Award Data

This STTR program proposes to exploit the tremendous benefits that could be offered by the development of ultra fine grain steel alloys for application to the production of high performance components for military rotorcraft applications. A severe plastic deformation technology based on isothermal forging technologies will be explored here. The goal is to demonstrate a practical, production leve ...

Higher efficiency solar cells are needed to reduce solar array mass, volume, and cost for Air Force space missions. Intermediate-band quantum-dot (QD) solar cells can yield dramatically higher efficiencies than current multi-junction (MJ) technologies. However, several issues must be addressed to demonstrate manufacturable, high efficiency devices. CFDRC aims to develop: 1) High-efficiency, ligh ...

The development of compact, ultra-low drive voltage optical phase modulators is a critical key component for passive antenna remoting applications, a strategic area, part of a number of current and upcoming DARPA initiatives. With the development of sufficiently low V-pi modulators, passive front-ends can be constructed with a low figure even for a moderate optical pumping power. The combination o ...

The design of future hypersonic vehicles requires detailed understanding of flow regimes ranging from rarefied to continuum. Hypervelocity flows are characterized by high temperatures, real gas effects, nonequilibrium chemistry, and ionization. The goal of this project is to develop unified kinetic/continuum solution methods with automatic domain decomposition for a wide range of Air Force applic ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project will develop ultradense, low-power plasmonic integration components and devices for on-chip manipulation and processing of optical signals. Both passive and active components will be studied. Detailed performance predictions will be obtained through finite element modeling (FEM) of the harmonic Maxwell’s equations. The FEM provides detai ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase-II project will design, develop and integrate an effective and efficient motion blur elimination algorithm to Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System (ARGUS-IS) system by optimizing and implementing the algorithm proposed during the Phase-I investigation to FPGA. In addition, an image enhancement toolkit for ground station ...

A team led by NextGen Aeronautics Inc., and working with San Diego State University proposes the development of redundant wideband antennas that are embedded in composite armor structures The planned work builds upon the team’s extensive prior experience in conformal load-bearing antenna structures (CLAS), antenna design, and metamaterials. The proposed antenna is a combination of concepts that ...

Lithium-air battery consists of a lithium anode electrochemically coupled to atmospheric oxygen through an air cathode. The major advantages of lithium air batteries are that air cathode active material, oxygen, is not stored internal to cell system and lithium anode being extremely lightweight metal with a highest theoretical specific energy density. This energy density is well comparable with t ...