Award Data

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 ...

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 ...