Award Data

Under sponsorship of the Air Force SBIR program, the small business Advanced Fuel Research, Inc. (AFR) is developing an innovative sensor system to map the surface temperature of thermal barrier coated (TBC) turbine blades during operational testing of advanced military jet engines. Temperature mapping is a high priority capability needed to prove ceramic coatings as a reliable means to prevent bl ...

Gas turbine engine development requires sensors to measure gas path properties in engines during ground testing.  The data collected with these sensors are critical to the development of advanced engines with high performance, high efficiency, and low emissions.  While instrumentation is available to measure most of the important gas path properties, the drive toward higher turbine inlet tempera ...

The drumbeat for higher efficiency gas turbine engines is driving new designs capable of operating at higher temperatures and pressure ratios, in fewer stages, and with higher airfoil loads.   These conditions pose a great challenge for turbomachinery designers.  They must now accurately predict airfoil metal temperatures to design effective cooling schemes that counter the high external gas te ...

Most commercial motor controllers (MC’s) operate at relatively low switching frequency that produces a detectable acoustic signature and therefore drives the Navy to procure MC’s operating at higher frequencies in order to reduce acoustic signature. These custom MC’s, however, still generate significant noise, are not sufficiently reliable, and have obsolete components. APS will develop an i ...

The focus of the proposed effort is to develop a coupled composite damage assessment and repair evaluation tool for a given damage state measured by a NDI technique. New solution modules for damage and repair representation will be developed and linked with our existing mesh independent extended finite element (XFEM) toolkit for ABAQUS. This tool will for the first time be able to model arbitrary ...

The European Union''s RoHS and WEE Directives mandated the elimination of the carcinogenic, hexavalent chromium coatings for metals, including magnesium and zinc-nickel plated substrates.  The purpose of this project is to find chemistry that will meet requirements of industry performance specifications and of the mandate.  METALAST intends to explore trivalent chromium in conjunction with two o ...

We propose a suite of nonlinear image processing algorithms derived from the analysis of the underlying diffusion geometry of a collection of hyperspectral images of interest. These tools enable the comparison of spatio-spectral features of hyperspectral images acquired under different conditions, for the purposes of target detection, change detection and anomaly assessment. This methodology also ...

Optical switching fabrics (optical cross-connects) require arrays of highly interconnected optical switching devices. Such fabrics require a high density of optical and electronic interconnect.  The optical switching devices are also required to switch configurations in sub-ns time intervals to enable reconfiguration times between packets that introduce little if any latency. Currently such fabri ...

The digital signal processor is currently dominated exclusively by CMOS technology. This is largely due to the fact that it is the only low power (VLSI density) technology available. However, CMOS is near the end of its scaling potential and it has a severe liability for space applications due to a weakness to radiation.  Recent progress in integrated optoelectronics has indicated dramatic perfor ...

The major requirements for this program include the modeling of optical switching fabric technologies appropriate to space-borne systems at very high speed. Specifically, this program will evaluate two OptiComp candidate optical transceiver technologies against a Serial Rapid IO switching fabric. A down-selection to one optical transceiver technology will be made. Then, a simulation of that Serial ...