Award Data

This Phase I STTR proposal will demonstrate nanostructured “metal-black” coatings to enhance absorption by thin film solar cells. The problem is that silicon has low absorption due to its indirect gap. The opportunity is that nano-scale metallic scattering centers increase the effective optical path length and enhance the solar electric-field strength in thin-film solar cells, leading to more ...

Our team proposes to develop, test, and commercialize a Micro Air Vehicle Tether Recovery APparatus (MAVTRAP). This system operates by deploying an instrumented MAV capture device attached via a tether system from a mothership unmanned air vehicle (UAV). The instrumented MAV capture device contains an integrated avionics suite. Our team will determine and control the precise mother ship UAV loi ...

New, innovative laser spectroscopy technology will be developed for performance quantification and combustion characterization in a Rotational Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE). The effort will push the state of the art in tunable laser absorption spectroscopy to enable fast time response diagnostics of the extreme pressure and temperature conditions of an RDRE.

Cyber Risk Assessments for Threatened Environments (CRATE) is a system that produces actionable, mission-level alerts when anomalous behaviors indicative of cyber-attack are discovered within deployed mission-critical cyber-systems. CRATE is particularly relevant to deployment scenarios involving third-party infrastructure, such as deployment to a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider or other clo ...

U.S. forces are benefiting from automation systems of unprecedented sophistication, empowered by advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and human-systems interaction. In air combat operations, onboard intelligent assistants monitor the aircraft, interpret and carry out commands, and report aircraft and system status, mission progress, threats and alerts. Because pilots and agents are part of a n ...

The ability of Large-eddy simulation (LES) techniques to accurately predict combustion instabilities and the onset of lean blow-out is not yet firmly established, especially in realistic operating conditions. A number of modeling choices play an importan...

Military applications for the use of directed electromagnetic energy, which include high power microwave (HPM), seek to disrupt electronic systems by exploiting non-linearity in semiconductors. While current mode second breakdown is a thermal non-linearity often exploited, it has been demonstrated that a broad class of semiconductors have more subtle non-linearities that can be utilized to induce ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer research project addresses the perception and learning of complex sound patterns within complex auditory scenes. The objective is to model auditory signal processing, pattern recognition and learning in the human auditory system. Our novel approach simulates the nonlinear signal processing that has been observed in auditory physiology. By mimicking functiona ...

The objective is to develop zonal multi-physics capability for turbulent combustion simulations. The foundation of the proposed work is a novel Pareto-Efficient Combustion (PEC) framework for fidelity-adaptive combustion modeling. The PEC model utilizes a combustion submodel assignment, combining the low-cost flamelet-based models with the more expensive finite rate chemistry models where necessar ...

The proposed effort aims to deliver a novel process model for carbon-carbon manufacturing to determine thermo-mechanical properties of these materials and their components, thereby enabling a faster cycle for material development for hypersonic platforms. The proposed solution consists of (1) requirement and functionality analyses, (2) a six-level model representing the key steps of the manufactur ...