Award Data

Current survivability and engineering requirements for airframe platforms necessitate the automated application of specialty coatings to the composite inlet duct OML surface. The specialty coatings have tight specification tolerances for the final thickness. Current equipment does not allow for accurate measuring of the specialty coatings. Measurement techniques and equipment need to be develop ...

Extending gun barrel life has been a long-standing goal for the US Air Force and other DoD agencies. Currently-used chrome plated barrels are susceptible to erosion and corrosion which affects the accuracy of fired bullets due to material loss along the inner surface. The primary cause of barrel degradation is the poor quality chrome coating and attack of steel inner surface by hot gases and comb ...

The rapid increase in the use of the Internet in many aspects of our lives has led to an explosive growth in the spread of malware such as computer worms, viruses, and trojans. Security tools typically examine software for the presence of malware either by looking for specific byte signatures, or (more recently) by analyzing the candidate binary’s internal logic. However, it is surprisingly easy ...

We propose to examine the necessary ingredients for the development of marketable codes which will: model the morphology of heterogeneous propellants (a packing code); calculate the thermal and mechancial properties of such a morphology or pack; simulate the combustion of the pack; predict the statistics of aluminum agglomeration on the burning pack surface; simulate the flight of these agglomera ...

Sample preparation has been recognized as the single most important challenge to be faced in the development of detect-to-warn (DTW) systems (NRC, 2005). Available commercial sample preparation technologies are expensive, slow (30 min to 2 hours) and require trained laboratory technicians for operation. Addressing this need, we propose to design, fabricate, demonstrate, and validate a novel integr ...

Combustion LES is a high fidelity CFD method that can analyze transient/acoustic challenges that previously were impossible to analyze with conventional CFD. However, excessive calculation times hinder the use of LES as an effective design tool. To make LES more practical, we propose to develop and validate a next generation combustion LES code that can solve 10M cell grids in less than one day, ...

Under AFRL Contract FA8650-05-M-5214 Phase I, CFDRC has developed and demonstrated the foundation of a comprehensive code for modeling the Cold Hearth Melting (CHM) processing of Titanium alloys. The code includes effects that accurately predict the transient temperature distribution, flow patterns, skull shape, species evaporation, and particle fates in the hearth region for a given set of dynam ...

CFDRC proposes the integration of Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) with its maturing Laser Induced Spark (LIS) technology for rocket chamber and ultimately in-flight engine health monitoring. During Phase I CFDRC and the University of Tennessee Space Institute (UTSI) completed quantitative LIBS measurements of bi-propellant combustion equivalence ratio while simultaneously demonstrating ...

Aerospace vehicles that perform aggressive maneuvers are subject to several dynamic loads problems such as buffet and flutter. Unsteady computational aeroelastic simulations of these problems require careful attention to the physical modules of fluid and structures, as well as, to the fluid-structure interfacing and fluid-grid movement. In the Phase I study, a novel solid-brick analogy (SBA) was d ...

Run-time and convergence requirements limit practical Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) combustion simulations to simplified chemistry, such as multi-step global kinetic mechanisms. Current methods available for generating reduced global mechanisms are tedious, and the resultant mechanisms often lack accuracy. What is needed, and proposed for development in this SBIR effort, is a software packa ...