Award Data

Liquid rocket engines may be run for repeatedly over extended periods of time, requiring active cooling. An efficient means of cooling LRE nozzles involves using the liquid fuel or oxidizer itself to provide the cooling, often referred to as regenerative cooling. SEA's liquid rocket combustion chamber and nozzle design code, TDK, can predict the heat transfer to the surface of the nozzle as a fu ...

The maturation of Titanium Matrix Composite into an affordable material system with production experience on the F-16 opens up a wide series of opportunities for improved propulsion performance. This SBIR builds on the baseline TMC demonstrations being conducted by FMW and ATK and extends them to advanced systems. The use of configured residual stress states and enhanced Titanium matrix systems ...

Combustion instability is one of the greatest development risks for liquid propellant engines. In developing a stable injector design, the risks arise from a variety of sources - limited modeling capabilities, poor scalability and the high cost of appropriate component test facilities. Sierra Engineering Inc. believes that much of the empirical data on the injection element's driving characteris ...

The future propulsion requirements of the USAF will require substantial performance improvements, especially stage mass fraction as defined by the Phase III IHPRPT goals. The development and transition to production of titanium matrix composites (TMC) offer the potential of significant mass fraction gains for liquid engines. This program proposes the substitution of TMC into the impeller, which ...

We propose using response surface methodology (RSM) as a tool to better understand the effects of engine design parameters and operating conditions on plume signature, and to improve signature predictions through optimized selection of analysis inputs. Often rocket engine operating conditions and design variables are not well known, either because the systems being simulated are foreign, or beca ...

We propose to develop a secure runtime environment for fuselet-based missile targeting and threat analysis built on a foundation of aspect-oriented secure web services. Aspect-oriented techniques enable the modularization of crosscutting concerns such as remote access, security, transactions, and monitoring. We will compose aspect-oriented instrumentation with distributed object technologies in a ...

The goals of this Phase II SBIR include development of a strike planning deconfliction system, providing a real-time implementation for replanning, providing a mechanism to deconflict with fallout of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and providing a scalable and extensible mechanism to support multiple levels of decision echelons. The development of the Strike Planning and Deconfliction (SPAD) p ...

Touchstone Research Laboratory has developed a novel material, CFOAMr. The primary enabling carbon foam characteristic is that the Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) values are comparable to carbon fiber polymer matrix systems in manufacturing advanced composites. Other advantages of carbon foam-based tools are low mass, reduced energy, easy modifications, unmatched repair capabilities, and r ...

Touchstone Research Laboratory is currently producing carbon foam in its pilot production facility. In the Phase I feasibility study, Touchstone identified opportunities to reduce the production cycle by combining manufacturing processes. The results indicated that a batch foaming process was optimum and the heat treatment step should be converted to a continuous process. This would lead to a s ...

The objectives of the proposed effort are to demonstrate the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a design tool for reducing engine development time and cost, to reduce fuel nozzle-combustor test requirements, and to demonstrate the capability of CFD to accelerate the incorporation of promising, actively controlled fuel nozzles and combustors into aircraft engines. These overall objectives ...