AGILTRON, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N14A-T003
AGILTRON, INC. — STTR Phase I award from Department of Defense.
Phase I STTR feasibility signal
- Phase I awards fund proof-of-concept work. For capture teams, they mark early interest from Department of Defense in a technical approach.
- Watch for Phase II follow-ons from the same firm/topic family — that conversion path is where budgets and transition pressure rise.
- Obligated amount $149,049. Cross-check similar awards in the same agency and technology tags for going-rate context.
- Topic code N14A-T003 links this award to a solicitation family — search the same topic stem for incumbents and recompete timing.
- Amount
- $149,049
- Agency
- Department of Defense · Navy
- Program / Phase
- STTR · Phase I
- Topic
- N14A-T003
- Solicitation
- 2014.0
- NAICS
- —
- Place of performance
- MA
- Period
- 2014-09-09 → 2015-12-31
Description
Agiltron in collaboration with National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will develop a new class of high-efficiency and lightweight broadband inverted metamorphic multi-junction (IMM) solar cells for the uninterrupted flight missions of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The approach is closely coupled with Agiltrons extensive experience in high-transmittance broadband and wide-angle anti-reflective microstructures and NRELs significant progress in high efficiency IMM solar cells to push the cells conversion efficiency performance well beyond the current state-of-the-art. The novel solar cells will be transferred from thick, heavy, and stiff substrates to a thin, light and flexible support handle by epitaxial lift-off process, thus meeting the NAVYs specific-power requirement. This novel solar cell technique has several unique advantages over conventional approaches, including high conversion efficiency, high specific power, wide incident angle acceptance, broad band operation, low cost, and high flexibility, without engineering trade-offs. The technical approach will be proven in Phase I through numerical analysis, simulations and experiments. The solar cell array prototype will be designed, fabricated, characterized, and delivered to the Navy in Phase II.