Award Data

There is a need for easy-to-use, versatile alloys for additive manufacturing that print consistently regardless of the specific process or machine, or the metallurgical and manufacturing knowledge of the user. Such capability is especially critical for soldiers to be able to make every day items on demand in the theater of war. Toward meeting this need, recent successes developing high performance ...

The Army has a clear need for a small unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) capable of autonomously accompanying a single soldier or vehicle. Such a UGV would help solve both logistical problems of soldiers needing to transport more equipment and supplies than they can carry in a backpack, and tactical problems of scouting unsafe areas. Multiple designs for such UGVs exist; however, they require active re ...

The proliferation of social media technologies has provided a promising new source of information for intelligence analysts. Effective use of this data could provide insight into the evolution of social networks, identification of communication patterns that lead to events of interest, and analysis of relevant socio-cultural factors and trends. However, intelligence analysts frequently have diffic ...

Socio-cultural factors are increasingly being recognized as critical to effective military operations. Therefore, collection and analysis of socio-cultural data is required to provide Warfighters with a comprehensive understanding of their operational environment. Warfighters need tools that enable the capture, management, and rapid analysis of socio-cultural data from heterogeneous sources (e.g., ...

In this program, Omega Optics and the University of Texas at Austin propose to develop an on-chip surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectrometer array for single molecule detection. The sensitivity of the SERS spectrometer comes from the 5-nm gap between gold nanowires, which can achieve 108 enhancement factor (EF) for the Raman scattering signals. Especially, these gold nanowires are preci ...

Development of a novel logistic fuel reformer that has excellent tolerance to sulfur and is resistant to coke formation is proposed. The reformer will produce a hydrogen-rich product that contains less than 1 ppm sulfur and is suitable for use with solid oxide fuel cells. Significant improvements in power density, startup time, durability, and cost relative to state of the art logistic fuel refo ...

The rapid ascent and adoption of social media as the dominant form of communication has led to significant analysis challenges. In particular, there is a gap in theoretically informed methods to analyze data mined and collected from social media. One primary cause of this gap is the lack of fusing structural sources of information (e.g. social network topology) with non-structural sources (message ...

Most standard-of-care tools and techniques for evaluating neck disorders are subjective, unreliable, and do not provide actionable information for providers, payers, and organizations to deliver efficient and effective care. This lack of objective neck he

The goal of the proposed program is to identify an effective passivation material and develop a capable passivation methodology to protect highly reticulated HgCdTe surfaces. The proposed passivation material and technique using highly conformal atomic layer deposition (ALD) will allow the DOD to develop high-performance infrared focal plane array detectors that can operate under wider operating c ...

We propose to leverage the expertise of Applied Nanotech, Inc. (ANI) in building highly sensitive, selective, portable and versatile GC/DMS instruments, to create a system to uniquely identify pollen species in complex mixtures based on their VOC profile. This project will determine which VOCs shall be collected and how many pollen grains are needed in order to increase the confidence of accuratel ...