Award Data

Military shelters currently use electrically driven Environmental Control Units (ECUs) to provide cooling for the air inside the shelter. The ECU is vapor compression cycle powered by a diesel generator, operating on JP-8 fuel. Other than fueling jet engines, the largest drain on U.S. military fuel supplies in current operations comes from running generators at forward operating bases. In hot cli ...

A unique type of air lubricated thrust bearing called a Wave Bearing is proposed to assist a rolling element bearing to carry the thrust load and to improve the bearing’s life when used in a micro gas turbine engine. The Wave Bearing technology will provide improved reliability, safety and life compared to rolling element bearings used alone, as well as to allow simplification of engine design a ...

Aurora Flight Sciences and MIT propose to develop a model-based adaptive health estimation and real-time proactive control to identify gas turbine engine stability risks and avoid them through control action. In this concept, the engine control system actively monitors sensors and actuators, compares them against physical models, and infers which components may be performing poorly and may need to ...

Prognostics and health management (PHM) systems are critical for detecting impending faults and enabling a proactive decision process for maintenance or replacement of avionics systems before actual failures occur. A PHM system is essential to enhancing aircraft systems reliability and maintaining a high level of mission readiness and affordability. Current PHM advancements are focused on aircraft ...

The Phase I deliverable will be a physic-based model which represents a CMC gas turbine component concomitantly at the material level and the structural level. This model will be probabilistically analyzed to account for the uncertainties in material properties and the uncertainties in the size and impact velocities of possible foreign objects (FOD). A ceramic material must display sufficient capa ...

We propose to conduct a feasibility study for utilizing broadband sampling of the diffusive noise field in a dynamic environment. In ambient noise studies, the ability to resolve a wavefield is proportional to its time-bandwidth (TB) product. In a dynamic environment such as in the atmosphere or ocean, the nature of the impinging wave field is changing rapidly so that only short time segments can ...

The research objective is to develop a fully functional computational method for prediction of the after-burning effect of different fuels in a wide range of temperature, pressure, and turbulence regimes. Achievement of the objective requires understanding and modeling of key phenomena including (a) post-detonation response of the fuels, (b) near-field coupling of detonation products with particul ...

This proposal is being submitted in response to the solicitation topic N10A-T002 (Development of a Computational Method for Prediction of After Burning Effect) by BUSA Engineering Consulting (Dr. Jianghui Chao) in collaboration with University of Florida (PI: Prof. S. Balachandar). The overall objective of the proposed effort is to contribute to national defense and security by advancing the state ...

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 ...

The Barron Associates/Virginia Tech team believes that intelligent use of ambient riverine environmental factors together with novel drifter design and low-energy articulation is the key to enabling large non-overlapping river coverage. The proposed phase I research program focuses on (1) identifying key river characteristics which may be leveraged by riverine drifters, (2) fabricating a novel riv ...