Award Data

Over the past 150 years, copper mining in the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan has resulted in the accumulation of approximately 1/2 gigaton of tailing piles. These wastes occur in a number of forms on the uplands and in the lakes and waterways. Today these tailings are drifting along the lakeshore and affecting the beauty of the otherwise pristine coastline of Lake Superior, depreciating the valu ...

Reduction in dependency on imported petroleum and the quest to identify renewable energy sources has led to a search for innovative biofuels derived from renewable biomass, which promise long-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Butanol is one possible biofuel. It is an industrial fuel that can be produced from crops using acetone-butanol (AB) fermentation by butanolagenic microbes, such a ...

This proposal describes an Application Coherency Manager that implements and manages the interdependencies of simulation, data, and platform information. It will also enforce a simulation configuration profile submission that includes the specification of the interdependency requirements. To describe these interdependences, a general-purpose language will serve as the basis for higher-level rule ...

Heat shield technology is a critical component of manned spaceflight. In particular, the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) requires thermal protection systems (TPS) beyond the current state of the art. While new TPS shields are under development, a key difficulty is the ability to diagnose TPS performance. Technology demonstrator missions are being planned, but designing instrumentation capabl ...

NASA's next generation of x-ray observation missions require x-ray calorimeters with superior energy resolution. Semimetallic HgTe has already proven itself as an excellent soft x-ray absorber material due to its low heat capacity. The alloy Hg0.834Cd0.166Te is predicted to also have zero energy gap at T=0 K and a heat capacity even less that that of HgTe due to: (i) a greater Debye temperature (r ...

The objective of this proposal is to study and demonstrate novel GaAsNP/GaP/AlGaP technology for use in extreme photovoltaic (PV) energy conversion. NASA and the scientific community are interested in solar missions that go as far as Saturn or even into near sun conditions. Such missions present a challenging problem for PV technology. In addition to the requisite high efficiency and reduced so ...

Active flow control to prevent or delay boundary layer separation dramatically improves the performance of air vehicles in critical regions of the flight envelope. FlexSys Inc. has designed a compact, efficient, electromechanical High-Frequency Micro-Vortex Generator system (HiMVG) and tested it a subsonic speeds, proving that, when tuned to the boundary layer, it is as effective at promoting flow ...

The structural design during the early development of an aircraft focuses on strength, fatigue, corrosion, maintenance, inspection, and manufacturing. Usually the acoustic requirements are met after the design of the fuselage structure has been completed. Ideally the structural-acoustic concerns should enter the design cycle early and they should be considered along with other main design discip ...

A fully monolithically integrated L-band T/R module using InGaP/GaAs-based HBTs (heterojunction bipolar transistors) for both the transmit and receive functions is proposed. We plan to improve the efficiency by implementing a DHBT (double heterojunction bipolar transistor) InGaP HBT which is designed reduce the offset voltage. This DHBT design can offer a higher efficiency as well as increasing th ...

Element beneficiation from a moving, ionized plasma can be accomplished through the principles of mass spectroscopy. Two US patents were recently awarded to the PI on a means to separate all isotopes of regolith in a single pass using either a continuous or pulsed operation. This method of in-situ resource utilization has been studied at a system level, and results published at a national space ...