Award Data

The Air Force has a strategic need for a fuel source that is renewable (and which does not rely on foreign petroleum sources). Several approaches to a renewable fuel source have been investigated; with “artificial photosynthesis” being one example. At its core, the photosynthesis reaction is a photoinduced charge separation reaction with light being concentrated by antenna complexes onto a c ...

The occurrence of combustion instability has long been a matter of serious concern in the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines due to the high rate of energy release in a confined volume in which energy losses are relatively small. Shear layer instabilities and intermittent growth rates of the mixing layer cause fluctuations in the burning rates and result in acoustic waves triggering ...

The electron transferring unit of enzymes – apoenzyme and cofactor are deeply buried inside its protein structure, therefore efficient electronic communication between the electrode and the biocatalytic enzyme is inefficient. The development of a reproducible approach that allows efficient electronic connection between enzymes and electrodes would meet the major technical needs in the developmen ...

The real-time implementation of controls in nonlinear systems remains one of the great challenges in applying advanced control technology. Often, linearization around a set point is the only practical approach, and many controllers implemented in hardware systems are simple PID feedback mechanisms. To apply Pontryagin’s principle or Bellman’s equation using conventional hardware and algorith ...

The ever-decreasing size of the electronic microchips and the ever-increasing density of electronic components required to support future Air Force platforms are creating the problem of substantial localized heat generation that can impair component operation. State of the art thermal interface materials (TIMs), that are used to dissipate heat from the source to the spreader in a microchip, are se ...

Detecting explosives and weapons under clothing or in hand carried packages, and imaging terrain and objects through fog and smoke are two high-priority needs that can be met using light in the Terahertz frequency range. However, to image concealed threats, and aid in navigation in fog and smoke, a practical, low cost THz camera is needed. Intelligent Optical Systems (IOS) in collaboration with Re ...

We propose to investigate the feasibility of obtaining fast and accurate trajectories using global geopotential models representing departures from the two-body plus J2 terms. The proposed geopotential formulations and numerical integration methods rely on multi-core processors and the emerging massive parallel capabilities of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) available to common personal computer ...

Digital electronics is approaching its limits in meeting the demand for increased processing speeds. Photonics, while promising high processing speed, is lacking integration capacity. Plasmonics promises to combine the information capacity of photonics with the integration density of electronics. The team of Luna Innovations, UCLA and Virginia Tech proposes to develop plasmonic logic devices and c ...

The key to making quantum key distribution practical (especially for free-space applications) is to be able to use weak laser pulses (WLP) instead of single photons, while at the same time making sure that any third party wanting to avoid detection and mount an eavesdropping attack is restricted to using beam-splitting rather than photon-number splitting (PNS). In this effort, we propose a novel s ...

The proposed effort develops the understanding required to assess the utility of using OAM states and quantum entanglement as a novel protocol for quantum key distribution for propagation through an aberrating medium such as the atmosphere. In addition a conceptual design of an experiment that is appropriate to further the development of this capability will be developed on the proposed Phase I e ...