Award Data

Rocket plume impingement can cause significant damage and contaminate co-landing spacecraft and surrounding habitat structures during lunar landing operations. CFDRC and the University of Florida will develop an innovative simulation system for predicting surface erosion and debris transport caused by lunar surface rocket plume impingement. This simulation system combines 1) a unified continuum-ra ...

Luna Innovations Incorporated proposes in this STTR Phase II project to continue development and validation of Luna's amplitude-dependent, nonlinear ultrasonic inspection technique applied to friction stir welded (FSW) components. The technique was successfully demonstrated in the Phase I project on samples made from aluminum-lithium alloy 2195. The proposed Phase II project will focus on refini ...

Long-term exposure to microgravity and radiation during space exploration can pose a critical threat to the health of a flight crew. Real-time monitoring of urine protein levels is an effective way to follow the onset and progress of many diseases and guide the prompt selection of proper therapy. The success of such diagnostic tasks, which is strongly desired for flight missions, critically depend ...

Accurate CFD modeling of fuel/oxidizer injection and combustion is needed to design and analyze liquid rocket engines. Currently, however, there is no mature modeling capability for liquid fuel/oxidizer injectors in LOCI-Chem, used by NASA and its contractors to analyze rocket engines. In this STTR, an innovative, high fidelity injection module will be developed that features the Level Set (LS) i ...

The overall objective of this STTR effort is to evaluate and demonstrate the potential for well-designed, strategically-located synthetic jet actuators to provide improved aircraft safety by: (1) delaying wing stall and improving aircraft controllability at high angles of attack and (2) providing low-cost actuation redun-dancy to improve controllability in the event of a mechanical control surface ...

Our proposal and the Phase I work completed under it addressed these NASA-identified needs by providing software infrastructure that provides physical scientists a "plug-and-play" architecture in which they can insert their "physics kernels" and exploit very large existing code bases for the computer science aspects of the problem. In particular, our STTR product provides cutting-edge adaptive me ...

Given the vulnerability of the GPS system to intentional or hostile denial of service, it is imperative that the U.S. military develop technologies that provide robust navigation solutions that do not rely on GPS data. To achieve this capability, Aurora and MIT have teamed to develop the Integrated Visual and Inertial Sensor Information Onboard Navigation (I-VISION) system, which will couple optic ...

Intellectual Merit: This STTR project will develop novel engineered Clostridia strains for fermentation to economically produce butanol as a biofuel from sugars derived from starchy and lignocellulosic biomass. Butanol is an important industrial solvent and potentially a better transportation fuel than ethanol. Recent rising oil prices and limited petroleum resources have generated high interest i ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project aims to apply the unique property of high-speed jets to adhere to nearby curved surfaces, with a turning radius much larger than the size of the jet - the so-called COANDA effect. The proposed research aims to take advantage of this effect to manipulate thermal spray jet stream and vector the stream such that the hot thermal gas stream ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will investigate the technical and commercial feasibility of coating metal foils with a solid sorbent so that they act as a desulfurizing component for pre-treatment of sulfur-laden liquid fuels. The coated foils will be inserted into a small heat exchanger that acts as a platform unit for conversion of liquid fuels to hydrogen for fue ...