Award Data

Ultrafast laser technology offers compelling capabilities for national defense, state-of-the-art health care, and the materials processing industry. The development of this technology into commercial form factor hardware has been limited mostly by the size, cost, complexity, and/or pulse energy limitations of current ultrafast laser systems. Optical fiber based ultrafast lasers have dramatically d ...

Information Systems Laboratories (ISL) and Florida Atlantic University (FAU) propose to develop and test a system that uses existing signal processing algorithms coupled with innovative construction technology developed ISL under our E-Field sensor programs and FAU under UUV programs. The Challenge is to develop a small system package with the capability to intercept active threat emissions early ...

A significant barrier to the insertion of ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials into advanced aircraft engines is their inherent lack of toughness under foreign object Damage (FOD) as well as post FOD. Our team will develop and demonstrate a physics-based model for FOD/post FOD in CMC’s. The model will incorporate physical mechanisms associated with impact for two different CMC systems: a) ma ...

The US Navy needs the capability to model acoustic propagation in complex ocean environments containing natural or man-made objects. Such accurate modeling requires the solution of the wave equation in the ocean containing scatterers. In the absence of the scatterer, the oceanic waveguide can be assumed to be axially symmetric. This allows certain types of physically valid approximations to be mad ...

New material systems are required as a result of advanced performance criteria for the next generation destroyer program and other Navy ships. As a part of these requirements there is high demand for high strength structural composites. The objective of the STTR Phase II project is to develop high strength and light weight structural composites utilizing functionalized single-walled carbon nanotub ...

The proposed effort leverages the capabilities of data-driven and physics of failure (PoF) based prognostic techniques for electronic systems by combining them within a hybrid approach. Data-driven and PoF-based techniques both have shortcomings; combining them into a hybrid framework allows using their capabilities in a complementary fashion, and thereby providing a reliable way of prognostics an ...

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 ...

Advances in electronically controlled injection technologies for diesel engines have provided a method to improve medium- to heavy-duty engine performance through increased injection pressures, multiple injections, and injection rate shaping. Although these injection systems have been primarily limited to larger engines, the ability to rapidly and precisely meter fuel for smaller engines is partic ...

In miniature gas turbines for UAV applications, traditional bearings exhibit a typical lifetime of only 25 hours due to excessive axial loading. Mainstream proposes to use a passive, permanent magnet thrust bearing to alleviate this problem and increase service life to over 1000 hours. Since this type of bearing is non-contacting, it can operate at very high rotational speeds with minimal heat gen ...

Military shelters currently use electrically driven Environmental Control Units (ECUs) to provide cooling for the air inside the shelter. The ECU is vapor compression cycle powered by a diesel generator, operating on JP-8 fuel. Other than fueling jet engines, the largest drain on U.S. military fuel supplies in current operations comes from running generators at forward operating bases. In hot cli ...