Award Data

Military applications, such as IRCM (Infrared Countermeasures) and stand-off sensing, require highly efficient optical sources with power outputs for room temperature continuous wave operation of several to a hundred watts in the 3-5 micron and 8-12 micron spectral bands. While quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) have become the sources of choice in these spectral regions, the only realistic option to ...

Compelling applications of infrared ultrafast lasers—ranging from ship self defense and aircraft self defense, to medical and micromachining applications—have defined a critical performance point at about one millijoule per pulse from a reliable and robust portable laser system with high average power. Increasing amplifier efficiency is a critical need in order to reach high average powers nee ...

While there are established methods available in determining the fatigue life of critical rotating components, there is still room for improvement for better understanding and prediction of life limiting factors. Improved risk assessment of jet engine disk components would require probabilistic modeling capability of the evolution of microstructural features, residual stresses and material anomali ...

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 ...

The real-time implementation of controls in nonlinear systems remains one of the great challenges in applying advanced control technology. Often, linearization around a set point is the only practical approach, and many controllers implemented in hardware systems are simple PID feedback mechanisms. To apply Pontryagin’s principle or Bellman’s equation using conventional hardware and algorith ...

We propose to construct a deception detection system which will exploit scaffolding provided by a collection of largely domain-independent deception detection heuristics. These heuristics, integrated through a novel evidential reasoning system, will provide the proposed system, called Skeptic, with a significant advantage over purely inductive methods by allowing it to exploit the adversarial natu ...

A military without good leadership is a mob. Identification, preparation, guidance and mentoring of potential leaders are critical functions across all services. Leadership training and support can be substantially improved by refinement of theories and models on what constitutes good leadership, and what enables individual to be effective leaders. DoD needs better models of how leaders learn, ...

Free electron lasers (FEL) made from Nb cavities offer high performance, but they are complex, bulky, and expensive. For Navy FEL applications, where footprint, power consumption, and cost are severely constrained and reliability is of great importance there is a critical need for an alternative to Nb. MgB2 is a recently discovered superconductor with a high critical temperature and critical field ...

A rapid prototyping simulation for the Autonomous Rotorcraft Land & Take-Off (ARLTO) system will be developed to analyze and evolve requirements for the landing and take-off of a Rotary-wing Autonomous Air Vehicle (RAAV) from unprepared terrain. The simulation is based upon the Task-Pilot-Vehicle modeling system and features a UH-60 configured with a Sliding Mode Control (SCM) inner loop closure. ...

The Air Force has a strategic need for a fuel source that is renewable (and which does not rely on foreign petroleum sources). Several approaches to a renewable fuel source have been investigated; with “artificial photosynthesis” being one example. At its core, the photosynthesis reaction is a photoinduced charge separation reaction with light being concentrated by antenna complexes onto a c ...