Award Data

Hearing protection which targets the airborne vibrations traditionally associated with hearing has advanced considerably in the last two decades. Airborne noise can be blocked or reduced to the point where the limiting factor in the intensity of sound experienced by a subject is now in large part determined by the sound conducted through bone in the anatomy of the head and face. Air Force flight ...

To improve jet-engine combustion, we chose a saturable-reactor design for driving a plasma discharge igniter. A major advantage of this architecture is that it is invulnerable to damage by arcs. In Phase I we demonstrated a risetime of 10 ns at 23 kV into a 50 ohm load. We believe that in Phase II pulsers with the same basic design can be scaled to produce similar outputs at 30 kHz, 30 kV, and 1 ...

While billions of dollars have been spent over the past several years on the development of training systems, testing infrastructures, and Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) interoperability, there is still no common approach to objective human performance measurement. The purpose, after all, of a Distributed Mission Operations environment is to deliver comprehensive training exercises to the warfigh ...

Currently, optical measurements available on target plumes and re-entry wakes are collected by air or ground assets which view the wake/plume photons after having been filtered through the atmosphere. Atmospheric transmission removes significant information needed to anchor models that simulate these phenomena. MDA needs innovative approaches to mount a spectrometer on the aft closure of the RV. ...

The planned DoD Airborne Network Backbone will provide airborne connectivity for the Air Force ConstellationNet, Army's LandWarNet, and Navy's ForceNet. It will be an Internet Protocol (IP)-based network, running on top of the multiple data links currently available. The nodes forming the planned DoD Airborne Network Backbone typically contain multiple radios, with data links based on Time Divisi ...

The Air Force requires an improved corrosion detector to assess corrosion in multi-layer metallic structures on its aircraft. A compact and portable device is needed that can pinpoint corrosion in the early stages of pitting deep within these multi-layer structures. Reactive Innovations, LLC proposes a Phase I program to develop and demonstrate a corrosion detection system based on an electrochemi ...

Mobile aircrew who serve in rotary wing platforms must be mobile in all phases of flight to complete missions. In so doing, they are vulnerable to injury or fatality during crashes, evasive maneuvers, or mishap events. The Gunners Belt, in use for several decades, was designed to prevent aircrew from falling out of aircraft, and to provide additional stability when leaning out of the aircraft. How ...

In this STTR project, Boston Applied Technologies, Inc. (BATi), teaming up with Prof. Di Bartolo’s group at Boston College, aims at developing a large size (300 mm x 300 mm) updatable 3D display with photorefractive polymers for battlefield and command and control applications. The proposed 3D display system features fast response (feasible to video-rate), high diffraction efficiency, and relati ...

The intelligence analysts who monitor for asymmetric threats such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) face a daunting task of information management. They must monitor data from diverse sources, repeatedly circling back for updates, always evaluating content, and aiming to identify critically relevant information when it is first available. These are painstaking processes. The cost of missing c ...

Q-Peak will design and develop a novel ultrafast, extremely low loss, all-fiber switching architecture that promises near Raman-free operation. By utilizing a novel interferometric all-fiber switch with nonlinear enhancement, it is possible to provide both ultrafast switching speeds and reduce laser power requirements.