Award Data

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 ...

The ever-decreasing size of the electronic microchips and the ever-increasing density of electronic components required to support future Air Force platforms are creating the problem of substantial localized heat generation that can impair component operation. State of the art thermal interface materials (TIMs), that are used to dissipate heat from the source to the spreader in a microchip, are se ...

ABSTRACT: This proposal is concerned with the development of a novel failure initiation and progressive failure analysis modeling method for advanced composite structures, including the analysis of selected structural joints utilizing a statistically based micromechanics model embedded in a 3D non-linear finite element code. The method accounts for the interaction between out-of-plane failure and ...

The objective of this program is to build upon many decades of experience with magnetic flowmeters to develop a next-generation system to measure the burning surface admittance of high-energy-density solid propellants at high frequencies and pressures. Using the results of research on solid propellant rocket motor combustion instability from the past fifty years, one can directly measure the ac ...