Award Data

The Virtual Engineering firm is a reality, with a team of scientists and engineers scattered at home sites working together to solve tough engineering problems. This SBIR will perform research and development to provide collaborative system engineering tools for network engineering projects. We will explore new directions for collaborative systems engineering (SE) that enable distributed req ...

Single Crystal relaxor ferroelectric materials have been found to have significant electroacoustic property enhancements compared to their polycrystalline counterparts. Navy underwater acoustic projectors would benefit significantly from the high sound pressure levels and compactness that such transducer materials make possible. The key to their successful application in many Navy transducer sys ...

The use of Nitinol wire as the activating mechanism for an emergency parachute Automatic Actuation Device (AAD) is envisioned to address the shortfalls of the systems currently employed. The use of a ballistic charge to automatically open a parachute increases the operating costs of such systems. These ballistic charges require maintenance every 2 to 3 years. They also require 100% replace ...

Polymer Optical Fibers (POFs) are attractive for short-haul applications such as local area networks (LAN), fiber to the home (FTTH), and datalinks in ships, aircrafts and automobiles, due to their low cost, flexibility and ease of handling. The large diameter of POFs helps in achieving fiber coupling with ease and high efficiency. Commercially available POFs suffer from optical loss, and lo ...

Scientific innovations are commercially worthless until they are matched by corresponding manufacturing innovations. This dilemma characterizes the current status of nanometer metal powder technology. On one hand, years of scientific research have unambiguously demonstrated the utility of nanoscale metal materials for a myriad of high technology applications; on the other hand, current manu ...

NZ Applied Technologies (NZAT) proposes to develop a mechanical sensor and sensor array which potentially have one order of magnitude improved sensitivity over the current state-of-the-art sensors. The technology is based on fabricating flexible/movable integrated optical waveguide structures on Si substrates using micro-machining process. These sensors can be used in harsh environment, such ...

This proposal addresses the feasibility of fabricating advanced magnetic field sensors based on the properties of a magnetostrictive-piezoelectric thin film composite. By utilizing the giant magnetostriction of Terfenol-D and the very high piezoelectric coupling coefficients of PZT films, it is theoretically possible to achieve very high magnetic field sensitivities. By direct detection of a ...

This SBIR Phase I project intends to develop a novel fabrication and packaging methodology leading to the production of a family of low cost, low loss, and reliable microchip star and tree optical couplers using silicon substrates. These monolithic silicon devices would have self-aligned input and output fibers coupled to sol-gel waveguides and would be compatible with present production tech ...

The light intensity modulator is a key component for optical information processing and communication systems. The currently available electro-optical light modulators have two major drawbacks of (1) low power handling capability due to material's optical damage and (2) poor modulation efficiency at high frequencies resulting from velocity mismatching. The need for high speed and high power ...

Single-crystals of PMN-PT and other excellent ferroelectric materials hold the promise of realizing the next generation of high performance piezoelectric transducers. Presently, bulk single crystal growth techniques are severely hampered for producing this type of materials, due to the difficulties caused by lead evaporation and the formation of the other phases. Epitaxial growth of very thick ...