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Active Flow Control of Turbulence for Airborne Directed Energy Weapons

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Air Force
Contract: F33615-02-C-3245
Agency Tracking Number: 011VA-0575
Amount: $290,325.00
Phase: Phase II
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: N/A
Solicitation Number: N/A
Timeline
Solicitation Year: N/A
Award Year: 2002
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): N/A
Award End Date (Contract End Date): N/A
Small Business Information
174 North Main Street, P.O. Box 1150
Dublin, PA 18917
United States
DUNS: 929950012
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Neeraj Sinha
 Vice President & Technica
 (215) 249-9780
 sinha@craft-tech.com
Business Contact
 Neeraj Sinha
Title: Vice President & Tech Dir
Phone: (215) 249-9780
Email: sinha@craft-tech.com
Research Institution
N/A
Abstract

"The application of airborne Directed Energy (DE) weapons is under consideration for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) and Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAV). Intense turbulence is encountered along the beam propagation path in the aircraft nearfield, e.g.boundary layer, free shear layer, or wake. Flowfield turbulence creates a highly non-uniform and time-varying, three-dimensional, fluctuating density field, causing a propagating optical wavefront to incur phase delays and become aberrated. Aero-opticalwave-front errors produce beam spreading in high-energy laser weapon beams, which drastically reduces target irradiance and lethality for DE weapons and impairs laser-guided bomb accuracy. Optical degradation, and compensation by adaptive optics, iscompounded by the broad spectrum of turbulence frequencies, which can exceed 10 kHz for typical fighter flowfields. The Phase II program will provide sub-scale demonstration of beam performance improvement by implementing high-frequency flow control, usingnovel actuators. High-resolution numerical simulations and novel optical diagnostics will provide insight into the physics underlying beam attenuation and remediation. Scaling laws will be developed and flow control effectiveness demonstrated. The Phase IIresearch paves the path for implementation of high frequency, active flow control of turbulence around full-scale DE weapons, with the goal of reducing the demand upon the adaptive compensat

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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