Award Data

Hypersonic missile defense systems are being designed to reach global threats. During flight, external surfaces are predicted to reach temperatures in excess of 2200C. As a result, innovative, high performance thermal protection systems (TPS) are of great demand. Among ultra-high temperature ceramics (UHTC), it is well known that ZrB2- and HfB2-based materials have high melting temperatures and ...

Gallium Nitride (GaN) substrates are ideal materials for fabrication of high-power and high-frequency devices based on III-V materials. The current state-of-the-art Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) methods are plagued by several challenges, including, surface charge affects due to surface contamination, and sub-surface damages, which can limit the quality of III-V devices. Furthermore, there is ...

Structured Materials Industries, Inc. (SMI), working with others have demonstrated functioning fundamental memristor material technology. In this program, working with our University partner and end use collaborators, we propose to provide an infrastructure for making memristor materials at production scales, expand/refine the known memristor materials, provide samples of the produced memristor ma ...

ABSTRACT: A system that operates at room temperature and that could scan for concealed weapons from standoff distances of >10 m would be a tremendous asset for US military homeland security personnel worldwide. THz imaging can, potentially, be used for this application, but it requires the development of a new class of THz detectors whereby the signal to noise ratios are improved significantly. ...

The Navy has need of assessing the river environment including bathymetry, flow velocity profile, and navigational obstructions. While improvements in measurement fidelity and reduction in cost have come about by the use of multiple drifters, measurement quality is lost due to convergent drifter trajectories, and cost/risk remains high due to personnel effort required for deployment. An autonomous ...

This proposal addresses key open challenges identified during the LAGR program for the practical use of adaptive, vision-based robot navigation in commercial settings. First, the adaptive vision system learns quickly, but forgets as quickly. This will be addressed by using an ensemble of "expert" classifiers, each of which specializes for a particular environment and can be quickly activated when ...

Quantitative predictions of reactive flow dynamics from large-scale simulations of Liquid Rocket Engines (LRE) appear to be model dependent. Relationships and coupling among the dominant mechanisms most responsible for destabilization are obscured by the complexities of the model and subtle consequences of inherent ad hoc approximations not supported by mathematical rationale. The reliability of ...

EO/IR elements of the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) responsible for detecting and tracking ballistic missile threats encounter extraordinarily challenging threat and scene phenomenology. Specifically, non-stationary clutter characteristic of airborne and satellite-based sensor systems, along with dim target signatures, closely-spaced objects, and dense debris clouds typical of ballistic ...

We propose to develop ultradense plasmonic integrated devices and circuits for optical interconnect compatible with the electronic circuitry. In our proposal, we will employ engineered metallic nanostructures that combine energy concentration by plasmonic lenses and retardation-based plasmonic resonances to even further boost the efficiency of materials exhibiting optical nonlinearity. These plas ...

The goal of this program is to develop devices that can detect small electric fields over large frequency ranges while being compact and power efficient. We propose an electro-optic resonant plasmon that enhances the electro-optic phase shift in a small volume (