Award Data

The potential for combustion instability has historically been a hindrance in developing rocket engines, and nearly always represents the major technical risk in engine developments. This proposal addresses innovative approaches toward prediction of liquid rocket engine combustion instability, as well as innovations in full-scale engine stability verification. Specific objectives are to demonstrat ...

We propose the development of a general software infrastructure for simplifying the integration of computer-game software with cognitive modeling tools. The software is designed to meet the requirements of two state-of-art cognitive models, one focused on spatial reasoning, the other on visual imagery. The approach extracts visual scene information from a computer game, represents it in a common ...

The Electrodeless Lorentz Force (ELF) Thruster is a new propulsion device designed to operate at the highest jet powers, well beyond the currently developed electric propulsion thrusters. Based on recent laboratory results on the formation and acceleration of magnetized plasmoids, the goal of the proposed research is to build and test a prototype that has the potential to surpass all current elect ...

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 ...

This proposal seeks to investigate monaural (one-microphone) speech segregation. Motivated by the observation that the human auditory system has the remarkable ability of segregating an acoustic mixture and grouping the components of the same event into a stream in a perceptual process called auditory scene analysis, the proposed approach is based on auditory scene analysis principles. The overall ...

Michigan Aerospace Corporation proposes to develop an optical MEMS based skin friction sensor specifically designed for hypersonic applications. This instrument will be capable of shear stress resolutions as small as 0.01 Pa, have a high dynamic range, and data rates in excess of 100 Hz. The sensor will be compact and tolerant of the extreme environmental conditions of hypersonic propulsion test f ...

The realization of materials with record mechanical and electrical properties is of paramount importance to the Air Force and other branches of the US Armed Forces. Layer-by-layer (LBL) assembly is capable of producing nanocomposite materials with record properties surpassing those made by many traditional composite preparation techniques. However the process is time consuming and typically yiel ...

This STTR will provide a prototype Electronics Package that integrates disparate streams of spectrographic and topographic data to provide high resolution imaging and chemical specificity at the nanoscale. It will enable development of a commercial instrument delivering routine near-field tip-enhanced optical imaging with spatial resolutions in the range of 10-50nm along with topographic (Atomic F ...

High energy density and high power capacitors operating at a high frequency are in great demand for a variety of residential, military, medical, and industrial applications. In fact, a large percentage of the cost of alternative energy components is consumed by the cost of capacitors. Although there have been some developments in the fabrication of inorganic super-capacitors, the problems encoun ...