Award Data

Sensors are vital during advanced turbine engine development testing. Essential data expedite engine development programs and accordingly bring new advanced propulsion and ground-power engines to market sooner. Ceramic thermal barrier coating (TBC) on first-stage turbine blades is now a vital component of advanced engines under development for future military aircraft, protecting the metal alloy b ...

A number of high-energy laser weapons currently under development by and for the U.S. military will provide our armed forces with capabilities that are unmatched by conventional armaments. Laser weapons allow targets to be destroyed from remote locations without the delays associated with the transit of typical missiles and artillery shells. However, during engagement the laser radiation reflect ...

The innovation proposed is a flight-worthy optical sensor that will monitor propulsion system performance and health characteristics, including identifying the onset of combustion instability, in air-breathing engines such as turbojets and ramjets. It is an innovation for three reasons: 1) the sensing is performed in the hot exhaust flow at the back of the engine instead of at the flame-front in t ...

75661S The production of hydrogen fuel from renewable resources such as solar and wind in distributed-generation, small-scale applications would provide an environmentally-benign, truly sustainable transportation fuel supply. But before this can be achieved, the hydrogen generating systems must become as reliable as home appliances (e.g., central air conditioning or furnaces), which require only ...

The design of turbomachinery components is a complex process requiring many steps and hundreds of minute decisions in an iterative process. The design proceeds from engine cycle performance and meanline design through 3D viscous flow calculations (CFD) and finite element structural analysis (FEA). Design studies may traverse this process many times, with routine tasks performed by engineers in a ...

79729S Ocean currents constitute a potentially enormous renewable energy resource; however, existing technologies for capturing this energy are only in the prototype stage, are small in scale (less than 1 megawatt), and are not grid-connected. Although there is a considerable overlap in technology with the more mature field of wind energy, new robust technologies will have to be developed that ar ...

79659S As direct drive wind turbines increase in size, the diameter of their generators increases to the point where it is no longer possible to ship them as a single unit. While some companies have addressed this issue by using wound rotor generators that can be assembled on site, this approach suffers from the inherent lower efficiency and reliability of the wound rotor technology. To date, no ...

Thermal batteries use a number of halide-based electrolytes, such as LiCl-KCl eutectics, that have an operational temperature range from 350°C to over 550°C. Such high temperatures can be unacceptable if there are temperature-sensitive electronics adjacent to the battery. In a Phase I SBIR effort we have identified and tested battery systems with operational temperatures in the 120°C to 228.5 ...

78150B The catalytic reforming of diesel fuel in Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) systems must overcome a number of challenging issues: (1) the deactivation of the catalyst by sintering and sulfur poising; (2) the requirement for a large fuel processing system as a result of high space velocity requirements; and (3) the lack of durability of the catalysts, which require frequent replacement due to "c ...

78072S III-V nitride-based, high brightness, UV and visible light emitting diodes (LEDs) are of a great interest for general illumination, but the low light output efficiencies of current high brightness LEDs are still inadequate. A key material issue preventing the achievement of higher light output efficiency in LEDs is the poor crystalline quality of the nitride epitaxial layers that result fr ...