Award Data

The application of high-temperature refractory materials such as rhenium, iridium and tungsten to liquid rocket engines holds substantial potential for improvement in the life of the components. Currently, Ir-Re rocket engines and thrusters are manufactured by chemical vapor deposition. Although this technique has been successful, it is plagued by prohibitively high costs and low rate of product ...

The objective of this Phase I is to develop a high quality, high speed, cost effective technique for polishing silicon carbide mirrors that are machined using single point diamond turning methods. The finished optic should have a more perfectly polished surface with uniform shape and thickness than is presently being produced. We will achieve this by using two different approaches, a novel non-con ...

As electronic packaging densities increase, more heat is being generated per unit area. The reliability of electronic components is, therefore, increasingly dependent on the ability to transfer heat. Current chip performance is limited in keeping up with the increased power densities, 30% of which is attributed to packaging materials. The disadvantages of current methods of fabrication of thermal ...

Aluminum nitride is as an ideal thermal management material since it has a very high thermal conductivity and its electrical resistivity is comparable to that of ceramic insulators. Aluminum nitride has thermal conductivity five times greater than alumina and has mechanical strength twice that of alumina and beryllium oxide. The current methods of synthesizing and consolidating aluminum nitride re ...

Materials Research Group, Inc. proposes an innovative fabrication method for very low cost, high efficiency, multibandgap thin film photovoltaic converters on light weight plastic substrates. To date, CuInSe2 (CIS) based solar modules have the highest demonstrated efficiencies of any thin film photovoltaic material. All known deposition methods for CIS based materials use physical vapor depositio ...

Materials Research Group, Inc. (MRG) proposes the process development of low-temperature fabrication processes for thin film silicon carbide (SiC) infrared (IR) emitter on flexible substrates for thermophotovoltaic (TPV) applications. Optimizing the emitter is critical to an effective TPV system. The outstanding thermal and chemical stability of SiC enable it to operate at high temperatures up to ...

MicroFab Research (MFR, Inc.) proposes to apply the techniques of micromachining to aid in the fabrication of millimeter wave components, thereby reducing manufacturing expenses. Many microwave applications such as radar and communication systems would be improved by shifting to higher frequencies, provided new lower cost manufacturing techniques can be found. A manufacturing technique is presente ...

This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research describes a means to develop a misalignment-tolerant fiber-optic laser transmitter. The insensitivity to misalignment within the transmitter optical subassembly (OSA) enables passive alignment to single-mode fibers for extremely low-cost, high-performance applications such as fiber-to-the-desk (FTTD) and network access modules. The OSA is based on ...

This Phase I Small Business Innovation Research proposal describes a means to develop a new epitaxial growth technique which as far-reaching use for increasing semiconductor laser performances in terms of power, temperature stability, and emission wavelength. The technique is most beneficial to semiconductors lasers, both edge-emitters and vertical-cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), but it a ...

Conventional optoelectronic packaging technologies failed to provide low-loss coupling among various optoelectronic devices that are pivotal for BMDO-mission-related tasks. To bridge different effective apertures of various optoelectronic devices are the major bottleneck needs to be overcome. Radiant Research, Inc., proposes a drastically new idea to solve this problem by introducing a mode-matche ...