High-Reliability Capacitors

Maintaining technological superiority remains critical for national defense forces. Many face informal adversaries that are adept at harnessing today’s sophisticated civilian technologies, like mobiles, M2M...

Fabricating Transparent and Stretchable Supercapacitors Based on Wrinkled Graphene Electrodes

Stretchable electronic devices, including solar cells, light-emitting diodes, batteries, and textile supercapacitors, have been developed to retain...

Power Loss and Data Integrity in Military SSDs

For the defense industry, NAND Flash, with its lack of moving parts, has made it the common storage medium for a variety of field applications. With its small size, low power usage, high...

Oil Pipeline Fault Detection System Determines Material Permittivity at Microwave Frequencies

Researching fault location techniques for the oil industry requires data on the complex permittivity of the polyamide Rilsan at microwave...

Improving Signal to Noise Ratios in Defense Electronics

As a vertical market, “defense electronics” encompasses a huge range of systems, from portable communications to transportation, avionics, and shipborne radar. While the power...

Solving the Power/Energy Paradox for High-Power Defense Applications

While often used interchangeably, power and energy are not the same. Energy is the capacity to perform and power is the rate at which that capacity is exercised — the...

Choosing a Capacitor for Use as a Switch-Mode Power Supply Filter

Input filter caps need to be able to supply a quick burst of energy and to suppress noise generated in the switch circuit. Important considerations for the input filter cap...

Airbrush-Fabricated Carbon Nanotube Supercapacitor Electrodes

In order for the batteries used by soldiers to provide peak power, an increase in battery size and weight is necessary, which is becoming a burden. A light, compact alternative to...

Passive Devices Designed to Improve Signal-to-Noise Ratios in Defense Electronics

While power architectures of defense electronics are extremely diverse, all have common operational demands: they must be robust (shock, vibration, temperature...

Magnetic Random Access Memory Integrated Passive Components

An embedded magnetic memory technology was developed to be integrated into a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuit fabrication process to provide radiation-hard...

Microwave Energy Transmission for Aircraft

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are used in many applications to gather intelligence without risking human lives. These aircraft, however, have limited flight time because of their reconnaissance...

Low-Power Circuit for an Electromagnetic Warning System Sensor

Low-power sensors are important to the Army for monitoring infrastructure of the lifecycle of an operation. Isotope batteries can power and operate compact, low-power sensors for...

Characterization of High-Temperature Polymer Thin Films for Power Conditioning Capacitors

Wide bandgap semiconductors (e.g., silicon carbide) will enable operation of military systems at temperatures above 150 °C, which eases thermal...

Study of Submodeling of a Small Component in a Structure

A study was performed to evaluate the accuracy achievable in the use of submodeling in finite-element modeling of the mechanical response of a structural system that includes...

High-Voltage, High-Temperature Power Electronics Capacitor

A novel high-temperature, high-voltage power electronics capacitor incorporates materials of construction and electrical components that have been initially designed as a segment of...

High-Cycle Life Testing of RF MEMS Switches

The electromechanical, RF, and charging properties of an "air-gap" capacitive switch enable it to be utilized in high-cycle life testing. Monitoring both high-speed and low-speed switching...

DC Power Converter for 200°C Containing SiC Transistors

A DC-to-DC power converter, nominally rated for a power of 180 W, an input potential of 28 V, an output potential of 270 V, and a maximum operating temperature of 200°C has been...

Life Tests of a Microwave MEMS Capacitive Switch

Life tests have demonstrated the longevity of an electrostatically actuated capacitive switch of a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) type suitable for handling radio signals having...

Improved Magnetic Sensor Based on Giant Magneto-Impedance

A low-power, highly stable electronic sensor circuit for measuring a small change in the ambient magnetic field with high sensitivity exploits the giant magneto-impedance (GMI)...

Compensating for Parasitic Effects in Low-Pass Filters

Techniques to compensate for the effects of parasitic inductances and capacitances have been developed as part of an effort to improve the performances of low-pass filters in electronic...

Textile Capacitor

The Air Force (AF) is evolving from a Cold War-era force with a large, containment- focused infrastructure to a smaller, more responsive and affordable Air and Space Expeditionary Force. In support of this transformation,...