Rads to Watts Program Solicitation

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals for directly converting radiation energy into electricity, focusing on radiation voltaics (also known as radiovoltaics). Typical radiovoltaic unit cell configured devices can produce power at the milliwatt-level. Rads to Watts seeks approaches that can scale unit cells to broad-area collection volumes to produce power at kilowatt-levels over relevant timescales.

Proposed work should include innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in high fluence-resilient, radiation-hardened, charge-carrying materials and techniques that specifically apply to radiovoltaics. Specifically excluded from Rads to Watts is research that primarily results in incremental improvements to the existing state of practice and research that applies to direct conversion methods other than radiovoltaics.