Award Data

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 ...

Compelling applications of infrared ultrafast lasers—ranging from ship self defense and aircraft self defense, to medical and micromachining applications—have defined a critical performance point at about one millijoule per pulse from a reliable and robust portable laser system with high average power. Increasing amplifier efficiency is a critical need in order to reach high average powers nee ...

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 ...

We propose to conduct a feasibility study for utilizing broadband sampling of the diffusive noise field in a dynamic environment. In ambient noise studies, the ability to resolve a wavefield is proportional to its time-bandwidth (TB) product. In a dynamic environment such as in the atmosphere or ocean, the nature of the impinging wave field is changing rapidly so that only short time segments can ...

We propose to construct a deception detection system which will exploit scaffolding provided by a collection of largely domain-independent deception detection heuristics. These heuristics, integrated through a novel evidential reasoning system, will provide the proposed system, called Skeptic, with a significant advantage over purely inductive methods by allowing it to exploit the adversarial natu ...

Free electron lasers (FEL) made from Nb cavities offer high performance, but they are complex, bulky, and expensive. For Navy FEL applications, where footprint, power consumption, and cost are severely constrained and reliability is of great importance there is a critical need for an alternative to Nb. MgB2 is a recently discovered superconductor with a high critical temperature and critical field ...

A rapid prototyping simulation for the Autonomous Rotorcraft Land & Take-Off (ARLTO) system will be developed to analyze and evolve requirements for the landing and take-off of a Rotary-wing Autonomous Air Vehicle (RAAV) from unprepared terrain. The simulation is based upon the Task-Pilot-Vehicle modeling system and features a UH-60 configured with a Sliding Mode Control (SCM) inner loop closure. ...

TSC and Purdue University will demonstrate a lab prototype of software and hardware capable of doing high speed monitoring of a Lithium-Ion cell. This monitoring needs to be specifically designed to predict failures. When a predictive failure is indicated a defensive countermeasure needs to be implemented. Our specific project goals are to: 1) Select a Lithium-Ion battery that consists of multiple ...

The Navy has need of assessing the river environment including bathymetry, flow velocity profile, and navigational obstructions. While improvements in measurement fidelity and reduction in cost have come about by the use of multiple drifters, measurement quality is lost due to convergent drifter trajectories, and cost/risk remains high due to personnel effort required for deployment. An autonomous ...