Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall purpose of this project is to help improve the resolution and lower the cost of PET instrumentation for both research and diagnostics applications. Single crystal scintillators, currently used in PET Imaging systems, are expensive and difficult to produce. In addition they suffer from inhomogeneous dopant distributions that can degrade or limit reso ...

Multimode seekers for missiles are becoming a reality with multiple technology development efforts underway across the services. Such seekers require protection from severe environments. The Joint Air to Ground Missile and the Small Diameter Bomb are two potential candidates for this technology. Proof-of-principle protective domes have been demonstrated for these seekers, but numerous technical a ...

The Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) goal of a "six-day" satellite is not achievable using the traditional flight thermal design paradigm. A drastically simpler paradigm must emerge that uses elemental (COTS-like) thermal control modules that can be rapidly and reliably linked to enable a wide range of missions irrespective of the satellite and the orbital environment. TA&T in collaboration ...

Two-phase loops have significant flight heritage having demonstrated high reliability and long life in the space environment. However, a shortfall of existing aerospace-grade two-phase loops is their relatively low heat flux capacity in the range of tens of watts/cm2. This program applies a new evaporator design to cooling of laser diode arrays on space platforms. The new evaporator design will ...

In the ITER, an international fusion experiment, a magnetically confined cloud of super hot plasma maintains the fusion of tritium and dueterium. The water-cooled diverter cartridge, which removes the charged species generated by the fusion reaction, experiences a harsh environment of rapidly fluctuating temperature. In this environment, the joint between the tungsten plasma facing material on t ...

Soft lithography is an inexpensive and fast method for applying micropatterned structures to both flat and nonplanar substrates. TA&T leverages multiple soft lithographic processing steps to pattern co-fireable refractory metal grid on spinel dome windows for electromagnetic interference (EMI) filtering purposes. In addition to the overall curvature of a green ceramic dome, the surface roughness ...

Methods to mitigate contributions of conventional grinding and polishing procedures to transmitted wavefront error that were identified in Phase I will will be applied to full scale JAGM domes. A special emphasis is placed on the development and optimization of deterministic ion beam figuring of spinel and ion beam sputtered spinel coatings. Design modification to existing magnetron sputtering s ...

In this Phase I SBIR project TA&T will use ceramic stereolithography to fabricate integrally cored shells for investment cast turbine airfoils with the goals of demonstrating dimensional accuracy specifications can be met and demonstrating castability of a legacy airfoil. The application target will be advanced high pressure turbine (HPT) airfoils cast in single crystal superalloys, the most diffi ...

Skyward will develop a low-cost, light-weight, and extremely effective fire barrier to protect Navy ships. Skyward’s unique design solution utilizes a lightweight honeycomb structure to support a lightweight intumescent coating. Intumescent materials form a char with excellent insulating properties when exposed to fire’s heat, however the char is fragile and will not adhere well to flat surf ...

The proposed Skyward/ESI wireless fire detector system is a forward-looking concept that utilizes a collection of some commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies, applies them to this unique problem, and creates an innovative package addressing the many requirements of this SBIR topic. This system uses electro-optical devices in the form of a combination of photodiodes and thin film thermopiles ...