Award Data

Modern military and civilian aircraft technologies are pushing the performance envelope through design and use of new advanced materials with superior property combinations. Aircraft powerplant manufacturers are facing intense competition to efficiently deliver ever increasing thrust, while meeting the highest standards of reliability and performance over an expanded service life. These performanc ...

Quantitative predictions of reactive flow dynamics from large-scale simulations of Liquid Rocket Engines (LRE) appear to be model dependent. Relationships and coupling among the dominant mechanisms most responsible for destabilization are obscured by the complexities of the model and subtle consequences of inherent ad hoc approximations not supported by mathematical rationale. The reliability of ...

This Phase I STTR proposal will demonstrate nanostructured “metal-black” coatings to enhance absorption by thin film solar cells. The problem is that silicon has low absorption due to its indirect gap. The opportunity is that nano-scale metallic scattering centers increase the effective optical path length and enhance the solar electric-field strength in thin-film solar cells, leading to more ...

Two-dimensional (2D) visualization techniques have limit capacity to achieve understanding of full dimensionality of the battlefield. Rewritable 3D holographic storage is promising for updatable 3D display applications. In Phase I, New Span Opto-Technology has demonstrated novel concepts of both holographic recording technique and recording material system without the use of high voltage. We have ...

ABSTRACT: Adversarial installations, such as those housing the means for nuclear weapons production, are increasingly being constructed in heavily fortified locations and often using ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) as the construction material. As such, the U.S. Air Force has considerable interest in further developments of ultra high performance concrete (UHPC) to maintain an advantage o ...

ABSTRACT: Feature extraction and target recognition suffer from a lack of a reliable model for both exploitable target features and the electromagnetic signature they possess. Signature data are often hard to interpret and invert to recover the target robustly. Bayesian learning approaches to statistical pattern recognition are based on the use of training sets of inputs and outputs, a data mode ...

ABSTRACT: The overall program objective is to utilize the best available technologies to successfully develop the concept and design of a state of the art C-Band telemetry transmitter that meets or exceeds the performance qualification parameters and size constraints detailed in the AF12-BT07 solicitation. Specifically, the objective of the entire two-phase program is to develop, test, and deliv ...

ABSTRACT: Terahertz (THz) spectroscopies offer unmatched non-contact probing of low-energy excitations underlying electronic transport and magnetism in a wide range of novel materials. To-date, expensive and complex THz Time Domain Spectroscopy (THz-TDS) systems are the most common THz source used in these studies. Lower cost, continuous wave (CW-THz) spectroscopy systems can offer comparable per ...

ABSTRACT: Optical Sciences Corporation (OSC) and the University of Alabama in Huntsville"s Center for Applied Optics (UAH/CAO) will demonstrate the feasibility and present a plan for developing optical instrumentation for the monitoring, mitigation, and removal of cryodeposits accumulated on optical and mechanical surfaces in cryogenic-vacuum radiometric calibration chambers. OSC will investigat ...

ABSTRACT: Current and projected limitations on the maximum power from a high power single mode fiber laser amplifier impose architectural limitations on a high power phased array laser weapon system. Prior studies strongly indicate that when faced with this limitation the optimal approach is (to borrow the term for Paul McManamon) a Phased Array of Phased Arrays (PAPA) geometry wherein large(r) ...