Award Data

Development of hypersonic aircraft and weapon systems has become a critical focus for the Department of Defense to maintain global strike and projection of force capabilities. Despite decades of research, traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods are either incapable of adequately predicting complex features in hypersonic flows or too expensive to be of practical use for vehicle desig ...

Low-cost systems operating at video rates within W-band have remained elusive – especially for stand-off and remote applications. Real time video rate imaging requires parallel detection modalities that traditionally led to high costs and calibration challenges. Substantial advances in low-cost packaging and chip-level integration driven by commercial millimeter-wave applications can now be appl ...

Re-Entry Vehicles (RVs) are a critical component of the strategic weapon arsenal. While physics packages themselves have a substantial deterrence value, the ability to deliver those weapons quickly and with high survivability unlocks the ability to maintain a truly global deterrence. However, these thermal protection systems are encountering two developing challenges: Industrial Base Attrition: Th ...

The focus of this proposed Phase I STTR will be on identifying and assessing initial low-cost acreage TPS technologies applicable to hypersonic conventional and strategic system performance objectives addressing affordability, capacity, and supply chain resilience.  The initial feasibility assessment will utilize a low-cost TPS technology, carbon phenolic, and assess performance over a range of n ...

Specialized materials such as Carbon-Carbon (C-C) are required as primary structural and thermal protection elements to sustain the severe temperatures on the surface of Hypersonic Vehicles during high-speed flight. The C-C material currently qualified at Northrop in Hypersonic Glide-Bodies or “Aeroshells” consist of phenolic resin and a low fired, stretch broken polyacrylonitrile fiber (LFSP ...

As Hypersonic weapons enter the US arsenal there is a need for cost control and high rate of production which is currently not being met by the current state of the art material systems, like Carbon-Carbon. What is needed is a Thermal Protection System (TPS) for aero structures that can survive the Hypersonic environments of high heat in oxygenated environments. A means to do this is using Peregr ...

Multidisciplinary design, analysis, and optimization of hypersonic aircraft require automated adaptive mesh generation across disparate length scales. In the current state-of-the-art, geometry-aware adaptive meshing techniques are still lacking and the such geometric discrepancy can lead to significant errors in the prediction of critical physics, such as shock-boundary layer interaction and fatig ...

The effect of particle ingestion in gas turbine engines has become a significant problem in recent decades. Commercial and military aircraft and helicopter engines currently operate over various terrains with particles. Vehicles near the ocean, for example, typically come across sea spray, which contains fine particulates of salt and can lead to the quick corrosion of metallic engine parts inside ...

High temperature jet plumes emanating from aircraft engines and missiles produce effects that are of interest for threat detection, environmental noise, and engine development purposes. Optical and infrared emissions from plumes are sources of light and heat signatures, respectively, that can potentially be used for tracking or targeting vehicles in flight.  Acoustic noise from jet plumes can pot ...

The Navy requires a low-cost, industrial microwave system for curing aerospace composite materials. In this Phase I STTR proposal, Physical Sciences Inc outlines the development of a microwave applicator that uses low-cost RF sources and can be installed in heritage autoclaves for curing large aerospace composite parts. This technology has the potential to improve cured mechanical properties, and ...