Award Data

During Phase I, goals of initial design and demonstration of system concepts for a portable friction stir welding (FSW) system were successfully completed. During Phase II, the objective is to design, fabricate, and demonstrate a portable and versatile FSW system. To support AMP’s design, BYU will continue engineering and application studies in parallel with the design effort. BYU will optimize ...

Traditional finite element methods require conversion of a CAD model into an alternate geometric representation called the finite element mesh. Tools like Cubit, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, have greatly reduced the time to mesh. However, it is still expensive to produce a complete analysis and difficult to have that analysis affect the design cycle in a timely manner. Our studies ...

UHF radar is used for surveillance from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A typical transmitter must produce multi-kilowatt pulses, but the efficiency of existing transmitters is only 20 to 30 percent. Low efficiency results in transmitters that are unnecessarily large and heavy. It also taxes the limited power available on a UAV and limits the capabilities of the UAV payloads. GMRR proposes to ...

In Phase II of this SBIR program, innovative, high-power, low-cost, small-volume and weight W-band transmitters will be built and demonstrated based on the feasibility and paper design studies of the Phase I effort. The objective is to develop a 50-watt peak output-power, chirped W-Band pulsed-transmitter that can produce chirped-pulses of several hundred nanoseconds at a PRF of several hundred ...

Advances in terahertz (THz) technologies have demonstrated their potential to support defense-related applications in a number of areas including concealed or buried explosives, chemical and biohazard detection. However, for many applications, there is a lack of sufficiently powerful miniature THz sources. This lack of THz source technology has been a major limitation and impediment to the explor ...

This project will demonstrate 3D sensor capability to identify and track maritime targets, collect target characteristics that enable quick development of identification (ID) templates for ID and tracking of new targets, apply the technology to currently deployed naval passive sensor suites, and extend the technology to airborne platforms.

The development of an effective coating technology is proposed to be applied for planar SOFC stacks. In Phase I, a short stack with coated interconnects will be tested and compared to an identical stack with uncoated interconnects. Several coating methods will be evaluated. With the proposed coating strategy and the established SOFC technologies, a durable 1-3 kW SOFC system will be developed.

The goal of this Phase II SBIR proposal is to design, build, test, and demonstrate next generation energy harvesting wireless sensors for real time load measurement and structural damage tracking on helicopters. Energy harvesting allows the realization of wireless monitoring systems that do not require battery maintenance. During Phase I, our energy harvesting wireless sensors were optimized for ...

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 ...