Award Data

The United States is currently faced with unprecedented energy challenge. Petroleum prices have skyrocketed due to rising competition for energy resources from emerging economies. There is a significant need for processes that can produce hydrocarbons from renewable resources rather than petroleum. The use of renewable resources ensures a long-term supply of hydrocarbons, even after easily extract ...

This Phase II effort will establish stretchable photovoltaic modules that achieve the key metrics of the program: modules with efficiencies > 10%, that sustain elastic deformations > 10% (with little or no loss in performance), and that produce output voltages > 25 V. In this Phase II effort will we demonstrate functional modules deployed on the airfoil of micro unmanned aerial vehicles (MAVs). To ...

The Navy's role in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) has necessitated a variety of activities that require long-term, reliable intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance. For tactically relevant applications, the endurance and performance tradeoff remain the limiting factors in determining how long sensing and analytic capabilities can remain operative while unattended. In this proposal, Inte ...

In recent years, the need for highly reliable, durable and non-intrusive systems for monitoring the health condition of naval structures becomes more and more recognized. Of particular importance is the condition based maintenance of Navy rotating machinery (motors, generators, pumps, gear systems, etc.). Such Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems should be able to detect failures in their ea ...

We propose developing high energy density, non-toxic, environmentally friendly zinc-water battery system, which can be manufactured in various form factors including flexible cells, based on novel metal hydrated ruthenium (IV) oxide chemistry. The cells are flexible and have a low recharge voltage. This makes them useful in a variety application as well (mounted on air frame support elements to m ...

Current prosthetic feet produce much less peak mechanical power than the able-bodied foot/ankle and release only about half of the mechanical energy generated during gait. This leads to higher energy expenditure among amputees as compared to able-bodied i

Intelligent Automation Inc. (IAI) proposes the design and implementation of the Target Recognition with the Assistance of Artificial Intelligence (TRACE) system that incorporates classical model-based target classification and identification approaches with data-driven machine learning solutions to improve the target classification accuracy. The outcome of the TRACE systems is a set of machine lea ...

Vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNTs) will be selectively applied at interfaces in laminated composite structures to effect locally the mechanical properties that limit rotorcraft structures, such as fatigue and damage tolerance. In Phase I this work will quantify these effects in CFRP and CFRP/GFRP hybrid coupons. The VACNT material will be transferred directly onto prepreg plies, but also ...

Quantum cascade laser optical output power is limited by laser facet catastrophic optical damage (COD). In edge-emitting semiconductor lasers COD is a thermal runaway process wherein the front facet of the laser heats under high power operation. This facet heating reduces the semiconductor bandgap which increases the optical absorption and also increases the electrical injection current in the fac ...

In this program, we will develop solutions to optimize QCL fabrication processes, such as facet passivation and high thermal conductivity coatings, that will mitigate the reliability issues for high power QCL applications. In phase I, we will first evaluate all concepts and efforts that have been largely investigated for GaAs based high power diode lasers and transfer the knowledge to InP based QC ...