Award Data

The performance of modern combustion systems used in propulsion devices (e.g., gas turbine main combustors, augmentors, rockets, etc.) is largely dependent on the mixing of fuel and oxidizer (e.g., compressor air, vitiated air, and oxygen). This mixing process, usually involving a liquid jet emanating into a gaseous flow followed by subsequent breakup and atomization, is critically important to ma ...

The nature and requirements of military operations lead to high noise levels, exposing military and civilian personnel to the possibility of noise-induced hearing loss. Otoacoustic emission (OAE) probes can assess the health of the inner ear by testing the response of the cochlea to various types of stimuli. The measurement of emissions at high frequency has the potential to detect noise-induced d ...

There are many efforts underway to develop distributed shipboard health monitoring sensors. These devices face strong opposition by fleet maintainers unless the requirements for power supply cabling and/or battery maintenance are eliminated. Consequently, methods for harvesting energy from local environmental conditions using heat, solar, and vibration are of great interest. As opposed to piezoele ...

Legacy power distribution cables will not be able to meet the future requirements of Navy electric ships. While power distribution systems employing high temperature superconductors (HTS) have the potential to meet this need, further development work is required to improve the performance and increase the technology readiness level of key system components. The proposed work focuses on the current ...

When many Lithium-ion battery cells are integrated into a large pack, the possible outcomes resulting from individual cell faults are complex and difficult to predict. Consequently, there is great interest in developing design tools to aid in the optimization of pack performance as well as to understand and mitigate the effects of individual cell failures from propagating to other cells or even th ...

Future military communication systems will utilize advanced superconductor digital electronics that will require efficient cooling at low temperatures near 4 K. We propose to improve the efficiency of pulse-tube cryocoolers by addressing the two primary performance limitations. These are operation in adverse orientations and performance of the regenerator at low temperatures. We will develop (1) a ...

The presence of noise in piping systems often serves as an early warning of mechanical problems such as faulty or cavitating pumps and valves, or boiling in cooling lines. Additionally, in many Naval environments, especially submarines, minimizing noise radiated from vibrating pipes is highly desirable. The ability to quantify the sound pressure level in fluid-filled pipes with an external sensor ...

Northwest UAV Propulsion Systems proposes using our purpose built heavy fuel engine designed and built in the USA for small unmanned aerial systems in the tier 2 & 3 class. We will be adding a lightweight ceramic material set combined with FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and heavy fuel atomizer (IRAD Project) to create a lightweight engine for a SUAS or STUAS class UAVs. The Ceramic material set is ...

Measurement surveys of full-scale ship airwakes are needed to validate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of these wakes. Airwake computations guide the design of ship superstructures, improve the fidelity of flight simulators, and save time and reduce risk during flight tests to define launch and recovery envelopes for ship and aircraft combinations. Current full-scale test techniques invo ...

Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) power systems offer an attractive approach for compact, simple, and reliable energy conversion needed in applications such as portable power systems and unmanned aerial vehicles. A key challenge with TPV energy systems is achieving a high-energy conversion efficiency, and one of the critical aspects of the energy conversion process is creating spectral emissions from the h ...