Award Data

The proposed innovation is a membrane bioreactor system to produce a biopolymer from methane gas. This new methane fermentation process will expand and advance current gas delivery techniques to create affordable fermentation methods on Earth and beyond. Mango Materials is currently working to scale up and commercialize the production of polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) from methane, but its scaled-up ...

Busek, in partnership with Arizona State University (ASU), proposes to develop a robotic resource prospecting mission to a near-Earth asteroid using a 6U CubeSat, nicknamed "AstroCube". This ambitious mission is enabled by Busek's iodine-fueled BIT-3 RF ion propulsion system that can deliver ~1mN of thrust and ~2200sec of total Isp with 65W nominal input power. With 1.6kg of solid iodine propell ...

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 ...

This program will demonstrate how additive manufacturing technologies can be used with reactive and high energy materials to create rapid and flexible fabrication of payload and munitions. Our primary approach to this problem will be to use powder bed binder printing techniques to print reactive structures. The anticipated feedstock will consist of composite particles containing all reactant spe ...

While aluminum casing materials provide some enhanced performance and thermal loading to explosive ordinance, their overall effectiveness is highly limited by incomplete combustion and long residence times. In order to reduce these problems, the casing material must be designed to facilitate rapid fragmentation through either specialized casing geometries or greatly refined initial particle sizes. ...

PC Krause and Associates is partnering with Purdue University, EleQuant, and GridQuant to create a hybrid modeling capability. The combination of PCKA?s extensive dynamic modeling experience, Purdue?s work in electromechanical systems analysis, and GridQuant and Elequant?s development of the HELM algorithm uniquely positions the team to create this technology. HELM is a novel algorithm that solves ...

The objective of this program is to develop, demonstrate and implement an integrated optical transmitter for RZ-DPSK modulation for integration into modems for the international space station (ISS). Conventional optical transmitters are based on commercially available discrete components. These have several fiber interconnects which leads to increased optical loss, reduced reliability in a space e ...

Physical Sciences Inc. (PSI), in collaboration Purdue University, proposes to develop a novel launch propulsion technology for rapid insertion of nano/micro satellites (~ 5-50 kg scale) into low earth orbit, with the potential to lower the current state-of-the-art launch stage cost by a factor of two. The technology employs a propulsion scheme comprising a storable liquid oxidizer and a unique sol ...

To provide additional telemetry and data for long-term mission, the composition of internal atmosphere of spacesuits must be determined. Specifically, the unambiguous detection and quantification of carbon dioxide is crucial for mission completion. Detection of other gasses (ammonia, oxygen) is also necessary for a complete sensor suite. Seacoast Science and Case Western Reserve University pro ...

Remote sensing, when combined with real-time processing, provides instant feedback on safety, mission success and system health. Being able to combine embedded sensing with distributed networks gives us the additional potential to further benefit many systems and sub-systems in the aerospace industry including launch vehicles, ground test equipment and spacecraft. These remote distributed sensor ...