Award Data

Recent high usage of helicopters in Iraq and Afghan theatres underscores a need for improvements in rotorcraft safety and reliability. Rotor induced vibrations contribute significantly to airframe fatigue, electronic component failure, and pilot workload. In current generation rotorcraft, vibration attenuation is achieved through either airframe mounted tuned-absorbers or active vibration control ...

The U.S. Army is evaluating laser peening technology in support of major helicopter programs, including the AH-64 Apache, UH-60 Black Hawk, and CH-47 Chinook fleets. The Army has a critical need to boost the engine horsepower for these helicopters, especially when operating in high altitude theaters such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Laser peening offers a method of increasing the fatigue performanc ...

The current use of polymer matrix composite materials aboard U.S. Navy ships has been limited to mainly exterior parts such as DDX topside structures, sonar bow domes, towed array fairings, diving planes, control surfaces and the prototype submarine sail dome for VA class submarines. There has been increasing interest in the development of composite materials for applications inside ships and sub ...

To provide low-cost, light-weight, cost-effective insulation system that combines an improved acoustic performance in excess of 40-60 dB with the required thermal, smoke, toxicity and fire barrier performance using mature coating technologies. Our team of acoustic and thermal experts will demonstrate in Phase II that our coating system will exceed the standard acoustic properties of transmission ...

Orbital Research Inc. proposes to design and develop an innovative, low-cost Miniature Control Actuator System (MCAS) for active aerodynamic control of Army's next-generation smart munitions. The MCAS will employ miniature flow control actuators and advanced control strategies to provide in-flight course-correction capability for Army’s line-of-sight (LOS) and beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) munitio ...

Although numerical analysis applications have proven to be effective and reasonably accurate, the effort required to develop the associated analysis models remains a challenging and time consuming task. While many meshing tools are currently available, decomposing and manipulating the design geometry and enhancing the topology for mesh construction are manual processes and place the heaviest dema ...

The Holloman High Speed Test Track (HHSTT) currently uses photographic film based image motion compensation techniques to create Focusing Schlieren photos of high speed rocket sleds. Since film processing and film manufacturing continue to be phased out, this capability needs to be replaced by digital cameras. Current state-of-the-art digital cameras are sufficient to replace HHSTT framing camer ...

The objective of this Phase-II effort is to build and deliver a high-speed laser system for performing particle-image velocimetry (PIV) and planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) of OH at rates of 5 to 10 kHz in augmentor test facilities. This state-of-the-art laser system will allow velocity and 2-D flame radical measurements for understanding the complex spatio-temporal development of instab ...

Performance of silicon thin film transistors (TFTs) made with low temperature processes ( 300°C on glass or metal foil substrates, this is still too high for traditional plastic substrates. In Phase I, Versatilis successfully showed the feasibility of using Zinc Oxide (ZnO) as an alternative to Silicon for the active semiconductor channel in such TFT arrays. ZnO is readily available and cheap, a ...

The development of a ship wide integrated, modular, divisible, flexible, and fully distributed lighting control system will create significant construction and manpower savings in shipboard applications, while at the same time enabling US Navy vessels to meet new high temp operations that employ rapidly re-configurable lighting technologies successfully and safely. The proposed system will enable ...