Award Data

Software continues to be a weak link in our critical systems. A prudent operator should employ a defense-in-depth strategy whereby"safe"systems are still monitored to detect breaches and respond to them. Unfortunately, such monitoring is challenging in practice, since there is no universal pattern that characterizes misbehaving software. We will capture an application"s intended behavior as it is ...

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are becoming increasingly critical components in advanced electronic systems. However, limited research has been applied to identifying critical vulnerabilities that could be present in the designs deployed on these FPGAs. The risk is further increased by the use of 3rd party intellectual property in many designs.GrammaTech is proposing to develop a Trust ver ...

The Navy has been developing superconducting systems, based on high-temperature superconductors (HTS), for future use on Navy ships. One of the challenges associated with superconducting magnets is the possibility of a quench, which is an event where a local hot spot develops within the superconductor that quickly spreads throughout the device, driving it into its normal and dissipative state. Sen ...

Vescent Photonics proposes to develop a compact laser system and integrate it with a cold-atom micro primary standard developed under the DARPA IMPACT program. In phase I we will investigate performance enhancements resulting from immobilizing the cold-atom sample with an optical lattice formed from an optical field whose wavelength is chosen to minimize the differential light shifts between the s ...

Vescent Photonics and MIT Lincoln Labs (MIT-LL) propose to develop a quantum-based vector magnetometer with low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP+C) for Navy applications. The proposed system will rely on probing magnetically-sensitive, atomic-like transitions of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond to provide stable, high-bandwidth readout of the vector magnetic field with sub-picotesla sen ...

Improved magnetic anomaly detection can counter threats from quieter submarines and mines. This Phase I STTR project will address this goal using improved atomic magnetometry methods based on pumping alignment coherence in rubidium vapor. A means of changing the polarization of the pump light will ensure that atomic coherence can be pumped in any orientation of the magnetic field. Multiple probe b ...

Thermo-mechanical processes of turbine disks have been progressively improved to meet microstructural requirements tailored for advanced, sustainable high temperature performances. However, the chemistry of typical Ni-base turbine disk alloys is very complex, and yields a variety of phases and microstructural anomalies under different thermo-mechanical heat treatments. These microstructural hetero ...

Current software development and testing methodologies are inadequate for validating software in mission-critical applications. As Dijstra famously stated: "testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." When lives and national security is at stake, there is a need for mathematically rigorous techniques that can verify the absence of bugs. We propose to devel ...

MZA partnered with the University of Notre Dame proposes to conduct high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations providing volumetric time-resolved aero-optical disturbance modeling for rotary-wing aircraft flow dominated by wing-tip vortices. We will develop detailed wave-optics models of a baseline Navy helicopter beam director including engineering-level simulations of the beam ...

Large aerospace composite structures currently require autoclaves and ovens to achieve desired performance which are expensive to purchase, costly to operate, and often limit part size and production rate. Ovens and autoclaves rely on convective heating which is inefficient, consumes large amounts of energy, and can be difficult to predict. Alternative cure processes using external heaters or hot ...