Award Data

Keeping the Air Force assets flying is difficult enough at depot level where there are extensive facilities and expert help. But in an austere environment, these advantages aren’t present. A recent innovation, the Portable Maintenance Aid (PMA), is a new type of tool to help the human through these situations. PMAs are mobile computing devices that can be used at the point of maintenance and ran ...

The time and cost it takes to integrate new airborne weapons on platforms is still too great. The current F-15E Strike Eagle weapon integration timeline is 4 years, from requirements to fielding, and costs up to 20 million dollars. What is really needed for rapid aircraft-store integration is a development environment for a “plug-and-play” capability like that of today’s PC-based multi-media ...

Culturally diverse people are now participating in military multinational coalition applications as well as in extreme environments - once the province of American males drawn from a relatively homogenous cultural pool. Human biases and routines, capabilities and limitations strongly influence overall system performance; whether during operations or in simulations using models of humans. Many mi ...

Advancements in subminiature earphone drivers are sought to provide desired improvements in active noise reduction (ANR) earplug attenuation magnitudes and bandwidth. Prior investigations have illustrated a need for improvements in frequency response, sound power output, geometrical configurations, and ease of manufacturing for drivers that are optimized for military ANR earplug applications. Th ...

Manufacture of polymer matrix composite (PMC) jet engine parts is expensive due to the high cost of needed high temperature materials and fabrication processes currently in use. To reduce costs and improve quality, automated composite fabrication methods such as filament winding, automated tape placement, and fiber or tow placement coupled with non-autoclave processing offer great promise for use ...

Changes in the state of polarization of scattered laser radiation can be utilized to discriminate among targets according to surface microstructures on the wavelength scale. Newly-developed rigorous electromagnetic coherence theory is applied to the inverse problem of laser discrimination of unresolved space and airborne targets based on the effects of surface correlations on the backscattered st ...

The objective of the proposed work is to develop a tool for real-time interactive visualization of the results of combined CFD and multibody dynamics simulations of tanker vehicles and sloshing liquid payloads. The tool can be used for the following: 1) visualization of an animation of: liquid surface, iso-surfaces, vehicle, terrain and surroundings; 2) making any part of the model semi-transparen ...

Currently available domestic star trackers, optimized for reliability and maximum accuracy at low angular velocity, are far too heavy, large, and expensive to meet the requirements of microsatellites. An opportunity exists to meet the needs of US microsatellites by developing a highly miniaturized, low-cost star tracker that compromises select, less critical aspects of performance, such as accurac ...

AeroAstro proposes to leverage its existing innovative miniature star-tracker design to develop an improved star tracker that provides both spacecraft attitude and angular rate information. The resulting system will have minimal cost and impact to spacecraft resources and can easily handle typical spacecraft tumble conditions and provide for recovery from a lost-in-space (LIS) condition. AeroAstro ...

Recently our group successfully developed a Digital Particle Image Velocimetry with a sampling frequency as high as 10,000 fps capable of resolving poly-dispersed multi-phase flows simultaneously for all phases present in the flow field. We were successful in developing very sophisticated image processing algorithms and velocity evaluation methodologies that deliver velocity and size measurements ...