Award Data

Gyroscopes are found in nearly every airplane, many cars, robots, missiles, and more. The reason for such broad, wide-spread use is simple: gyroscopes are excellent tools for determining rotation, and can be quite sensitive. Improving the sensitivity of optical gyroscopes while also reducing their size and weight has proven to be a significant challenge. To provide a solution, Los Gatos Researc ...

Aging aircraft commonly suffers from several types of degradation including fatigue cracking and lack of bonding. It is virtually impossible to predict degradation in structural performance or when a component or structure will fail due to the inability to test new material systems under all loading conditions and under all environmental conditions. A material state awareness system using minimali ...

Free-play nonlinearity of the control surfaces has a direct impact on aircraft’s dynamic stability characteristics. . It is impossible to design and manufacture a control surface with zero free-play. As control surface free-play increases, tighter limits must be imposed on the aircraft mission capability. Typically, researchers have utilized an oversimplified piecewise-linear torque-rotation rel ...

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 ...

A method is proposed for the simultaneous imaging of temperature and velocity fields inside combustion chambers to enable experimental data on turbulent heat fluxes needed for model validation and development. Applications include turbine engines, afterburners, internal combustion engines, and boilers. Temperature imaging is proposed with laser-induced luminescence imaging of phosphor particles su ...

The main objective of the proposed Phase II project is to leverage the technology of THz generation in resonantly-pumped quasi-phase-matched (QPM) GaAs structures, jointly developed by Stanford University and Microtech Instruments, Inc., and create a compact and power-efficient commercial THz source with a mW-level average power. This source will be continuously or step-tunable in the 0.5-3 THz ra ...

New Jersey Microsystems proposes to develop an economical thermopile array with sensitivity maximum in the long wave infrared region (LWIR). Current infrared detectors are too expensive to be widely deployed in large numbers. The proposed MEMS technology is simpler, more manufacturable, and therefore less expensive than bolometer and ferroelectric devices with competitive D* sensitivity. The th ...

Two-dimensional (2D) visualization techniques have limit capacity to achieve understanding of full dimensionality of the battlefield. Rewritable 3D holographic storage is promising for updatable 3D display applications. In Phase I, New Span Opto-Technology has demonstrated novel concepts of both holographic recording technique and recording material system without the use of high voltage. We have ...

Nonlinear transmission lines offer new vistas in the generation of high power microwave wave (HPM) signals. All electromagnetic sources use an active medium to convert electrical energy to high frequency waves and ultra-wide band signals that can perform useful work. Traditional methods rely on electron beams for the active medium. Nonlinear transmission lines use nonlinear circuit elements to ...

Future Air Force platforms require electro-optic long range imaging systems conformal to the surface of the aircraft to minimize drag and maximize stealth. The long imaging range often means having to compensate for atmospheric turbulence as well as the boundary layer around the aircraft. During the first phase of this STTR project, Optical Physics Company (OPC) demonstrated the feasibility o ...