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 ...

In order to meet the challenges of high probability of mission success for space exploration, ground support system for various launch operations that responds rapidly to system events and anomalies is essential. In addition, the vast amount monitored parameters (around 50,000) for ground support system requires systematically supportablity analysis and trade-off studies for sensor optimization. ...

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 ...

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 recent advances in data collection and storage capabilities have led to information overload in many applications, including on-line monitoring of spacecraft operations with time series data. Such datasets present new challenges in data analysis, especially for implementation in memory-constrained DECUs. Also, the traditional statistical methods break down partly because of the increase in th ...

The Small Business Technology Transfer Research (STTR) Phase I project will address the need for an advanced process control system for improved manufacturing of photovoltaic cells. Thin film silicon photovoltaic modules offer a potentially lower cost alternative to crystalline silicon modules through reduced materials utilization and lower processing temperatures if improvements in conversion ef ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This proposed project will create an ultra-low power, digital wireless transceiver as an integrated circuit (IC) which will enable communication between hearing aids worn in the left and right ears in a binaural system. Wireless synchronization between the digital signal processors of two hearing instruments is a new technology for next generation hearing inst ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of this project is to develop a hearing aid and wireless companion microphone system based on new, highly-innovative, very low-power ultra-wideband impulse radio technology. The phase I program successfull y established the feasibility of fully integrating an ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radio transceiver and antenna system inside a behind-the-ear ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Affomix would like to commercialize antibody chips to enable researchers to study the human proteome. Currently, researchers use gene chips as a surrogate means to estimate the concentration of the vast variety of pro teins in cells and tissues. But given the choice, most researchers would prefer to study the proteins directly because of the; i) poor correla ...