Projects

MUST I: Marine and UnderSea Technology (MUST) Research Program at UMass Dartmouth 

FAIN #: N00014-20-1-2170 

Award Period of Performance: 2/1/20-1/31/25 

Total Award Budget: $4,576,764 

Ramprasad Balasubramanian 

Toward High-Power/High-Energy Flow Batteries for Applications in Unmanned Undersea Vehicles: Overcoming Fundamental Obstacles with a Bio-Inspired Active Material Scaffold

Patrick J. Cappillino, Maricris L. Mayes, and Louis G. Carreiro (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$165,431 

Acoustic Radiation and Directional Patterns (ARDP) of Sensors and Sources       

David A. Brown

Office of Naval Research

 $366,436 

Improving the Prediction Capability of Coastal Ocean Models using Hardware Acceleration     

Geoffrey Cowles and Gaurav Khanna

Office of Naval Research

$147,848 

Anti-biofouling Property and Lifetime of Super-Hydrophobic Surfaces in Marine Environment  

Hangjian Ling, Pia Moisander, and Wei-Shun Chang

Office of Naval Research

$197,813 

Advances in underwater marine technology: New solutions to biofouling  

Pia Moisander, Wei-Shun Chang and Ranjan Mukherjee (Michigan State University)

Office of Naval Research

$399,666  

Marine Sensing Technology for Acoustic Detection and Damage Monitoring through Embedded Composite Conductors    

Vijaya Chalivendra, Arun Shukla (URI), and Helio Matos (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

 $419,367 

Incremental Learning with Human-in-the-Loop for Underwater Anomaly Detection         

Ming Shao and Paul Gendron

Office of Naval Research

$269,704  

Bi-functional Polymer Matrix Composites for Structural Energy Storage in Marine Systems        

Caiwei Shen

Office of Naval Research

$292,319 

Intermediate and Long-Time Evolution of Turbulent Wakes in the Ocean  

Miles A. Sundermeyer and Geoffrey W. Cowles

Office of Naval Research

$387,279 

Deep Learning-Enabled Detection and Classification of Acoustic Signals in Underwater Channels           

Ruolin Zhou, Paul Gendron, and Dayalan Kasilingam

Office of Naval Research

$476,926 

Tethered Integrated RF/Photonic Transmit/Receive for Underwater Unmanned Communications            

Yifei Li, Wei Guo (UMass Lowell), Tariq Manzur (NUWC), Robert Dougenik (NUWC), and Donald Steinbrecher (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$549,145 

A multi-modal sensing enabled soft robotic end-effector for highly dexterous object manipulation in explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) missions   

Kihan Park

Office of Naval Research

$400,230 

Development of a Biomimetic Sensor with Augmented Sensitivity for Ocean Sensing Applications            

Banafsheh Seyed-Aghazadeh and Hamed Samandari

Office of Naval Research

$475,715 

MUST II:  UMass Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Research Program - Materials, Sensing and Communication for Naval Applications 

FAIN #: N00014-20-1-2849 

Award Period of Performance: 9/17/20-9/16/25 

Total Award Budget: $4,205,268 

Ramprasad Balasubramanian

Enhanced Source Localization Using Optimally Designed Metamaterials and Advanced Machine Learning for Underwater Applications

Arghavan Louhghalam, Mazdak Tootkaboni, Alireza Amirkhizi (UMass Lowell), Benjamin Cray (NUWC), and Ivars Kirsteins (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$370,177 

A Unifying Framework for AM Process-Informed Design of High-Contrast Multi-Material Systems for Eigenvalue-Driven Physics

Alireza Asadpoure, Mazdak Tootkaboni, Lorenzo Valdevit (UC Irvine), and Matthew Begley (UC Santa Barbara)

Office of Naval Research

$387,696 

Second Generation Autonomy for Underwater Vehicles

Daniel MacDonald and Jim Reilly (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$423,732 

Advanced Computational Investigation of Nose Curvature and Surface Hydrophobicity Effects in Water Entry of Solid Objects

Mehdi Raessi and Jess Belden (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$290,547 

Computational Strategies for Scientific Data-Driven Learning for Marine and Undersea Technology Applications

Alfa Heryudono, Yanlai Chen, Sigal Gottlieb, Gaurav Khanna, Chris Hixenbaugh (NUWC), Makia Powell (NUWC), Eugene Chabot (NUWC), and Alec Yonika (Mikel, Inc.)

Office of Naval Research

$435,393 

Regional Ocean Turbulence from Long-Duration, Autonomous Observations

Mark Altabet, Amit Tandon, and Geoff Cowles

Office of Naval Research

$1,043,876  

Acoustic Rainfall Measurement on Global Drifters

Amit Tandon, John Buck, and Ian Sabo (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$1,253,847  

MUST III:  UMass Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Research Program: Materials, Sensing and Communication for Naval Applications 

FAIN #: N00014-22-1-2012

Award Period of Performance: 12/2/21-12/1/25 

Total Award Budget: $4,328,191 

Ramprasad Balasubramanian

Underwater Signal Processing for Remote Sensing and Communications

Paul Gendron

Office of Naval Research

$325,747 

Durability and Performance of Flow Batteries for Applications in Marine and Undersea Technology

Patrick J. Cappillino, Maricris L. Mayes, Richard Urian (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$466,035 

Multi Objective Reinforcement Learning for Automated Process Control of Modern Software Practices

Lance Fiondella

Office of Naval Research

$441,043 

Organics Oxidation and Metals Precipitation from Naval Bilgewater Using Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC)

Sukalyan Sengupta, Caitlyn Butler (UMass Amherst), Sandeep Sathyamoorty (Black & Veatch)

Office of Naval Research

$305,189 

Multiagent Learning in Complex Environment with Limited Communication

Yuchou Chang, Shelley Zhang (Adjunct Faculty), Eugene Chabot (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$250,535 

Multi-Fidelity Information Fusion for Accelerated Predictive Modeling and Optimal Design of High Entropy Alloys

Mazdak Tootkaboni, Alireza Asadpoure, Yanlai Chen, Timothy Rupert (University of California), Lorenzo Valdevit (University of California), Negin Alem azkoor (University of Virginia)

Office of Naval Research

$477,181 

Quantum Computing and Control in Noisy Environments

David Kagan, Renuka Rajapakse, Robert Fisher, Jay Wang

Office of Naval Research

$231,213 

Detection, Characterization and Validation in Coastal Environments and of the Marine Wave Boundary Layer using Coordinated Airborne UAVs and Underwater AUVs

Miles Sundermeyer, Brian Howes, Robert Melvin (Teledyne Benthos)

Office of Naval Research

$495,095 

Sub-Mesoscale and Mesoscale Interactions STudy (SubMIST)

Amit Tandon, Mark A. Altabet, Wendell Brown

Office of Naval Research

$1,336,152 

MUST IV:  University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Research Program

FAIN #: N00014-23-1–2141

Award Period of Performance: 1/1/23-12/31/25

Total Award Budget: $3,463,000

Ramprasad Balasubramanian

Active Optical Camouflage with Internal Communications

Wei-Shun Chang

Office of Naval Research

$358,432

Development of A Fully Coupled, Nonhydrostatic, Marine Infrastructure-resolving (up to ~ 1 m resolution), Atmospheric and Ocean Model System

Changsheng Chen

Office of Naval Research

$338,729

Applications of Machine Learning to Develop Statistical Emulators for Complex Spatial Marine Ecosystem Models for Improved Management Decision-making

Gavin Fay

Office of Naval Research

$376,392

Automated Vulnerability and Backdoor Detection as a Part of Software Development Pipeline

Gokhan Kul

Office of Naval Research

$286,754

Humpback Whale Behaviors in Relation to Human Activities and Structures on Stellwagon Bank

Kathryn Kavanagh

Office of Naval Research

$231,083

Learning Nonlinear Dynamical Systems from Sparse and Noisy Data: Applications to Signal Detection and Recovery

Scott Field, Zheng Chen, Alfa Heryudono, Vijay Varma, Brianna Johnson (NUWC), & Brendan Keith (Brown University)

Office of Naval Research

$438,284

Knowledge Augmented Adaptive Learning of Evolving Models for Large Sensor Data Streams

Donghui Yan, Haiping Xu & Steven Roodbeen (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$457,478

Development of a Remotely Deployable MADWEC Wave energy Conversion System for Utilization with a Sonobuoy Deployed Balloon Communication Package

Daniel MacDonald, Mehdi Raessi, Jose Vazquez & David Shane (Boston Engineering Corporation)

Office of Naval Research

$496,876

Cost-effective Elastic Filament Velocimetry (EFV) Sensor Network for Small Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs)

Kihan Park & Ian E. Owen (Jaia Robotics Inc)

Office of Naval Research

$478,972

MUST V:  University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Marine and Undersea Technology Program

FAIN #: N00014-24-1-2231 

Award Period of Performance: 3/1/24-2/28/27

Total Award Budget: $4,290,264

Ramprasad Balasubramanian

Understanding the Mechanical Behavior of Calcareous Sands Through Bio-Morphological Shape Parameters

Ryan Beemer

Office of Naval Research

$409,439

Textured PiezoCeramics Materials Properties and Treatment

David Brown

Office of Naval Research

$303,903

Effect of Stress Fields and Arctic Conditions on Damage Sensing in Marine Composites

Vijaya Chalivendra

Office of Naval Research

$300,695

Advancing Autonomy of Resource-Constrained Unmanned Underwater Vehicles by Third-Generation Neural Network Models

Yuchou Chang, Christopher Hixenbaugh (NUWC) & Anton Spirkin (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$208,051

High-resolution (up to ~ 1-2 m resolution) Marine-infrastructure-resolving, Coupled Atmospheric and Ocean Model System Validation Experiments

Changsheng Chen

Office of Naval Research

$379,225

Cyber and Autonomous System Resilience Engineering

Lance Fiondella

Office of Naval Research

$442,095

Underwater Acoustic Communications at Extremely Low Signal to Noise Ratios

Paul Gendron

Office of Naval Research

$413,049

Microbially Influenced Corrosion of Materials in Marine Applications

Pia Moisander, Maricris Mayes & Micheline Labrie

Office of Naval Research

$347,399

AI-assisted and Quantum-Accelerated Computational Simulation of Multiphase Flow and Fluid-structure Interaction with Adaptive Mesh Refinement: Application in Water Entry of Solid Object

Mehdi Raessi, David Markt (NUWC) & Jesse Belden (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$437,123

Optimizing the Design of a Novel Upper Ocean Variable Buoyancy Vehicle (Aurelia)

Amit Tandon, Ruolin Zhou, Lauren Freeman (NUWC) & Oliver Sun (NUWC)

Office of Naval Research

$486,493

Wide Dynamic Range Photonic Frontend Receiver for Ultrawideband Electronic Sensor

Yifei Li & John Murphy (SeaCorp, LLC)

Office of Naval Research

$562,792