Award Data

The Army desires carbon nanotube (CNT) based fibers with exceptional strength and stiffness to provide high performance composite materials. Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI) has demonstrated a method to fabricate continuous CNT from electrospun polymer nanofibers. Because these CNT are continuous, their mechanical strength is limited primarily to their defect population. During a Phase I program PSI w ...

Microwave technologies have found a broad range of and growing applications, especially in the area of communications. Many microwave tunable devices are bulky and incompatible with RF semiconductor IC technology. The slow tuning response speeds, high material losses, and device noise at higher frequencies have also limited their widespread applications.Recent advances in processing complex oxide ...

The synthesis of ammonia through nitrogen fixation is a vital component to all plant life and the world economy as a fertilizer and commodity chemical. The global industial production of ammonia exceeded 140MM tons in 2009 and is expected to grow to 160MM tons by 2020. Most ammonia,>90% is synthesized through the Haber-Bosch processThe Haber-Bosch process produces more than 90% of the industrial ...

The goal of the proposed program is to identify an effective passivation material and develop a capable passivation methodology to protect highly reticulated HgCdTe surfaces. The proposed passivation material and technique using highly conformal atomic layer deposition (ALD) will allow the DOD to develop high-performance infrared focal plane array detectors that can operate under wider operating c ...

There is a great need and opportunity to develop lower cost manufacturing process for ceramic tile-based composite armor system for military tactical vehicles. The threat levels encountered by the military tactical vehicles, particularly due to the Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) pose an ever-increasing need for more lightweight and effective vehicle armor system at an affordable cost. A low-co ...

The Department of Defense and owners of large, commercial enterprise networks need excellent tools and well trained personnel to enforce cyber-security and counter cyber-attacks. This proposal focuses on supporting security personnel to have great Situational Awareness and training to help them use next generation cyber-security tools. In collaboration with University of Utah researchers with expe ...

The main goal of the Phase II program is to build and test an operational prototype compressive sensing (CS) camera capable of high-speed change detection. Based on the algorithmic development, hardware modeling and simulation achievements of Phase I, we have defined a real-time CS framework that will be implemented in Phase II in an operational prototype. This framework, similar to Phase I, begin ...

TRACLabs Inc. has worked with NASA to create indoor/outdoor, vision-based leader-following systems for sparse, extra-terrestrial environments. Brown University's Robotics Group has demonstrated leader-following and gesture recognition in high-traffic, dynamic, indoor environments using active lidar sensing. We propose to combine our technologies in order to create a passive sensing system that w ...

Physical Sciences Inc., in cooperation with University of Notre Dame, will develop a method for the persistent detection of aerosolized biological warfare agents using a distributed and cooperative sensor network within a Bayesian framework. The proposed system, named BioNet, will provide a wider coverage and two-fold reduction in false alarm rate over individual sensor performance through intelli ...

Physical Sciences, Inc. and Colorado State University will advance the technical maturity of the Compressive Sensing Hyperspectral Imager (CS-HSI) platform. The CS-HSI operates in the longwave infrared (LWIR) spectral range with a single-pixel architecture for low-cost, standoff wide area Early Warning of chemical vapor plumes. The motivation for applying CS to LWIR HSI is to eliminate the high-co ...