Award Data

Additional passenger fatalities and injuries can occur during derailments due to interaction with wayside structures, such as catenary poles, bridge abutments, and discontinuities in third rails at highway grade crossings. Resilient wayside structures can reduce these risks, by lessening the amount of intrusion, penetration, and passenger motion. PEC and Arup will work together to develop resilien ...

With this research, we would like to provide new materials joining methods to the DOT. This will be achieved with a pulse energy store that has already demonstrated game changing capability in welding a wide variety of metals and alloys. The process we are proposing is known as Homopolar Welding. The weld is created by a solid state fusion welding process whereby high current is passed through the ...

Thorough understanding of airframe and propulsion aerodynamic noise sources and the subsequent acoustic propagation to the farfield is necessary to the design and development of efficient, environmentally acceptable aircraft. In this SBIR study, we propose to develop a high fidelity tool using high-order low-dissipation methods in the NASA flagship unstructured CFD code FUN3D. The developed predi ...

FlightStream has been developed a fast, accurate, aerodynamic prediction code based on vorticity computations on the surface of an aircraft. The code, though still a surface paneling algorithm, has proven to be significantly more robust and computationally efficient. FlightStream uses CAD or an unstructured surface mesh and is adaptable to subpanels varying in vertex valence from triangles to surf ...

During Phase I, our effort will focus on three software tools; CurveMesh, Geode and SLUGS. These tools will be developed in anticipation of use in the commercial mesh generation software Pointwise and consideration will be given to requirements for parallel implementation in a distributed computing environment. A new initialization procedure will be implemented in CurveMesh to provide more robust ...

Various attempts to advance high-order mesh generation technology have been made in recent years, however an integrated solution capable of robustly creating optimal curved element meshes in 3D still does not exist. In this SBIR project, CFDRC will develop a software tool for the generation of meshes formed by high-order elements. Our approach consists of (a) linear mesh generation and import, (b) ...

Environmental barrier coatings (EBC) prevent oxidation of ceramic materials in reactive, high temperature environments such as the exhaust regions of gas turbine engines. CFDRC proposes to a develop a physics based model of an EBC system interacting with the flow environment to provide a means to gain better understanding of the dynamic processes that effect EBC durability and performance under pr ...

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are extensively used by NASA for hypersonic aerothermodynamics calculations. The physical models used in CFD codes and initial/boundary conditions for numerical simulations carry significant uncertainties. There are also inherent errors in experiments designed for model validation, and numerical discretization. Despite this knowledge, only a limited n ...

Procedures are critical to experimental tests as they describe the specific steps necessary to efficiently and safely carry out a test in a repeatable fashion. The procedure process includes creating test procedures, validating those procedures, executing the procedures during a test, and then analyzing and auditing the results. Relying on paper-based test procedures hampers data collection and d ...

The safety of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) flights is currently the responsibility of the pilot who is required to keep the vehicle within their line of sight (LoS). However, many UASs are capable of increasingly autonomous operation. As autonomy pushes against this boundary it is inevitable that the LoS requirement must be replaced with onboard intelligence to sense and avoid trouble without ...