Award Data

Intuitive mission displays and planning capabilities are needed to enhance pilot and operator situation awareness when teaming with next-generation autonomous vehicles in tactical operations. To address this, we will design and demonstrate Tactical Interfaces for Teaming with Autonomy (TITAN) to increase the shared awareness for manned/unmanned teams in distributed and complex communications envir ...

Our objective is to develop advanced mediator architectures for efficient electron transfer in enzymatic fuel cells (EFCs) for low power systems. The proposed EFC will leverage ongoing research at both CFDRC and Michigan State University to provide a fully-integrated lightweight, low-cost, manufacturable, and renewable power supply, for various military and civilian applications. EFC systems offer ...

Accurate real-time waterborne pathogen detection is of paramount importance to security of U.S. military forces and installations. Fieldable high-throughput pathogen concentration is a critical analytical need for enhanced detection performance. Existing concentration methods are time-consuming, bulky, labor-intensive, power- and reagent-hungry, and consequently ill-suited for battlefield deployme ...

Higher efficiency solar cells are needed to reduce mass, volume, and cost of DoD space missions. However, to achieve higher efficiency and radiation hardness of the best to date multi-junction photovoltaic (PV) devices, several challenges must be addressed. This project aims to develop: 1) Quantum Well (QW)-based multi-junction cell that exhibits enhanced efficiency, and 2) Radiation-hardened PV c ...

The purpose of this STTR is to develop comprehensive detailed kinetics for oxidation of C-SiC-SiO2-rubber in extreme oxidizing environment. This material is used as a coating on the outer surface of Navy weapon systems. In order to predict the fate of this material under extreme conditions and mitigate the degradation of the coating, a comprehensive oxidation mechanism is required. In Phase I, CFD ...

The goal of the proposed research is to develop advanced computational tool for high-fidelity simulations of hypersonic non-equilibrium plasmas. Octree adaptive Cartesian mesh will be used for automatic mesh generation and dynamic mesh adaptation to plasma properties, particularly important for hypersonic flows with strong shock waves, transient laminar and turbulent domains with large gradients o ...

Higher efficiency solar cells are needed to reduce solar array mass, volume, and cost for Air Force space missions. Intermediate-band quantum-dot (QD) solar cells can yield dramatically higher efficiencies than current multi-junction (MJ) technologies. However, several issues must be addressed to demonstrate manufacturable, high efficiency devices. CFDRC aims to develop: 1) High-efficiency, ligh ...

The objective of this Phase I project is to evaluate the use of novel Laser Induced Surface Improvement (LISI) techniques to provide surface modification to substrate materials which will provide superior wear resistance in extreme conditions. The specific application of interest is the hypersonic metal-to-metal contact that occurs at high speed test track facilities that can and has lead to catas ...

In this STTR Phase I project, CFD Research Corporation and University of Nebraska at Omaha will develop a preliminary computationally-driven first-principles framework for discovery and design of non-RE-containing alloys for high temperature applications. While rare-earth (RE) based alloys have played a pivotal role in modern defense and high-tech industry, sustainability of RE-based materials is ...

The overall objective of this effort is to identify, and validate a suitable methodology and the associated multi-scale computational technique for predictive assessment of corrosion fatigue damage in Naval aircraft. Annual costs for corrosion inspection and repair of military aircraft are estimated to exceed $1B. Predictive modeling of corrosion fatigue damage is challenging since it has to captu ...