Award Data

The objective of this project is to demonstrate intelligent health and maintenance status determination and predictive fault diagnosis techniques for NASA rocket engines under online and offline conditions from either on-board or maintenance, test and analytic data. AGNC proposes a Health and Maintenance Status Determination and Predictive Fault Diagnosis System (HMSD/PFDS). The fuzzy qualitative ...

Phase I demonstrated the technical feasibility of creating surface acoustic wave (SAW) based humidity sensors that respond rapidly (under 0.5 second) and reversibly to a wide range of humidity levels using nanoparticle and thin polymer films. This proposal describes a Phase II effort that will result in the development of multiple uniquely identifiable, wirelessly interrogable, passive humidity s ...

This project will demonstrate the benefits of a partial emission pump coupled with a zero net positive suction pressure inducer design to achieve robust, deep throttling capability. This pump application is well suited for 5k to 15k lbf thrust range rocket engines.

Long-term exposure to microgravity and radiation during space exploration can pose a critical threat to the health of a flight crew. Real-time monitoring of urine protein levels is an effective way to follow the onset and progress of many diseases and guide the prompt selection of proper therapy. The success of such diagnostic tasks, which are vital for future space missions, critically depends up ...

Computational codes in physics and engineering often use implicit solution algorithms that require linear algebra tools such as Ax=b solvers, eigenvalue, optimization, or graph algorithms. Developers face major challenges in selecting linear algebra tools that can support their algorithms, numerical schemes, meshes, and computing hardware and to minimize the time, space and complexity. The existin ...

Soil debris liberated by spacecraft landing on the lunar surface may damage and contaminate surrounding spacecraft and habitat structures. Current numerical simulations of these events lack credibility because lunar environment complexities have never been captured in suitable models: the mixed rarefied-continuum nature of the plume's surface layer flow, and the highly irregular soil particle shap ...

Our objective is to develop and demonstrate a novel microfluidic device for non-destructive identification, sorting and counting of radiation damaged cells. A major thrust, using microarray experiments, is the discovery of unique cell surface markers for identification of radiation-damaged cells. A key innovative feature in the proposed device platform is a gravity-independent, optics-free, electr ...

The proposed innovation is an aircraft flight envelope monitoring system that will provide real-time in-cockpit estimations of aircraft flight envelope boundaries, performance, and controllability. The adaptable monitoring system will provide information on current and predicted aircraft performance and controllability, alerting the pilot to any aerodynamic degradation of the control effectivenes ...

Over the next decade, a host of new technologies and capabilities will be needed by NASA to support Project Constellation. For risk reduction considerations, it is desirable that they be flown on other missions prior to use on vehicles such as Orion or Altair. An innovative and cost-effective approach to doing so is to use picosats, which are miniaturized spacecraft with masses on the order of a ...

Advanced liquid rocket propulsion systems must achieve longer burn times without performance degradation to allow the lowest cost per kilogram access to space. Ablative thrust chambers have an extensive heritage and are the low cost approach to fabricating rocket thrust chambers. However, composite ablative chambers are heavy and suffer from erosion that typically limits performance of the engine ...