Award Data

While aluminum casing materials provide some enhanced performance and thermal loading to explosive ordinance, their overall effectiveness is highly limited by incomplete combustion and long residence times. In order to reduce these problems, the casing material must be designed to facilitate rapid fragmentation through either specialized casing geometries or greatly refined initial particle sizes. ...

Control Theory tools and processes for analyzing the interactions of complex System of Systems (SoS) are lacking, specifically when sub-systems are independently designed and/or higher levels of SoS controls are applied. Integrating these sub-systems into the SoS, can result in dynamic interactions between these sub-systems and the SoS controls resulting in unexpectedly large deviations between ex ...

There is an urgent need to develop and demonstrate innovative control, design and analysis techniques to characterize the stability and performance of a system of systems (SoS) as a function of sub-system dynamics, network structure and control/decision processes. This is particularly true in the missile defense scenario, which involves a coordinated defense against threats. However, there is no e ...

In this research effort, GTD Unlimited will design tools for efficiently specifying, representing, and analyzing the interactions between control systems in System of Systems (SoS). Our approach will be to model the problem as an uncertain system and analyze the resulting models using control methods. Control methods can be related back to the standard Nyquist criterion for stability, ensuring t ...

DfR Solutions and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have formed a team of experts in solder joint reliability and gold embrittlement to perform a series of experiments that will provide the data necessary to create mechanistic reliability models. Critical to any application of these models and of interpreting experimental results is the ability to determine solder joint gold contaminatio ...

Gold contamination in Circuit Card Assembly (CCA) solder joints leads to brittle intermetallic compounds (IMCs), which is one of the major factors in solder joint failure. The conventional rule of thumb considers 3 wt% of gold (Au) as a safety threshold, which is not always reliable due to varieties of package platforms, solder types, reflux settings, operational and environmental conditions, etc. ...

Circuit card assembly (CCA) reliability is dependent on solder joints, which join components to printed circuit boards (PCBs). Board users strive to mitigate risks associated with gold-embrittled solder joints. Enig Associates, Inc. (ENIG), in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories, proposes to develop a risk-forecasting tool for quantifying the risks associated with gold-embrittled sold ...

Laboratory investigations have suggested that acoustically or vibrationally inducing motion in buried targets can aid in improving target detectability through a characteristic response related to differential target motion. This gain is realized by adding an additional degree of freedom, modulation due to motion in the GPR return signal, to use as a discriminating feature. The AKELA team is propo ...

The meteoric rise of personally identifying information (PII) created and shared online is unprecedented. The sheer volume of open source intelligence available on sites such Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, message forums, Instagram, etc. makes the task of collecting and organizing OSINT increasingly laborious for analysts. Zeuss has already built and tested an operational product that addresses this ...

Wireless communication systems are critical components of Department of Defense (DoD) information operations, such as tactical mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and control of unmanned vehicles. These systems must offer trusted and reliable mission-oriented information exchange over the air in contested, congested, and adversary battlefield scenarios. The broadcast nature of the wireless communicati ...