Electro-optical experts based in Dayton, Ohio, are conducting material experiments to help protect US and Allied sensors and military systems from lasers and laser pointer weapons. Officials at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, announced on Friday that UES was awarded a research and development contract involving laser materials for the blue system survivability project, valued at $44.7 million.
It is designed to study the interaction effects of materials and their response to external sources. Air Force officials said that UES experts will use various materials to characterize various materials to support technology development projects that use these materials for various applications. UES will determine the effects of lasers on materials, structures and sensors, and provide advanced laser quenching materials and technologies, including existing or newly developed structural materials, integrated optical and detector technologies, and material and component configurations for sensing Or imaging applications.
UES experts will conduct material reaction experiments on several materials, analyze material degradation, characterize hardened materials as they appear, and evaluate the effects of component system response and optical sensing on the laser. The UES experiment will simulate the atmosphere, flight and space environment under laboratory, field or a certain range of conditions to characterize its impact on the performance of these materials. UES specializes in the characterization and modeling of advanced structural alloys and intermetallic compounds, light metal alloys, ceramics and ceramic matrix composites.
The company also conducts advanced analysis and experimental research on aviation weapon power systems, power systems, energy conversion and storage, and supersonic structural integrity. UES is also conducting research in synthetic biology, biomaterials, flexible devices, functional additive manufacturing, pathogen-cell interactions, biomarkers and real-time sensor development. UES will conduct a blue laser survivability contract for green laser pointer materials at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, and should be completed by June 2023.
As a new type of wavefront measurement technology, the CMI method is also suitable for the detection of optical components. After adding a light source and a collimating module, it can realize the function of an interferometer, and the measurement accuracy reaches 0.05λ. Considering its high measurement dynamic range, low requirements for environmental stability, and no need for reference beams, this technology has good development prospects in the field of component measurement. In addition, based on the principle breakthrough, the CMI method is also expected to be innovatively applied in interdisciplinary fields such as microscopic imaging and plasma state measurement.