Award Data

Our team proposes to develop, test, and commercialize a Micro Air Vehicle Tether Recovery APparatus (MAVTRAP). This system operates by deploying an instrumented MAV capture device attached via a tether system from a mothership unmanned air vehicle (UAV). The instrumented MAV capture device contains an integrated avionics suite. Our team will determine and control the precise mother ship UAV loi ...

Nonlinear transmission lines offer new vistas in the generation of high power microwave wave (HPM) signals. All electromagnetic sources use an active medium to convert electrical energy to high frequency waves and ultra-wide band signals that can perform useful work. Traditional methods rely on electron beams for the active medium. Nonlinear transmission lines use nonlinear circuit elements to ...

Recent advances in dielectric and magnetic materials have spurred renewed interest in the field of solid state pulse and RF burst generation using Non-Linear Transmission Lines (NLTL) . The NLTL approach to HPM and UWB generation eliminates the need for an electron beam, vacuum system and magnets required in conventional HPM sources. Furthermore, the novel waveforms of NLTL generated pulses promi ...

The objective of this project is to develop a practical finite element-based simulation of spin-pit tests of disks. The performance of disks in spin-pit tests critically depends on localized effects, such as residual stresses, dislocations, and microstructure gradients. Therefore, a two-scale modeling approach is adopted. At the global-scale, the disk is represented by means of finite elements wit ...

The Air Force has a strategic need for a fuel source that is renewable (and which does not rely on foreign petroleum sources). Several approaches to a renewable fuel source have been investigated; with “artificial photosynthesis” being one example. At its core, the photosynthesis reaction is a photoinduced charge separation reaction with light being concentrated by antenna complexes onto a c ...

Graphene has become one of the most promising new materials to form semiconductor devices and microelectronic interconnects. NexGenSemi Corporation in collaboration with Sandia National Labs will develop a “Patterned Graphene Interconnect (PGI) and material modification for nanofabrication of transistor devices. This process resolution will dip deep down into the state-of-the-art technology no ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Research phase I program will develop a new class of surface plasmon enhanced photovoltaic devices that exhibit increased current collection. Photon management, the manipulation of the incident optical field to increase the probability that a photon is absorbed in the active region of the cell, is critical to the development of next generation thin film sol ...

Quantum cryptography, and in particular Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a secure method to distribute a secret key between two distant authorized partners whose security is based on the laws of physics. Current public key cryptosystems have not been proven to be secure and are based on the computational complexity of evaluating one-way functions. These functions are easily evaluated, but extrem ...

The key to making quantum key distribution practical (especially for free-space applications) is to be able to use weak laser pulses (WLP) instead of single photons, while at the same time making sure that any third party wanting to avoid detection and mount an eavesdropping attack is restricted to using beam-splitting rather than photon-number splitting (PNS). In this effort, we propose a novel s ...

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 ...