Award Data

Advanced turbomachinery components play a critical role in launch vehicle and spacecraft liquid rocket propulsion systems. To achieve desired efficiencies, extremely tight tolerances are often imposed between inducer blades and shrouds or other system components which sets up strong interactions that influence both the aerodynamics and the structural performance of blades and vanes. These transien ...

Chemical contamination of spacecraft components as well as thermal and force loading from firing liquid propellant thrusters are critical concerns for in-space propulsion applications. Gas molecular contamination and liquid droplet deposition due to incomplete combustion threaten to damage surface materials, sensitive instruments and optical sensors, and poses major risks for mission success. Liqu ...

The proposed novel program will develop and demonstrate a new approach to perform real-time relative vehicle localization within a swarm formation with application to communication-less coordination. These objectives are achieved by using Random Finite Sets statistics theory to solve the multiple object tracking problem. The swarm formation localization problem can be formulated as estimating the ...

Newly developed phase-engineered and low dimensional materials have opened the door to the design of materials structures that exhibit extremely efficient ionic transport. Recently, a new type of electro-filtration system designed to convert thermal power into purified water from salt water (or other ionic pollutants) has been demonstrated in the lab. The system is based on a bi-phasic nanoplate ...

The proposed 9-month research project aims for the development of additive manufacturing techniques for the creation of electronic devices. It will develop an innovative additive manufacturing technique that combines the ink-based printing with laser melting technology to directly print a three-dimensional (3D) system with built-in electrical properties and functioning as an electronic device. Th ...

A human produces more than 100 Watts of waste heat during normal activity. If a fraction of this heat energy can be harvested it can replace the stored chemical energy in one or more of the batteries typically carried by soldiers in the field. The current generation batteries, such as the BB2590 are bulky and rigid. The PowerFelt material developed by Wake Forest University is ideally suited for h ...

This Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer program will simulate and demonstrate the feasibility of a Spin-torque microwave diode spectrograph for real-time determination and monitoring of incident microwave signals. The microwave detection will be performed by a bandwidth encompassing parallel array of nano-patterned magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs). When an ac current of microwave frequency ...

This NASA Phase I STTR effort will establish the feasibility of developing a compact broadband near to mid-IR programmable optical comb for use in laser based remote sensing and communications. The comb generator will use a waveguide-based optical parametric gain block technology that can have ultra wideband (>250nm) operation with very high gain (>25dB) in a very compact footprint. This approach ...

Accurate real-time waterborne pathogen detection is of paramount importance to security of U.S. military forces and installations. Fieldable high-throughput pathogen concentration is a critical analytical need for enhanced detection performance. Existing concentration methods are time-consuming, bulky, labor-intensive, power- and reagent-hungry, and consequently ill-suited for battlefield deployme ...

deciBel Research and our university partner, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)-Center for Imaging Science, propose to develop a dual MWIR/LWIR imaging polarimeter for the detection and discrimination of aerosolized biological spores. The system will exploit spectral absorption and MIE scattering-induced radiometric and polarimetric phenomenon exhibited by clouds of aerosolized biological spo ...