Award Data

The MIL-STD-1553B Bus is a widely supported data bus for avionics applications and compatible with most of the avionics equipment. However, its low data rate (1 Mbps) and command-response architecture are not suitable for many modern applications such as on-board autonomy. Therefore, the avionics industry recently has been interested in adopting the IEEE 1394A Bus as the next generation avionics b ...

The MIL-STD-1553B Bus is a widely supported data bus for avionics applications and compatible with most of the avionics equipment. However, its low data rate (1 Mbps) and command-response architecture are not suitable for many modern applications such as on-board autonomy. Therefore, the avionics industry recently has been interested in adopting the IEEE 1394A Bus as the next generation avionics b ...

Low-power Hall thrusters offer potentially important advantages for certain military applications but issues of lifetime and efficiency degradation at lower powers are issues hindering its utilization. A factor impacting efficiency is that thestate-of-the-art techniques for electron generation used for neutralization (such as hollow cathodes operating on the same propellant as the thruster) do no ...

This STTR project develops self-powered PZT sensor/actuators, MEMS temperature sensors and data transmitters, chip-sized mechanical impedance analyzers, and data processing procedures and integrates them into a self-contained structural health-monitoringpackage for wireless inspection of aerospace-weapons systems.The opportunity:Legacy system maintenance, the development of relatively disposable a ...

The purpose of this proposal is the research and development of low power (about 100 W) close-drift thruster with improved magnetic field. The patented design of the magnetic field makes possible to dramatically reduce the permissible size of aconventional stationary plasma thruster (SPT) that is limited by magnetic saturation of the inner magnetic path. The thruster with our improved magnetic f ...

Knowledge Analysis Technologies (K-A-T) and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) will partner to fulfill this Research and Development effort. We propose an unprecedented suite of Usability Engineering software tools to bebuilt upon the conceptual foundation of Virginia Tech's User Action Framework (UAF). We will use K-A-T's proprietary Latent Semantic Analysis (LS ...

The Air Force maintains a fleet of aircraft that depend on low-observability to successfully carry out their missions. This low-observability depends on a continuity of electrical conductivity at the outer mold line of the aircraft, and thus the panelseams and gaps must be filled with a conducting material. Currently, metal-filled elastomers or resins are used, but these materials suffer from po ...

Rapid growth in the performance and capabilities of thermography, and the increased use of composite materials in the construction and repair of military and commercial aircraft, has strongly positioned it as a viable NDI technique. In Phase I, ThermalWave Imaging, Inc. and UD-CCM propose to develop an AC coupled, non-contact Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) technique that can evaluate 3-D state o ...

Surface enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) has great potential as a tool chemical and biological detection. First, ultra-sensitivity is provided by remarkable Raman enhancement factors (>10^14); even delving into the ultimate limit for any sensor, singlemolecule detection. Second, since Raman scattering does not require a fluorescent analyte, SERS offers great generality in the range of detectable ...

In November 1998 a network of seismic stations was deployed by S. Anandakrishnan (now at Penn State) and others in West Antarctica. These autonomous stations returned state-of-health data via satellite, and stored high-volume instrument data for later retrieval. The satellite links demonstrated a novel and sophisticated application of technology to the problem of retrieving in situ data from harsh ...