Award Data

The United States Navy (USN) is seeking innovative, power dense bottoming cycles for use in conjunction with microturbines. We propose a transformative and innovative, solid-state heat engine, the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter (JTEC, US Patent 7,160,839) as an efficient power generator for advanced waste heat recovery for electricity generation. The JTEC technology was given a 2008 Break ...

Area-I, Incorporated, and Pennsylvania State University will combine an innovative real-time technique for estimating local airmass motion, a multi-objective guidance strategy, and a state-of-the-art adaptive control architecture to develop a Reactive Controller for Harvesting Gust Energy (RECHARGE). The RECHARGE system will utilize a compact yet capable suite of sensors and flight-proven computin ...

It is proposed to apply optimized surface treatment strategies to stainless steel identified from phase-I study to improve strength and corrosion resistance for wing-fold transmission (WFT) systems. During the six months of the phase I project, two material systems were considered for the preliminary study. These materials included: Custom 465 Stainless, and CSS 42L carburizing stainless steel. Th ...

A major barrier to the widespread adoption of wireless sensors for structural health monitoring is the requirement to power the network of wireless nodes. Batteries have a limited lifespan, adding significant size, weight, and costs to the wireless sensor network,and may represent a long term environmental problem. Battery maintenance can be eliminated by harvesting energy from the environment. Fo ...

Structural monitoring of Navy aircraft is of critical importance as the fleet ages. One critical area includes the control surfaces, which are subject to intense, dynamic buffet loading which can lead to structural cracking. The highly transient nature of buffet loading makes it difficult to measure using conventional sensors. We propose to solve this problem by combining a network of time-synchro ...

Propagation Research Associates, Inc. proposes to leverage technology developed in a previous SBIR projects to develop the Training Environment Position and Orientation System (TEPOS) for determination of the position and orientation of each participant’s head and limbs as well as devices such as a weapon or range finder. TEPOS combines a number of PRA technologies including: waveform diversity, ...

Propagation Research Associates, Inc., (PRA) proposes to design a receiver that will significantly reduce the sample rate required for a pulsed-Doppler EW sensing application using Compressive Sensing (CS) technology. The PRA Adaptive CS receiver will provide a compression in information space that will be sufficient to characterize multiple pulsed-Doppler waveforms accurately over a relatively la ...

We propose the development of a validated analysis tool to predict damage growth and useful life of loaded fastener holes in laminated composites. The objectives of Phase I are (1) to develop and verify a concept for comprehensive damage initiation and growth models applicable to loaded fastener holes; and (2) define a conceptual design for a prototype software/tool to perform damage growth and li ...

R-DEX Systems proposes to team with the University of Southern California to develop the Spatial-Diversity Communication Link (SD-Link), a free-space optical (FSO) communications system for reliable and high-capacity wireless communications. The proposed SD-Link will build on the team's previous published work in FSO communications using spatial diversity and the team's previous STTR collaboration ...

Current military dive masks are relatively bulky and do not function well with night vision equipment or weapons because of a large forward projection from the face. The additional size and complications of an integrated display for situational awareness and augmented reality exacerbates these problems. A versatile, compact and easy to stow goggle system with an integrated illuminated display that ...