Award Data

Recent advances in THz-source stability, power and practicality have opened the door for active THz imaging in both commercial and military settings. AEgis is teaming with U Buffalo to develop a THz detection device that utilizes classical rectification effects in semiconductor point contacts (SPCs) to achieve response in the 1 to 10 THz range and is capable of operating at temperatures over 150 K ...

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. Shear layer instabilities and intermittent growth rates of the mixing layer cause fluctuations in the burning rates and result in acoustic waves triggering ...

Combustion stability is an important consideration in the design of liquid rocket engines. While fundamental modes of unstable operation in simple geometries are easily identified using analytical methods, recent times have seen these methods greatly expand in scope, applied in semi-numerical format to increasingly complex geometries and flow situations. Much remains to be explored in understandin ...

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 ...

The ever-decreasing size of the electronic microchips and the ever-increasing density of electronic components required to support future Air Force platforms are creating the problem of substantial localized heat generation that can impair component operation. State of the art thermal interface materials (TIMs), that are used to dissipate heat from the source to the spreader in a microchip, are se ...

Topological data analysis is a new mathematical method used to study these massive data sets that arise in a variety of situations including military operations and national security. The use of passive infrared sensors for a wide area detection system involving chemical and biological contaminants produces massive amounts of hyperspectral image data. Recent research in this area include fast al ...

Metron, Inc. and Stanford University propose to design, develop, test and demonstrate topological data analytic algorithms to analyze hyperspectral imagery. We propose to adapt the topological data analytic techniques, including Stanford’s successful Mapper algorithm, to the hyperspectral imagery domain. Using these algorithms we will identify topological and geometric features and properties ...

A fully functional widely tunable wavelength converter prototype operating from -40C to 100C at 2.5-10 Gbps, in a 5mm tall package, will be developed.

We apply the theory of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) to the design of guidance algorithms for controlling the motion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with on-board sensors for tracking multiple ground targets. While POMDPs are intractable to optimize exactly, principled approximation methods can be devised based on Bellman’s principle. We introduce a new approximation ...

We propose to develop ultradense plasmonic integrated devices and circuits for optical interconnect compatible with the electronic circuitry. In our proposal, we will employ engineered metallic nanostructures that combine energy concentration by plasmonic lenses and retardation-based plasmonic resonances to even further boost the efficiency of materials exhibiting optical nonlinearity. These plas ...