Award Data

The occurrence of combustion instability has long been a matter of serious concern in the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines due to the high rate of energy release in a confined volume in which energy losses are relatively small. Positive feedback between the acoustic waves and unsteady combustion could lead to the destruction of an engine in a fraction of a second. The situation is ...

The Department of Defense uses large-scale high-resolution federated simulations to propagate rocket vehicle trajectories. Runge-Kutta methods have served as a de-facto standard while conducting such simulations. However, there are several challenges while using Runge-Kutta methods for this task. Firstly, there should be exact time-step matching between federates, otherwise the states have to be i ...

Magnesium alloys have 35% lower density compared to aluminum, with improved temperature stability compared to high strength aluminum.They can also be fabricated with minimum gauge thicknesses considerably thinner than fiber composites, and are weldable, with much higher impact resistance.Traditional magnesium alloys, however, have had lower strengths than more developed aluminum alloys.Powder meta ...

A goal of Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is to use computer simulation of complex systems to make scientifically informed assessments for high-consequence decisions. Because end-to-end empirical data is difficult to obtain for the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS), computer simulation provides the best method for understanding BMDS capabilities against a wide range of threats. Numerica Co ...

The objectives of our Phase I effort are to characterize target sensor measurement uncertainties and feature extraction uncertainties; determine how and where, in the processing chain, these affect target discrimination and classification; show how the different sources of uncertainty lead to the cumulative uncertainty in the final decision; provide techniques that will be instrumental to optimizi ...

The development and integration of three unique and innovative algorithm prototypes into a"Fused Track and Characterization Schema"are proposed. This Schema will encompass the determination of signatures and characteristics of objects that can be identified by RF and EO/IR Sensors in order to enable multi-sensor data fusion and correlation. The first algorithm, the"3D Pose Estimation"Algorithm, p ...

The goal of this project is to develop a robust, compact, light-weight Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) - based subsystem for fine pointing of high power laser phased arrays. This will facilitate the use of airborne high-energy laser weapons systems for ballistic missile defense. The principal innovation to be introduced is an array of enhanced MEMS mirrors that permit very high resolution ...

Antimony containing III-V semiconducting compounds are particularly attractive for the fabrication of a wide variety of electronic and optoelectronic devices such as photo detectors operating in the long wave infrared wavelength (12-32µm) range. The production of epi quality GaSb wafers still remains one of the important problems for rapid commercialization of GaSb devices. Sinmat Inc. proposes a ...

The Torch Team is proposing to design and conduct laboratory-based experiments to elucidate the fundamental micro-debris formation mechanisms to improve intercept optical models. Ballistic missile intercept optical signatures collected over the last decade have identified definitive micro-debris parameter trends. These measurements place bounds on the debris temperature, number of particles, and ...

There may be no more important mission for the US military than protection from ballistic missile attack. For any configuration of sensors, it is therefore extremely important to make the most of the collected sensor data. Specifically, this proposal describes how this objective can be accomplished by using artificial intelligence techniques to implement human-quality reasoning on object feature ...