Award Data

Passive microwave sensors aboard satellites provide valuable information regarding weather conditions by measuring atmospheric attenuation over a broad range of frequencies from 0-200 GHz. Additional ground-based sensors are desirable to provide complementary upward looking measurements that can be used to refine existing attenuation models. Operating over such a large bandwidth, however, places ...

Gas-Liquid separation is an acute microgravity problem. Existing devices use centrifugal motion on microporous membranes to separate the two phases. Centrifugal devices consume electricity and are prone to failure. The microporous membranes easily foul and have significant water loss. Novel membrane devices are proposed. Membranes can simultaneously disengage gases from gas-liquid dispersion and d ...

Reliable monitoring of the microcrack formation in the complex composite structure components in NASA spacecraft and launch vehicles is critical for vehicle operations. Early diagnosing and reporting vehicle capability has tremendous impact on mission readiness, safety, and life cycle cost. Microcrack formation in complex composite structure components can be challenging from a monitoring and eval ...

National Aeronautical and Space Administration's (NASA) Aviation Safety Program "seeks capabilities furthering the practice of proactive safety management." Specifically, one of the key interests in Topic A1.04 are proposals for Remaining Useful Life prediction techniques. In response, Nokomis is proposing to develop an Electronic Health Monitoring (EHM) Sensor Unit which would be able provide a ...

The proposed program will develop titanium/water heat pipes suitable for Spacecraft Fission Power. NASA is examining small fission power reactors for future space applications with the most recent being Kilopower, which provides roughly 1 kW of electric power. Kilopower uses titanium/water heat pipes to remove the waste heat from the cold end of the convertors. Previous water heat pipe designs f ...

The goal of the Phase I effort is to design, develop and demonstrate a novel solid-state ceramic-based voltage isolator and demonstrate its potential to provide a highly radiation tolerant digital voltage isolation solution applicable to a wide range of NASA mission requirements. The related design success QorTek has will lead to development in Phase I of a completely new gate drive technology wi ...

This project will develop advanced DC link capacitors using flexible ultrathin glass dielectric materials. The glass capacitor will be able to be operated in a broad temperature range (-150 degree C to 500 degree C), frequency (1 kHz to 1 MHz), and high voltage (>1,000 volts). This SBIR project will be focused on examining the technical performance of the glass dielectrics at very high (>200 deg C ...

Wick properties are often the limiting factor in a heat pipe design. Current technology uses conventional sintering of metal powders, screen wick, or grooves to fabricate realtively simplistic wick geometries. Additive manufacturing (laser sintering) of a porous structure would allow much greater freedom in defining the wick geometry and properties. One example is the RDU thermosyphon wick. Valuab ...

This SBIR Phase I project will develop a multifunctional electrolyte for high energy density abuse-tolerant lithium ion batteries with 5 V cathodes such as LiCoPO4. The multifunctional electrolyte comprises of a non-flammable ionic liquid as solvent and a porous ionomer membrane which serve as both separator and lithium cation source. No additional lithium salt such as LiPF6 or LiTFSi is required. ...

Aeroelasticity plays an important role in the design and development of highly flexible flight vehicles and blended wing body configurations. The operating margins on these flight systems are limited by non-linear unsteady phenomena such as stall, flutter, gusts, limit cycle oscillations, vortex roll-up which exhibit strong coupling between the aero-loads and structural deformations. The use of hi ...