Historical research guide · 0329 · 2009

DIRD Aerospace Applications of Programmable Matter

DIA / AAWSAP contractor

In one minute

Programmable matter is the idea that a material’s properties should be settings rather than facts, and this Defense Intelligence Reference Document explains how that becomes engineering. Alongside the 92 natural atoms, the author sets three families of artificial ones: quantum dots, which trap electrons in a box five to twenty nanometres across until they behave like an atom you designed; photonic crystals and metamaterials, whose sub-wavelength features let a solid bend light the wrong way; and liquid crystals, which rearrange at a moment’s notice. Pump electrons in and out of the dots with an electric field and the same block of material can be transparent or opaque, conducting or insulating, reflective or absorbing, on demand. He then walks the idea from a product already on sale in 2009 — RavenBrick’s thermoreflective window film — up to a spacecraft hull that grows portholes at dawn, pumps its own waste heat with solid-state junctions, harvests power from sunlight, pressure and temperature gradients, and raises a magnetic shield when a solar storm arrives.

Connection

Chapter 1 reads the DIRD list as the government’s own engineering syllabus, and this is its materials-science page — the discipline the corpus keeps naming as the real bottleneck, ahead of theory. Chapter 13’s unified picture needs a craft skin that can be sensor, radiator, solar cell, window and shield in turn, and this report is where that skin gets specified.

From the source

A quantum dot is a structure of about 5 to 20 nanometres that confines conduction electrons in all three dimensions until they behave as standing waves resembling the orbitals of an atom — an artificial atom, with an unbounded rather than a 92-item catalogue of possible configurations.Four Kinds of Atoms: Quantum Dots, pp. 1–3; Figures 2 and 3
In a metamaterial the sub-wavelength features are conductive metals in a transparent dielectric, and their resonances produce effects no natural material shows — the best known being a negative index of refraction, which bends light the wrong way.Four Kinds of Atoms: Photonics and Metamaterials, pp. 3–4
The 2003 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study for ASHRAE found that across eight US climate zones low-emissivity glass saved 8 to 15 percent of total annual energy while dynamic windows saved a further 6 to 19 percent, and cut peak cooling load by an additional 5 to 38 percent.Advantages of Dynamic Materials, pp. 7–8; ASHRAE report KC-03-12-3
RavenBrick’s RavenWindow, introduced in the third quarter of 2009, is an active-passive thermoreflective film that is transparent when cold and partially reflective when hot, giving a solar-heat-gain-coefficient range of 0.12 to 0.43 — more than twice the range the national laboratory study modelled.Early Commercialization of Smart Materials, pp. 8–9; Figures 5 and 6
A spacecraft skin made of programmable material could re-task one attitude sensor as a sun, horizon or star sensor, serve as a photovoltaic cell when idle, create Peltier coolers anywhere on the hull to move heat where it is wanted, open and close portholes as the station turns, and raise a superconducting magnetic shield against a solar storm.Advanced Concepts in Programmable Materials, p. 12; Scenario for Possible Applications, pp. 13–14
The controlling obstacle is temperature: the bandgaps of semiconductors, the optical spacing of photonic crystals and the symmetries of liquid crystals all shift with heat, so fully programmable devices await either direct temperature control of the active surfaces or high-bandgap systems whose thermal coefficients are small.Advantages of Dynamic Materials, p. 7; Directions for Future Research, pp. 14–15

The way in

https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_02-DIRD_Aerospace_Applications_of_Programmable_Matter.pdf

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

Defense Intelligence Reference Document DIA-08-0911-016, Acquisition Threat Support, 14 December 2009 (IOD: 1 December 2009), produced under the DIA Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. Released under FOIA and published by The Black Vault. The preparing office is withheld under 10 USC 424 and the author’s name under FOIA exemption (b)(6); internal evidence points to the engineer and author Wil McCarthy — reference 2 is his book Hacking Matter, reference 6 is internal research and modelling at RavenBrick LLC where he was chief technology officer, the report showcases RavenBrick’s RavenWindow film, and the notional programmable fibre is called Wellstone, his own coinage — but the released copy names no one. Further dissemination of the photographs in the original is not authorised, so the seven figures are described rather than reproduced. The full text follows, with page furniture and the classification banners removed; a scan artefact in the quantum-computing paragraph (a 64-bit binary computer, printed as 54-bit) is corrected.

How to cite it

DIA / AAWSAP contractor (2009) DIRD Aerospace Applications of Programmable Matter https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/dia/AAWSAP-DIRDs/DIRD_02-DIRD_Aerospace_Applications_of_Programmable_Matter.pdf

Where it sits in the curriculum

The reference documents and the institutional record