Award Data

Tropical Cyclone meteorological data from the Atlantic main development region (MDR) is difficult to collect due to the remoteness of the location and difficulty of deploying manned aircraft to the region. Data collection is frequent upon development of a major hurricane but many tropical disturbances in the MDR leading up to hurricane development are of interest. Being able to collect meteorologi ...

An Inexpensive Long-Endurance Drone (ILED) requires a re-evaluation of the approach to UAS design and fielding.  Future systems will be evaluated in terms of the capability of the swarm of aircraft instead of individual aircraft. This change in perspective will cause the design trades to look much different than those made in the initial development and evolution of today’s group 1 and group 2 ...

It is challenging to detect CBRN weapons production facilities that are hidden in residential and industrial neighborhoods. Once the weapons are manufactured, they will be sealed and removed from the site of production, so developing techniques to reveal the presence of the weapons will likely be fruitless. In this project, we will develop indicators that can be applied covertly around suspected w ...

MATSYS proposes to develop reactive materials compositions and processing techniques for structural reactive composites for blast enhancement. This effort will combine our unique expertise in instrumented-Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) with new approaches in reactive materials design to develop a new generation of cost-efficient and highly reactive materials. The proposed material system will use a ...

ABSTRACT: Warfare is being transformed from a closed, state-sponsored affair to distributed terrorist activities enabled by social media. In Phase I of this research, Securboration developed the prototype Link Analysis Knowledge Environment (LAKE) to enable analyst driven social network analysis. LAKE Phase I demonstrated noise reduction, link analysis, and influential node identification within ...

Certain magnetic nanoparticles produce substantial heat under high strength alternating magnetic fields. These particles will be introduced into the body such that they accumulate in cancerous tissues. Ovarian cancer is characterized by an abundance of immunosuppressive phagocytes. Nanoparticles are ideal agents for the purpose of targeting these phagocytes, rationalized as follows. First, even wh ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will assess the commercial viability of using new non-precious metal catalysts to produce hydrogen by splitting water. Electrolyzers made with these new catalysts have the potential to deliver higher efficiencies and lower capital costs than currently available systems. The market for hydrogen today is $115 billion per year. Currently, hydrog ...

After final bunch-compression in a typical linac-based free electron laser (FEL), a residual chirp remains on the beam, which must be removed for adequate FEL operations. Typical mitigation techniques require the inefficient off-crest use of hundreds of meters of acceleration cavities. This inefficiency increases the upfront and operational costs of future x-ray FELs, which have demonstrated groun ...

Blood Irradiators typically contain 2,000 to 7,000 curies of Cesium-137, which is a highly dangerous radioactive substance. The National Research Council has identified as a high priority the replacement of such sources with alternative technologies in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists for use in a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD, or dirty bomb). While linacs have ...

To improve public security and prevent the diversion of radioactive material for Radiation Dispersion Devices (or so-called dirty bombs), The US government is planning to dramatically reduce the amount of radioactive material in use. Ir-192 is the most common isotope used for radiography and poses a high risk of being diverted since it must constantly be replenished, and is found in small, portabl ...