Award Data

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research phase I program will develop a new class of surface plasmon enhanced photovoltaic devices that exhibit increased current collection. Photon management, the manipulation of the incident optical field to increase the probability that a photon is absorbed in the active region of the cell, is critical to the development of next generation thin film sol ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Quantum cryptography, and in particular Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a secure method to distribute a secret key between two distant authorized partners whose security is based on the laws of physics. Current public key cryptosystems have not been proven to be secure and are based on the computational complexity of evaluating one-way functions. These functions are easily evaluated, but extrem ...

Photovoltaics, while promising clean and reliable energy source, is not yet compatible with fossil energy for most applications. Organic-based solar cells have potential to reduce the cost of solar energy due to low-cost active materials, high-throughput reel-to-reel deposition technologies, low-temperature processing and application versatility. Currently organic photovoltaics (OPV) cannot commer ...

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 objective of this project is to develop a practical finite element-based simulation of spin-pit tests of disks. The performance of disks in spin-pit tests critically depends on localized effects, such as residual stresses, dislocations, and microstructure gradients. Therefore, a two-scale modeling approach is adopted. At the global-scale, the disk is represented by means of finite elements wit ...

The development of advanced, realtime, operator-in-the-loop tire/track/soil models, which can predict power and energy requirements, is an essential requirement for determining operational profiles for vehicles, especially hybrids, during the design and d

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase-II project will design, develop and integrate an effective and efficient motion blur elimination algorithm to Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) system by optimizing and implementing the algorithm proposed during the Phase-I investigation to FPGA. In addition, an image enhancement toolkit for ground station ...