Charles River Analytics
Cambridge, MA
617-491-3474
www.cra.com

The Department of Defense recently awarded Charles River Analytics, a developer of intelligent systems and robotic platforms, a follow-on contract for Tourniquet Master Training (TMT). The TMT course helps warfighters provide immediate aid by halting the bleeding of soldiers' battlefield wounds.

Logos Technologies
Fairfax, VA
703-584-5725
www.logostech.net

In partnership with the San Francisco, CA-based motorcycle maker Alta Motors, Logos Technologies has received a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue development of the SilentHawk military motorcycle.

PPG Industries
Pittsburgh, PA
412-434-3131
www.ppgaerospace.com

PPG Industries’ aerospace coatings group has installed an electrocoat primer system at the US Coast Guard Aviation Logistics Center in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The technology, custom-designed to protect the facility's aerospace parts, has reduced the time needed for primer application, processing, and full-cure.

Office of Naval Research
Arlington, VA
703-696-5031
www.onr.navy.mil

To improve the ability to detect and defeat adversary radars and anti-ship missiles, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) partnered with the MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and games experts Metateq and PipeWorks Studios to develop Strike Group Defender (SGD), a multiplayer training program.

Despite the continuous development of new, higher performing processors, the thirst for increased embedded computing capability remains unquenched. In fact, it seems like Moore’s Law may have slowed when it comes to frequency but increased in terms of driving processor core and field programmable gate array (FPGA) LUTS counts. The previous need for fewer frequency increases has become a need for increased core counts, faster front side bus speeds, and greater support chip integration, all of which drive continually rising power requirements. Meeting these ever increasing "compute density escalations" while simultaneously maximizing thermal cooling efficiencies requires innovative packaging solutions.

With the ever increasing threat of improvised explosive devices, both in the military arena and the civilian realm, there is a growing demand for technologies with the ability to detect explosives and their precursors from a safe stand-off. While a wide variety of technologies have been investigated for this application, laser-based spectroscopic techniques designed to detect chemical traces on personnel, vehicles and other objects have garnered a lot of attention. These laser-based techniques include Raman spectroscopy, laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), diffuse reflectance spectroscopy (DRS), and photothermal spectroscopy (PTS), among others. Laser-based approaches concentrate a large amount of power on a single target location, which enables reasonable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to be obtained despite the 1⁄R² drop-off in return signal strength (where R represents stand-off distance).

"Composite design and analysis is a highly integrated activity,” said Chris Gear, Chief Technology Officer & Senior Technical Fellow for GKN Aerospace. He noted that how composite material is placed, how it moves, how it cures, and the quality and conformance of the product are all interrelated. All of these factors are considered in the final release of the data for manufacturing, according to him, aided by design-for-manufacturing (DFM).