SBIR-STTR Award

Conventional, current generation, nuclear (tritium) lamps areemployed in many DoD applications. The Army uses these lamps infire-control applications among others. DoD currently has over 1 millioncuries of tritium in use in these lamps. The Army has been under pressurefrom the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for several years, due to theproblems created when conventional lamp breakage occurs. Self-luminousmicrospheres would provide an answer to NRC's safety concerns and alsoprovide a significant cost savings to DoD due to the reduced amount oftritium required for any given replacement lamp design incorporatingself-luminous microspheres. Tritium is $3.19/curie. Many new DoDapplications and possibilities will result from the envisioned safer,improved light source. Encapsulight, Inc. and Encapsulight's unique teampropose to develop an innovative and unique new machine technology thatwill provide Encapsulight, Inc. with the capability to produce theenvisioned safer, improved light source, radioluminescent microspheres.

The Department of Defense is in possessio of over 1,000,000 Curies of tritium in radioluminescent (RL) light sources. Replacement of monolithic RLs with distributed light sources i the form of miniature glass spheres, each containing tritium and a phosphor, offer all the advantages of RLs with greatly enhanced ruggedness and freedom from contamination in case of accidental breakage. In Phase I the critical problem was indentified as the insertion of active phosphors into the spheres as they are blown. A Phase II program to develop solutions to this problem was designed with a stepwise approach which will produce limited number of tritium and phosphor loaded spheres for evaluation in at least two microsphere arrays equivalent to standard RL lamps with a high degree of certainty. A production facility capable of producing self-luminious spheres at low cost will be built.