Award Data

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of using an innovative, durable, low friction, and non-toxic solid lubricant coating for foil air bearings for air cycle machines (ACM). Acrees coating provides superior wear characteristics at all temperatures and provides a substantial improvement over polyimide type coatings that are currently used on ACMs. The coating consists of tw ...

SA Photonics has developed a concept for our Multiple Optical Beam Landing System (MOBLS) to provide autonomous landing of aircraft in RF denied environments. MOBLS utilizes multiple, redundant methods to determine the real-time location and bearing of the aircraft relative to the carrier-based landing strip. By having built in redundant modalities, MOBLS provides highly reliable landing informati ...

As the warfighter is increasingly using more highly integrated instruments, e.g. a laser rangefinder (LRF) combined with a laser designator and an imager, the need to decrease the size of these components becomes more important.Compact small munition applications of rangefinders particularly place an emphasis on size of the optical front end.In order to make the transceiver more compact, special a ...

The Department of the Navy has a need for the development of an additive manufacturing (AM) process for key vacuum electronic device components to meet on-demand, flexible, and affordable manufacturing requirements. The developed manufacturing method has a potential to reduce cost of vacuum electronics by as much as 70% as well as simplify and hence expedite production process of these devices by ...

Ultra-short pulse lasers have advantages over continuous-wave lasers for directed-energy applications due to the high peak powers that can be reached. Directed-energy weapons are profoundly limited by the aberrations caused by atmospheric turbulence and current adaptive optics can correct for these aberrations only when the propagation medium is reciprocal. Unfortunately, nonlinear effects in the ...

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 ...

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies covering a broad range of technologies and processes have been under continuous and accelerating development since the 80s. While there are still fundamental hurdles such as low production rates and small sizes, AM holds tremendous promise in terms of revolutionizing manufacturing. Recent trends include direct-printing and incorporating sensors and electr ...

Laboratory investigations have suggested that acoustically or vibrationally inducing motion in buried targets can aid in improving target detectability through a characteristic response related to differential target motion. This gain is realized by adding an additional degree of freedom, modulation due to motion in the GPR return signal, to use as a discriminating feature. The AKELA team is propo ...