployment to terminal velocity or terminal descent and touchdown, and t ...

On this effort Toyon Research Corp. and The Pennsylvania State University are developing deep learning-based algorithms for object recognition and new class discovery in look-down infrared (IR) imagery. Our approach involves the development of a hybrid classifier that exploits both transfer learning and semi-supervised paradigms in order to maintain good generalization accuracy, especially when li ...

Traditional approaches to accelerated fatigue testing rely on heuristic methods with thresholds based mostly on experience and engineering judgment. These methods generally do not apply to the multiaxial dynamic loading situations characteristic of most aerospace applications and often result in uncharacteristic fatigue damage and failure modes during testing. To overcome the limitations of tradit ...

Filamentation of ultra-short laser pulse propagation in non-linear media offers significant potentials allowing to address numerous problems in military and commercial sectors. However, practical implementation of this requires an ability to control the USLP at its propagation through inhomogeneous media, like turbulent atmosphere. On the basis of our approach for combating turbulence effects on p ...

High speed air vehicles operate at material strength performance limits and are at significant risk when subjected to additional localized heating that can result in softening, pitting and burn-through the material and potentially change the vehicle structural profile. These effects degrade aerodynamic performance. The team of CFDRC and UDRI proposed to develop, validate and deliver a comprehensiv ...

To understand how insects and crustaceans sense and process light fields, researchers need a projection system that provides realistic wide field of view (FOV), high-speed imagery from UV to red (320-650nm) that includes polarization control. Insects and crustaceans have vastly different visual acuity and wavelength response from humans. In addition, some can sense polarization. Therefore, commerc ...

Areté proposes the development of Q-switched semiconductor lasers that can be scaled to produce high output peak powers within the blue/green wavelength band. The proposed system will utilize nanostructure quantum wavefunction engineering for gain material designs having extended excited state lifetimes and suppressed non-radiative processes to enable energy storage for high-peak-power optical pu ...

In this project, Citrine Informatics and the ADAPT Center at the Colorado School of Mines propose to build an informatics-driven system to understand the effects of defects in additive manufactured parts. The entire history of each sample will be captured on this system; from specific printing parameters and details of precursor materials through to part characterizations and performance measureme ...

Phase I of this effort involves the creation of a comprehensive end-to-end model of a novel holographic polarimeter.The polarimeter that can be constructed based on our model will be able to determine the full polarization properties (Mueller matrix elements) of scattering, reflecting and absorbing media as a function of the materials depth.Unlike previous attempts, this system will be a real-time ...