Award Data

Simulation technology plays an important role in propulsion test facility design and development by assessing risks, identifying failure modes and predicting anomalous behavior of critical systems. This is true for facilities such as the proposed A-3 that will operate at low pressures in conjunction with steam ejectors and the B-2 facility where flame deflector cooling and plume impingement dynami ...

The Grain Boundary Engineering (GBE) approach, successfully demonstrated in Phase I, that microstructural optimization provides a very significant improvement in reducing susceptibility to intergranular crack initiation and growth in conventional wrought Inconel 718. The principal objective of the Phase II research development program is to extend the applicability of the GBE technology from con ...

ProtoInnovations, LLC proposes to develop a new type of planetary rover called a Lunar All-terrain Utility Vehicle ("LATUV") to assist extra-vehicular activities in future lunar missions. The vehicle will operate unmanned or with an astronaut driving onboard. It will have a roughly 4 m2 footprint and be able to about twice as fast as an astronaut can walk on the Moon. The vehicle will feature four ...

The recent performance increases in graphics processing units (GPUs) have made graphics cards an attractive platform for implementing computationally intense applications. With their numerous parallel computational pipelines and SIMD architecture, modern GPUs can outperform high-end microprocessors by one to three orders of magnitude, depending on the problem. Most work to date at EM Photonics a ...

Leveraging Phase I SBIR successes, in Phase II, a single photon sensitive LIDAR receiver will be fabricated and delivered to NASA. In Phase I, high-gain, electron-initiated avalanche photodiodes (e-APDS) were designed, manufactured, and characterized over a range of temperatures. The e-APDs, sensitive from 1064 nm to 4300 nm, were fabricated in single-layer p-type HgCdTe films grown using liquid p ...

The principal Phase II objective is to refine and further develop the prototype PCHP into a useful thermal management tool. The Phase I program established the feasibility of thermal control an axially-grooved heat pipe with a variable-volume reservoir. The follow-on Phase II program will address control system optimization, component longevity, reductions in mass and power, and show that the de ...

The overall technical objective of the proposed Phase II program is to complete a system-level demonstration to show the capability and benefits of integrating this backup radiator/Variable Conductance Heat Pipe (VCHP) with the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG). The Phase I project developed a feasible VCHP radiator design that can be integrated with the ASRG. In Phase II, a trade ...

The Phase I project successfully demonstrated the feasibility of the vapor compression hybrid two-phase loop (VCHTPL). The test results showed the high temperature-lift capability and robust operation under transient heat loads of the VCHTPL. At the end of Phase I, the VCHTPL technology reached the NASA's defined Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 4 (Component/breadboard validation in a laboratory e ...

Radiation or passively cooled thrust chambers are used for a variety of chemical propulsion functions including apogee insertion, reaction control for launch vehicles, and primary propulsion for planetary spacecraft. The performance of these thrust chambers is limited by the operating temperature and thermal-chemical response of the available materials. The Phase I efforts focused on performing ...

TRS Technologies, Virginia Tech., and MTech, Inc. propose to develop high torque (>1.5 kg-cm), lightweight (< 250 g), low power (< 2 watts), high precision (