Award Data

In the Phase I STTR, N08-T029 “Novel Fiber Optic Methods for Sensing Shape, Orientation and/or Heading of Undersea Arrays and Tethers” a concept was developed for a fiber optic sensing array and shape reconstruction algorithm to be used for situation awareness of flexible undersea cable structures. Undersea cable structures are deployed in environments unsuitable for direct in-situ observation ...

The design of future hypersonic vehicles requires detailed understanding of flow regimes ranging from rarefied to continuum. Hypervelocity flows are characterized by high temperatures, real gas effects, nonequilibrium chemistry, and ionization. The goal of this project is to develop unified kinetic/continuum solution methods with automatic domain decomposition for a wide range of Air Force applic ...

This proposal is for the use of state-of-the-art computer wargames to be used in the research on the impact and optimal use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in realistic combat scenarios. High fidelity, historically calibrated wargames ranging from sub-tactical ground-centric game engines through operational, strategic, air campaign, and naval-centric game engines will be used to address the fu ...

Nonlinear transmission lines offer new vistas in the generation of high power microwave wave (HPM) signals. All electromagnetic sources use an active medium to convert electrical energy to high frequency waves and ultra-wide band signals that can perform useful work. Traditional methods rely on electron beams for the active medium. Nonlinear transmission lines use nonlinear circuit elements to ...

Recent advances in dielectric and magnetic materials have spurred renewed interest in the field of solid state pulse and RF burst generation using Non-Linear Transmission Lines (NLTL) . The NLTL approach to HPM and UWB generation eliminates the need for an electron beam, vacuum system and magnets required in conventional HPM sources. Furthermore, the novel waveforms of NLTL generated pulses promi ...

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are critical elements in electrical, water, oil/gas, and manufacturing services involving supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distributed control systems (DCS), and programmable logic controllers (PLCs). These systems allow operators to monitor sensor data and remotely control field devices. Initially, these devices were designed for closed-network or ...

Ziva Corporation in collaboration with UCSB will assess the feasibility of developing a directly modulated polarization switching laser based on the Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) geometry with a 3dB frequency of at least 10 GHz. This will be a major breakthrough in the ability to cost effectively fabricate directly modulated lasers (even in 2-D arrays) with polarization diversity ...

Photonic links and networks offer numerous advantages to analog RF systems including inherent wide bandwidth, a reduced size, weight and improved flexibility, and nearly lossless signal. Current all-electronic delay line systems based on microwave components suffer from high signal loss and dispersion as well as large size and weight. An efficient way to achieve true-time-delay beamforming is to u ...

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 ...

To build a more intelligent grid, electric utilities must now construct a new architecture from connected, standard technologies. This smart architecture will connect SCADA systems so they can interact more efficiently. It will employ distributed monitoring and power-use optimization. It will also connect SCADA networks to corporate networks, wireless systems, and remote monitoring stations. ...