Award Data

One of the challenges of helicopter cargo missions is dealing with external slung loads. During flight, these loads often move in complex ways driven by forces generated by atmospheric effects and the helicopter’s downwash. A low-cost, accurate and airworthy system for measuring the load’s motion could allow for direct slung load stabilization by providing feedback to a human pilot, flight com ...

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Improved understanding of rotorcraft aerodynamics through numerical simulations requires accurate modeling approaches viable for large-scale computations. Conventional Navier-Stokes and Lagrangian methods have severe limitations in effectively dealing with the complexity and length-scales involved. The proposed research focuses on zonal first principal-based methods for capturing strong rotor tip ...

Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) is a tremendous burden to the military. The sense of hearing is not only considered the most important survival sense for both the soldier, the monetary cost of NIHL amounts to approximately $1 billion per year in disability payments. The objectives for Phase I have been met, and we have developed, validated and demonstrated a whole-body physiologically-based phar ...

Recent statistics from Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) show that 61% of soldiers injured in explosion blast events endure Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). The current understanding of TBI mechanisms is incomplete and is limiting the development of protection and therapeutic measures. Animal testing, in vitro study, and analysis of clinical data are useful and necessary but these are slow, expensive, a ...

Protein biomarkers are finding increasing application in Force Health Protection and health surveillance. However, very few biomarkers have been verified and validated to-date. This deficiency can primarily be ascribed to the scarcity of reagents (affinity probes). There is a need for assays to measure biomarker candidates, which must be accompanied by the development of reagents for detection. Cu ...

Military helmets are designed based on costly and time consuming laboratory ballistic tests, firing range data, and forensic data. Until now advanced computational modeling tools have not been adequately utilized in the design and optimization of military helmets. The overall objective of this project is to develop a mild traumatic brain injury mitigating pad by integrating high-fidelity Finite El ...

Hearing Protection Devices (HPDs) are critical to the audiological fitness and mission safety of military personnel. Thorough, reliable, and mission-appropriate evaluation of HPDs needs sophisticated objective methods. Some Acoustic Test Fixtures (ATFs) are available for HPD research but they have drawbacks. In this project we will develop a method of designing a new ATF manikin that is appropriat ...

The present thermal battery technologies cannot currently meet future requirements that call for higher power and capacity with a smaller footprint. The principal avenue for increasing thermal battery specific energy is to identify and develop new electrode materials and electrolytes which provide higher specific capacity at higher operating voltages. The overall objective of the proposed effort ...

An Integrated Optical Diagnostics Analysis (IODA) Suite is proposed for the unification of optical data for wind tunnel testing. While optical methods have paved the way for non-intrusive measurement of complex flow characteristics and corresponding model response in wind tunnel tests, a variety of tools, techniques, and data formats complicates the consolidation of information into a single cohes ...