Award Data

Thermal barrier coatings have been widely used to provide thermal protection to superalloy components in gas turbine engines. After certain amount of service time, the coating experiences a reduction in thickness by processes such as wear, erosion and foreign/domestic object damage. When the thickness decreases below a critical value, the thermal barrier effect provided by the coating is no longer ...

Reliable ignition is critical to the operational performance of augmented military jet engines. Augmentors must reliably ignite when thrust is needed or the system (and pilot) safety could be compromised. Augmentor ignition is particularly challenging because the igniter must function over a range of operating conditions. In particular, high-altitude, low-pressure conditions are known to confou ...

The efficient, effective measurement of small drilled holes continues to be a challenge for key aerospace applications. While manufacturing methods for fabricating holes have improved significantly over the last ten years, measurement and metrology methods have not advanced at the same pace. Modern jet engine parts may contain tens of thousands of holes along with the requirement that the aggreg ...

Power conversion Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) used on advanced tactical aircraft use liquid cooling and complex packaging geometries to provide adequate thermal management. Typical LRUs could have cooling loops operating at 70 deg C inlet temperatures, enclosures which dissipate hundreds of watts of electrical power, and which have silicon based semiconductors rated for operation at a maximum te ...

Future Department of Defense (DoD) space-borne electro-optical payloads will require reliable, efficient, and lightweight cryocoolers for sensor cooling. Turbo-Brayton cryocoolers are ideal candidates for these payloads. The technology is reliable and space proven with one unit having provided over 6 years of successful operations on the Hubble Space Telescope without any change in performance. ...

Advanced space-borne infrared detectors require cooling at temperatures of 10 to 20 K. Cooling loads for these detectors will range from 0.25 W to 1.0 W at the primary load site, with additional loads at higher temperatures. A multistage cooler, capable of cooling multiple loads, will offer large potential gains in system efficiency and weight. Turbomachine-based Brayton cryocoolers are ideal c ...

Gas turbine engines rely on internal controllers to achieve efficient operation over a wide range of operating conditions. These Full Authority Digital Engine Controls (FADEC) are located within the engines in an environment characterized by high temperature and high vibration. Cooling the electronic components inside the FADEC is a tremendous challenge. We propose to apply innovative thermal m ...

Optical components for RF-photonic applications such as communication satellites, avionics, optical networks, sensors and phase array radar will require high speed, high capacity and low power. Due to the nature of crystalline electro-optic materials (LiNbO3, GaAs, InP, etc.) today’s commercial electro-optical devices do not perform well above 40 GHz. This limitation can be circumvented by utili ...

This proposal deals with advanced design architectures for realizing silicon-based reconfigurable and stackable photonic analog signal processing engines supported on flexible or flat substrates using crystalline Si-based nanomembrane technology. Silicon nanomembranes are single crystals of Si that have been released from SOI substrates and redeposited on foreign flexible or flat substrates enabli ...

Many large-scale numerical simulations can be broken down into common mathematical routines. While the applications may differ, they often need to perform standard functions such as system solves, Fourier transforms, or eigenvalue calculations. Consequently, producing fast, efficient implementations of these methods will benefit a broad range of Air Force applications. Graphics Processing Units (G ...