Award Data

With the advent of the Navy’s newest classes of all-electric vessels, the interdependence and functional correlation of the power plant with other mission-critical ship systems such as integrated cooling, weapons, navigation, air surveillance, and IT control network systems, maintaining optimal oversight and control of power distribution aboard ship becomes increasingly challenging. As the opera ...

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 ...

Accurate prediction heat transfer in gas turbine components subject to cooling requires high fidelity modeling of heat transfer in the presence of high Reynolds number turbulent flow. The cooling internal to the blades results in sustained temperature gradients within the structural parts, from low temperature in the interior of the structure to increasingly higher temperature closer to the surfac ...

Mission and planning is a difficult and time-consuming process that places a heavy burden on manpower and critical thinking and is performed under significant pressure. Existing and emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques are well-suited to assisting humans with these challenges. While the promise of AI/ML is great, there are significant obstacles to operationali ...

Current mission planning systems allow strike planners and operations centers to perform time-sensitive strike planning, execution monitoring, and validate mission effects using XML-based tools that visualize time critical attack plan and track plan status vs. execution. In this proposed STTR Phase I design for the Next Generation Navy Mission Planning (NGNMPS) system, we will identify expanded op ...

This project will bring unparalleled capabilities of beam pen lithography (BPL) to the fields of 3D bioprinting, biofabrication, and tissue engineering by enabling the rapid construction of large-volume 3D hydrogel structures with the tunable architecture and mechanical properties at the micron scale. Not only will BPL 3D printing allow the construction of considerably more biologically relevant t ...

The Phase II effort will be to clearly demonstrate the feasibility and build a prototype of a noncontact, high-quality holographic polarimetry system with pixel level depth and Mueller matrix information with a user-friendly interface to image and display this data. The measurements of each data product will be validated with trusted truth samples. The system will be reproducible and will have a d ...

Natural Fiber Welding, Inc. (NFW) is developing revolutionary textile manufacturing processes that both increase performance of biodegradable natural fibers while decreasing manufacturing costs. Benefits of NFW’s technologies include greatly increasing the performance of cotton, including mechanically recycled cotton. Today there are billions of pounds of waste cotton textiles that are landfille ...

The requirements for thermal management on tactical aircraft systems have reached a level at which integrated system design must be considered early in the aircraft design process. An integrated propulsion, power and thermal modeling and simulation design approach is necessary for reduced size, weight and power requirements. At the same time, there is an urgent need for capabilities that enable an ...

This STTR project proposed by CU Aerospace (CUA) and research partner the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will provide innovative thermal management systems-level analysis tools to the Navy, enabling detailed investigations of air platform thermal management issues associated with electronics loads (e.g., avionics/radar upgrades for military aircraft). The Phase I effort focuses ...