Award Data

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 ...

System reliability is a fundamental requirement for safety-critical weapons systems. A key challenge is identifying reliability problems early so that they can be fixed quickly and cheaply. Reliability problems are often integration problems: integration often reveals that flaws that seemed minor in isolated components but lead to serious system-wide reliability problems. The combination of static ...

High energy density and high power capacitors operating at a high frequency are in great demand for a variety of residential, military, medical, and industrial applications. In fact, a large percentage of the cost of alternative energy components is consumed by the cost of capacitors. Although there have been some developments in the fabrication of inorganic super-capacitors, the problems encoun ...

Esensors, with SUNY at Buffalo and SUNY at Albany as a subcontractor, will simulate, fabricate, experimentally investigate, evaluate, and deliver aprototype of a new adaptive IR photodetector based on advanced quantum dot (QD) structures. The detector’s operating principle is based on a new concept of the photoelectron lifetime tunable via adjustable potential barriers in QD structures. The phot ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer research project addresses the perception and learning of complex sound patterns within complex auditory scenes. The objective is to model auditory signal processing, pattern recognition and learning in the human auditory system. Our novel approach simulates the nonlinear signal processing that has been observed in auditory physiology. By mimicking functiona ...

Michigan Aerospace Corporation proposes to develop an optical MEMS based skin friction sensor specifically designed for hypersonic applications. This instrument will be capable of shear stress resolutions as small as 0.01 Pa, have a high dynamic range, and data rates in excess of 100 Hz. The sensor will be compact and tolerant of the extreme environmental conditions of hypersonic propulsion test f ...

Accurate and timely surveillance of objects in the near-Earth space environment is becoming increasingly critical to US national security. One of the main difficulties in this domain is efficiently and accurately modeling trajectories of the vast number of objects in orbit around the Earth. The orbital trajectory of a single object is typically modeled as a second-order system of equations which ...

Space surveillance is the component of space situational awareness focused on the detection of resident space objects (RSOs) and the use of multisource data to track and identify space objects. While the propagation of the states of RSOs has been investigated extensively over the last fifty years, the correct propagation of their covariance or the more general (non-Gaussian) probability distribut ...

A mathematical framework for detection and classification of weak, distributed patterns on computer networks is proposed. The framework will provide rigorous methods for understanding performance bounds and optimality of intrusion detection methods, while also providing concrete and implementable algorithms. The algorithms will find immediate application in cyber-security efforts, as well as mor ...

Gallium Nitride (GaN) substrates are ideal materials for fabrication of high-power and high-frequency devices based on III-V materials. The current state-of-the-art Chemical Mechanical Polishing (CMP) methods are plagued by several challenges, including, surface charge affects due to surface contamination, and sub-surface damages, which can limit the quality of III-V devices. Furthermore, there is ...