Award Data

The United States has a mechanized military that relies heavily on fuel availability. Delivering large quantities of fuel is a logistical burden. Besides the cost of the fuel itself, we must transport it, store it, and protect it. Fuel convoys are large targets moving along predicable paths. They expose soldiers and contractors to great dangers, and are a favorite target for terrorist attacks. ...

The team of 3 Phoenix, Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corporation propose to develop and evaluate technology that provides a substantial performance improvement to the problem of clutter discrimination. The team describes algorithms proposed to achieve substantial performance improvement. The proposed technology includes algorithms to perform detection of targets in heavy clutter, algorithms for extr ...

Structural state awareness can be vitally important to a wide variety of both commercial and military systems, including buildings, bridges, vehicles and advanced sensors. Equipment required to provide this telemetry has typically been large and heavy making it difficult to incorporate into the desired environment. The use of a strain and temperature sensing technique based in fiber optics can p ...

When submerged, unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) have difficulty with navigation and communication: inertial navigation systems can be used but they are subject to drift the longer the unit remains below; communications are limited to low bandwidth acoustics or wiring back to another vessel or shore platform. A tethered antenna system which allowed RF antennas to remain above water but connected ...

As the Navy moves forward with plans to augment the conventional assets with unmanned sensor vehicles, standoff weapons, and intelligent command and control (C2) systems we find more data will be available from these remote assets that is needed to maintain an accurate, complete, and consistent Common Tactical Picture (CTP). Design considerations for multi-platform, multi-layer data fusion are d ...

Custom fitting hearing protection ear plugs have been shown to provide substantial benefits for personnel working in high noise environments such as around military aircraft and in a range of other war fighter and civilian industrial scenarios. Current manufacturing processes for shaping custom ear plugs require that physical impressions be taken of customers ear canals. Since this involves inje ...

The acoustic test fixture (ATF) type of hearing protection evaluation system (HPES) has been widely used in the past to evaluate hearing protection device (HPD) performances, in addition to the Real-Ear-Attenuation-at-Threshold method and the Microphone-In-Real-Ear method. Since the use of ATF devices does not rely on human subjects, they are more efficient, and in many cases indispensable, for t ...

xxxIn-situ fiber placement is able to offer a wide and robust processing approach that is well suited for many aerospace structures. Flat, single curvature and large radius complex curvature parts can be effectively handled with the current in-situ techniques. However, there are limitations associated with this process. The use of a rigid metallic consolidation applicator is routinely used in t ...

Commonly, composite rotor blade spars are fabricated by hand layups or other non-optimized, not fully automated procedures. These methods are labor intensive and require many de-bulking steps, making them expensive. The results are often inconsistent due to the nature of work done by hand. In our process, continuous graphite fiber reinforced thermoset prepreg tape will be used in conjunction wi ...

Increased performance and reduced cost structures, is the direction many aerospace companies work toward. Our objective in Phase I is to demonstrate our automated in-situ fiber placement processing technology can provide low cost manufacturing methods with thermoplastic composites while maintaining structural integrity, increased performance and address issues such as corrosion and impact resista ...