Award Data

This Small Business Technology Transfer Phase I project will develop an innovative thermal solution to cool underwater acoustic projectors. More efficient cooling of the acoustic projectors will allow the devices to run at longer duty cycles, higher output powers and with longer service life. Current acoustic projectors use thermal conduction through the transducer parts to dissipate the waste hea ...

The proposed research program aims to develop a physics-based identification, modeling and management infrastructure for aeroelastic limit-cycle oscillations. This infrastructure will be built upon high fidelity state-of-the-art theoretical/computational methods as validated and verified by available experimental data bases, and will include (1) rapid flutter boundary determination for a wide ran ...

During Phase I, we have conducted proof-of-principle experiments to fabricate exchange-coupled isotropic permanent magnets with SmFeN-Fe4N compositions employing shock wave consolidation technique. We have also successfully synthesized nearly 100% Fe16N2 in bulk form. Under this Phase II plan, we propose to optimize and further enhance the isotropic exchange-coupled permanent magnets with higher e ...

Aluminum alloys are known to suffer from Stress Corrosion Cracking(SCC). SCC of high strength alloys can proceed rapidly, and can lead to devastating structural failures. However, a solid understanding of combined interactions of metallurgical, environmental and mechanical factors surrounding the crack tip during SCC is still elusive. Therefore, Al alloy developement for high corrosion resistance ...

Blade-to-blade variations in frequencies lead to the phenomenon of mistuning. Even very small amounts of mistuning can cause some blades to vibrate much more than others. Mistuning can cause an amplification of resonant response by up to 400 percent, and has been identified as a primary factor in HCF failures. One issue in setting blend limits is whether or not the blending operation will exacerba ...

The objective of this Phase I application is the focused development of an advanced bioinformatic based wearable critical care monitor to enhance warfighter medical care. This will be accomplished by building upon an existing advanced sensor, hardware and software platform developed by BodyMedia Advanced Development combined with additional computational and clinical expertise provided by Virgini ...

Single crystal relaxor ferroelectrics, PMN-PT, have shown great promise for broad bandwidth sonar transducers. However, the benefits of PMN-PT are somewhat counterbalanced by its maximum temperature limitation (~80 to 95°C), low coercive field (~2kV/cm) and low mechanical quality factor (60-80) for compact, high power and high duty cycle applications. The new crystal compositions with expanded op ...

Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) is being successfully transitioned to field applications in both close-contact (proximity) and standoff detection modes. LIBS is attractive since it can be used to detect a wide range of chemical, biological and explosive (CBE) hazardous materials. While LIBS is well suited to evaluation of complex hazards, including improvised explosive devices (IEDs) ...

A Phase I program is proposed which lays the groundwork for validation of CFD to accurately model heated exhaust plume discharge from non-conventional exit configurations into low-speed crosswinds. A key component of the Phase I effort is development of a detailed experimental plan to acquire high-fidelity CFD validation data for heated plumes in more complex low-speed flows. The sensitivity of pl ...

Our proposal addresses the enhancement of design capabilities for supersonic inlets using advanced CFD methodology integrated with efficient design-optimization procedures in an automated, GUI driven framework. Three-dimensional CFD solvers, coupled with design optimization techniques, can now reliably refine initial geometries to produce robust, high performance inlet designs accounting for comp ...