Award Data

The overall goal of this proposed Army STTR is to demonstrate low-cost, non-destructive methodologies for non-agglomerating drying of anisotropic nanomaterials. NanoSonic and Virginia Tech will work in tandem to demonstrate novel approaches involving both high performance coatings and CO2 processing that facilitate gentle, simultaneous drying and exfoliation of nanoparticles, preventing agglomera ...

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 growing complexity of future military systems demands the development of high-performance nonlinear control algorithms. The goal of this proposal is to develop a specially designed software/hardware architecture to enable real-time autonomous closed-loop control of nonlinear high-dimensional dynamical systems. Following the recent success of pseudospectral (PS) computational control methods in ...

A clean-slate approach is needed for the design and implementation of wireless networks that self organize and can scale with the number of users, devices, and information objects and services that network users wish to share. This project will develop a new architecture and protocols for wireless networks in which naming, addressing, routing, and channel access are redefined to take into account: ...

High power microwave (HPM) sources have been developed over the past few decades for many important DoD missions ranging from electronic warfare to intentional EMI to impulse radar. In this proposal, we describe an integrated program that seeks to develop innovative solutions based on mesoband source and antenna technology to improve the effectiveness of HPM-based BMD systems. Our research will ...

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 ...

Early detection of virulent infectious pathogens is critical to blocking the devastating epidemic spread of the pathogen and the potential harm this could have on our armed forces and general populations. In Phase I, we have utilized the state-of-the-art QuantiGene 2.0 technology to establish an assay for the sensitive quantification of SARS (epidemic spread in 2001) and assessing plasma DNA level ...

The Progeny – University of Utah team proposes a new approach for flow noise reduction to improve acoustic sensor performance. Our proposal is to investigate the ability of controlling the turbulent flow by utilizing acceleration which makes the flow locally laminar. Our proposed method of achieving acceleration is to send the flow around a concave surface, by adding a “two-dimensional bump ...

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 ...