Award Data

Supercomputing plays a major role in many areas of science and engineering, and it has had tremendous impact for decades in areas such as aerospace, defense, energy, finance, and telecommunications—to name just a few. Supercomputing enables many of our most important high-tech tools, and nowhere is it more important than at NASA, where attaining increased computing speed and performance at lower ...

This proposal addresses the cold-start requirements of scramjet engines by developing a safe, energy-dense, and low volume hydrocarbon fuel conditioning system based on the hydrolysis reaction of water with triethylaluminum (TEA). TEA is an organometallic liquid that reacts exothermically with water and burns readily in air when not diluted in hydrocarbon mixtures. We propose to use the hydrolys ...

ACTA and Sandia National Laboratories propose to quantify and propagate substructure modeling uncertainty for reduced-order substructure models to higher levels of system assembly, thereby enabling predictive simulations of engineering designs with quantified margins and uncertainties for model-based flight qualification of complete spacecraft. A critical part of this process is the accurate mode ...

Fine water mist (FWM) is a promising replacement technology for fire suppression on the next generation of manned spacecraft. It offers advantages in performance, ease of cleanup, compatibility with on-board environmental systems, and ability to recharge during a mission. ADA Technologies has designed and built a prototype hand-held extinguisher that successfully extinguished test fires in an atmo ...

The lunar surface is, to a large extent, covered with a dust layer several meters thick. Known as lunar regolith, it has been produced by meteorite impacts since the formation of a solid lunar surface billions of years ago. The regolith, while promising as a future building material for lunar installations, also poses a hazard in the form of dust clouds being generated by all forms of gas expans ...

Future NASA flight missions are considering passive wavefront and amplitude control in astronomical applications such as the search for exo-planets. NASA's Discovery mission proposal called out the need for a coherent 2-dimensional array of fiber bundles for this application. In this SBIR proposal we propose to develop monolithic polarization maintaining (PM) coherent fiber bundle arrays consistin ...

Accurate measurement of atmospheric parameters with high resolution needs advanced lasers. In this SBIR program we propose to develop innovative Q-switched high power 2.05micron fiber laser with pulse energy greater than 10mJ, repetition rate of 10Hz to 1KHz, and pulse duration of 200ns using our proprietary innovative highly efficient Tm-doped glass fiber. This new fiber laser will be an all-fibe ...

Long-lived Venus landers require power and cooling. Heat from the roughly 64 General Purpose Heat Source (GPHS) modules must be delivered to the convertor with minimal ÄT. The cooling system must be shutoff during the transit to Venus without overheating the GPHS modules. This program will develop an alkali metal Variable Conductance Heat Pipe (VCHP) integrated with a two-phase heat collection/tr ...

Loop heat pipes (LHPs) can provide variable thermal conductance needed to maintain electronics and batteries on Lunar/Martian rovers/landers within desired temperature range. During lunar day, the LHP transfers the heat to the radiator for rejection. During the fourteen-day-long lunar night, the sink temperature drops, lowering LHP and WEB/battery temperatures. Without a variable thermal link, the ...

This Phase I Small Business Innovative Research project proposes to develop a multiscale computational methodology capable of accurate prediction of the properties and performance of insulating ablative materials that are used to protect the re-entry of vehicles from excessive thermal loads. In particular, this effort will focus on multi-million atom, reactive molecular dynamics (MD) simulations o ...