Award Data

Manufacturing of structural composites traditionally employs autoclaves to achieve high quality parts, including high fiber-volume-fractions and low porosity. A laminate comprised of stacked prepreg plies are cured under a vacuum in addition to ~7 bar of pressure to prevent formation of voids, particularly in interlaminar (inter-sheet/ply) regions. However, manufacturing composites within an autoc ...

Active imaging systems are used in degraded visual environments, like those found in marine fog and other areas with a high level of attenuation and scattering from obscurants like rain, smoke and dust. These systems are still limited in range and resolution. SA Photonics is taking advantage of new eyesafe, hybrid fiber-bulk laser technology capable of high pulse energy at high repetition rate to ...

Cyber warfare is a rapidly expanding, critical battlefield for the US Navy. Attacks on infrastructure, ship systems, and sailors themselves can significantly reduce operational readiness and deployment time, and can be very costly. To prepare and successfully defend this rapidly evolving battlefield, defensive cyberspace operations (DCOs) must analyze and forensically investigate attacks, but few ...

SSCI and MIT (Prof. Julie Shah) propose to develop and test a system that provides real-time assurance and trust in decisions made by autonomous collaborating vehicles. The proposed system is referred to as the RESTORE (Robust Execution System for Trusted Operation in Relevant Environments) and represents a decision support tool which facilitates decision making by the operator in cases when decis ...

The Phase I effort of this STTR aimed to reinforce ply-drop laminates. When laminates taper from a thicker to thinner cross section, the termination of plies locally create resin pockets that can reduce the life of a part due to the lower strength of the resin compared to the fibers, local stress concentrations, and the propensity for voids in these resin rich areas. Thus, Metis Design Corporation ...

Effective mission planning is critical for military strategy and execution. This process is complex as human operators must consider many variables (e.g., resource limitations, threats, risks) when formulating a plan to accomplish mission goals. Although powerful tools, such as the Navy’s Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS), provide advanced functionality, mission planning remains a hybrid acti ...

The objective of this project is to advance the capabilities of the Coastal Battlefield Reconnaissance and Analysis (COBRA) system by creating a Surf Zone Modelling Tool (SZT) that can create realistic synthetic imagery of the surf zone (SZ). Through the use of this synthetic imagery the COBRA Program will be enabled to inform concept of operations (CONOPS) in unfamiliar environments as well as mo ...

Current design tools for gas turbine engines invoke a variety of simplifying assumptions to estimate heat transfer to solid/metal engine components (e.g., isothermal boundary conditions). These approximations are often not valid, result in inaccurate predictions of heat transfer, and ultimately compromise the thermal integrity of propulsion and power systems. Wall-modeled large eddy simulation (WM ...

ATA Engineering has developed a wavelet-based damage squeezing methodology for generating optimally compressed fatigue test signals that produce an equivalent amount of fatigue damage in a predictably reduced amount of time compared to the baseline (uncompressed) signals. Fatigue-critical signal characteristics (e.g., magnitude, phase, frequency, and sequencing relationships) are identified in the ...

The littoral environment is especially demanding on tactical sonar systems, in large part because the spatial and temporal variability imposes sonar system operating conditions of a nature and with a scale heretofore not encountered in the open oceans. Recent Office of Naval Research (ONR) sponsored basic research as well as fleet exercises have shown that littoral environments tactically importan ...