Award Data

Natural fiber welding (NFW) is a disruptive bioengineering platform that has broad applications to manufacturing high performance materials and composites from abundant natural materials. By careful control of NFW process conditions, native order and structure of biopolymers is retained thus creating strong composites without glue while preserving the impressive native physical characteristics of ...

MicroLink Devices proposes to integrate its high-efficiency, lightweight, and flexible solar sheets to the Puma UAS platform to significantly extend the flight endurance of the aircraft. The Navy has a growing fleet of small unmanned aerial system (UAS) vehicles that enable tactical intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities not possible before, and a need to extended mission ...

Additive Manufacturing (AM) promises to be an innovative technology that can enable rapid manufacturing of complex parts at greatly reducedcycle time. With the maturation of selective laser melting (SLM) AM technologies there is increasing interest in applying this manufacturingmethod to the production of aircraft structural components, many of which are made of high-strength stainless steels. How ...

There is a growing need for the wider deployment of infrared cameras in various defense applications, from handheld to vehicle-mounted. Meeting this requires a low-cost imaging device that has low noise and high frame rates. Microbolometers largely fill this need in the longwave infrared regime, although they suffer from relatively slow response times and are near their technological performance l ...

The special properties of quantum states make them attractive for emerging applications in quantum communication and computing. However, the very properties of quantum states that make them useful also make them difficult to measure. Quantum state tomography is a measurement tool which allows for complete characterization of quantum states. Although great progress has been made in researching quan ...

We will develop chip-scale components at 780/795 nm, for a superluminal ring laser gyroscope and accelerometer (SRLGA) using Rubidium.The components include high-power and narrow-band lasers, modulators, detectors, low-loss waveguides, and micro-resonator based magneto-optic isolators, integrated on a single chip. The components will be built on GaAs substrate.GaAsP Quantum Wells (QWs) will enable ...

In this Phase I SBIR, Microlink Devices in collaboration with Prof. Jeehwan Kim of MIT will develop a low cost, flexible, radiation hard dual junction InGaP/GaAs solar cell using graphene assisted epitaxy for space application.The innovation in this Phase I SBIR is the development of low cost, light weight, flexible epitaxial lift-off (ELO) InGaP/GaAs dual junction (DJ) solar cells with improved b ...

This Phase II project will extend the investigation of Phase I effort to further enhance and mature a sealant technology to limit or prevent environmental degradation of aircraft exhaust coatings that provide thermal and corrosion protection to the underlying substrate. The environmental degradation problem is a severe and urgent problem faced by DoD across many advanced aircraft platforms resulti ...

To reduce size, weight, power and cost (SWaP-c), military platforms have been evolving towards more integrated platforms that utilize all available space. For radiating systems, this will require exploring innovative design methods, materials and manufacturing approaches to realize cost-effective, customizable and conformal antennas. An attractive solution to this challenge is offered by additive ...

This project aims to develop a low-cost millimeter-wave (mmW) imaging system for ground vehicles, to operate in combination with a long-wave infrared (LWIR) camera. Such a system will mitigate the challenges of driving in degraded visual environments (DVE) including night time, fog, dust, or smoke by providing real-time image of the vehicle surrounding independent from the presence of naturally oc ...