Award Data

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 ...

deciBel Research and our university partner, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)-Center for Imaging Science, propose to develop a dual MWIR/LWIR imaging polarimeter for the detection and discrimination of aerosolized biological spores. The system will exploit spectral absorption and MIE scattering-induced radiometric and polarimetric phenomenon exhibited by clouds of aerosolized biological spo ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) and its partners, Research Support Systems (RSI, a PSI-subsidiary) and Professor Thomas Strohmer of UC Davis, propose to develop an innovative approach that can be employed by an ‘on-the-move’ sensor constellation to determine the size (length, width, and height), absolute geo-location, and 3-D concentration distribution of chemical threat clouds released on battle ...

Thermopile arrays manufactured using integrated process compatible materials and micro-machining will provide high performance with low manufacturing cost. Black Forest Engineering (BFE) teamed with Case Western Reserve University will design thermopiles using silicon based semiconductors and compare performance. Low cost thermopiles, differentially coupled with advanced BFE CMOS readout, will pr ...

The Army has a clear need for a small unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) capable of autonomously accompanying a single soldier or vehicle. Such a UGV would help solve both logistical problems of soldiers needing to transport more equipment and supplies than they can carry in a backpack, and tactical problems of scouting unsafe areas. Multiple designs for such UGVs exist; however, they require active re ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research program will develop narrow band plasmonic resonant cavity filters with integrated microbolometer sensors operating in the long wave infrared (LWIR) atmospheric transmission band for IR absorption measurements of low concentration chemicals. IR spectroscopy can identify a wide range of contaminants, including chemical/biological warfare agents, exp ...

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 ...

Physical Sciences Inc. proposes an innovative, filter free approach to rapidly concentrate and detect bacterial spores from large volumes of flowing water for the purpose of early warning detection of contaminated potable water supplies against low concentration biological pathogens. Our approach builds on previous concentration work to study the feasibility of optimizing this approach and lays t ...

A narrow-band microbolometric detector is proposed to the address need for a low-cost, portable system to perform chemical and biological threat detection. An approach is shown to achieve a narrow-band bolometric detector whose response can be tailored to both a desired peak wavelength and bandwidth. The approach will enable the design of an array of detectors meeting the requirements for chemical ...

Physical Sciences, Inc. (PSI) proposes to demonstrate environmentally benign, low cost biological agent simulant particles that mimic the infrared, scatter, fluorescence and atomic absorption spectra of bacillus subtilis (BG), Erwinia herbicola (EH), and the MS2 Bacteriophage (MS2). These stimulant particles will be composed of materials that are commonly available foods or nutritional supplement ...