Award Data

The occurrence of combustion instability has long been a matter of serious concern in the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines due to the high rate of energy release in a confined volume in which energy losses are relatively small. Positive feedback between the acoustic waves and unsteady combustion could lead to the destruction of an engine in a fraction of a second. The situation is ...

Inlustra Technologies and the University of Notre Dame propose a Phase I STTR program that, combined with a subsequent Phase II effort, will result in methods for the scalable production of semi-insulating non-polar GaN substrates. These substrates will be utilized in the fabrication of high-power/high-frequency AlGaN-GaN electronic devices capable of reliable operation under high thermal load. ...

This is a proposal to develop a unique, robust, fieldable, gated, picosecond, digital holography system for characterizing dense particle fields under harsh conditions. Many powerful imaging methods have failed to fulfill this requirement because noise from multiple scattering buries the signal needed to acquire a useful image. Solutions to this limitation are very expensive, hard to implement, an ...

Turbine efficiency improves with increased operating temperature. Consequently, the rim zone of disks operates at high temperatures where creep is the main concern. The bore and web zones operate at lower temperatures, where strength is the driving design criterion. Procedures to produce disks that can meet both demands include dual heat-treatment and hybrid disks. A thin transition zone forms in ...

Ziva Corporation in collaboration with UCSB will assess the feasibility of developing a directly modulated polarization switching laser based on the Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) geometry with a 3dB frequency of at least 10 GHz. This will be a major breakthrough in the ability to cost effectively fabricate directly modulated lasers (even in 2-D arrays) with polarization diversity ...

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 ...

Photovoltaics, while promising clean and reliable energy source, is not yet compatible with fossil energy for most applications. Organic-based solar cells have potential to reduce the cost of solar energy due to low-cost active materials, high-throughput reel-to-reel deposition technologies, low-temperature processing and application versatility. Currently organic photovoltaics (OPV) cannot commer ...

The goal of this program is to develop devices that can detect small electric fields over large frequency ranges while being compact and power efficient. We propose an electro-optic resonant plasmon that enhances the electro-optic phase shift in a small volume (

Sensor development researchers and engineers have perpetually sought novel methods to reduce sensor size and improve performance. Continued miniaturization of sensors through micromachining has enabled novel applications and introduced new paradigms for engineered systems to interact with the world. The challenge has always been to improve performance while continually reducing size. In the cur ...

Digital electronics is approaching its limits in meeting the demand for increased processing speeds. Photonics, while promising high processing speed, is lacking integration capacity. Plasmonics promises to combine the information capacity of photonics with the integration density of electronics. The team of Luna Innovations, UCLA and Virginia Tech proposes to develop plasmonic logic devices and c ...