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 ...

Thermally induced fatigue and residual stress introduced during fabrication are sources of failure in microelectronics, which raises reliability concerns for MDA and its system integrators. CFDRC has teamed with experts in the reliability of microelectronics packaging to develop a physics based modeling and testing protocol to correlate material properties and thermal loading conditions to stress ...

NASA recognizes the importance of conservation, smart utilization and reuse of resources for their deep space missions to address the need for regeneration of air, water and waste with highly reliable systems to reduce mission payload. Additionally, energy for life support and other systems needs to be obtained from renewable energy sources or waste streams. In order to address NASA's requirements ...

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 ...

High-energy space radiation from Galactic Cosmic Rays and Solar Particle Events (SPEs) pose significant risks to equipment and astronaut health in NASA missions. Energetic particles from SPEs associated with flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) may adversely affect not only beyond-Low-Earth-Orbit missions, but also aircraft avionics, communications, and airline crew/passenger health. It is cru ...

Establish a radiation-aware analysis capability in a commercial EDA design flow that will enable first-pass success in radiation-hardened by design (RHBD) for DoD ASICs in much the same way that existing EDA design suites ensure first pass functionality and performance success of complex ASICs destined for commercial applications. Layout-aware, calibrated single-event radiation models that captur ...

Control Theory tools and processes for analyzing the interactions of complex System of Systems (SoS) are lacking, specifically when sub-systems are independently designed and/or higher levels of SoS controls are applied. Integrating these sub-systems into the SoS, can result in dynamic interactions between these sub-systems and the SoS controls resulting in unexpectedly large deviations between ex ...

In this research effort, GTD Unlimited will design tools for efficiently specifying, representing, and analyzing the interactions between control systems in System of Systems (SoS). Our approach will be to model the problem as an uncertain system and analyze the resulting models using control methods. Control methods can be related back to the standard Nyquist criterion for stability, ensuring t ...