Award Data

Cured aircraft composite materials present a particularly difficult challenge for recycling technology. Those materials have mostly thermosetting epoxy matrices and occur in intimate association with metals, paints, and coatings. Current techniques for recycling thermoset composites, mostly for automotive sheet molding compounds (SMC), involve pulverizing the material for use as fillers. Th ...

A novel tertiary recycling process is proposed for investigation as an economical means for recycling shipboard plastic waste. Early development work has shown that this process can convert a wide variety of polymers and composites into low molecular weight hydrocarbons at temperatures below 200'C. The hydrocarbons produced can then be reused as chemicals, fuels, or monomers. Metal, glass, and fil ...

The AES International Corporation (AESI) of College Station, Texas, in concert with Texas A&M University personnel, can build an airborne ground-penetrating radar system to detect land mines from an Unmanned Airborne Vehicle (UAV). The radar itself will be a totally new and fully airworthy flight demonstration unit, the principles and characteristics of which will be conceptually similar to two p ...

The implementation of new environmental and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) regulations due to take effect by the year 2000 make it imperative that industrial and manufacturing processing facilities take steps to monitor, characterize, and control stack emissions in accordance with EPA air permit requirements. Inline gas/air monitoring techniques that permit simultane ...

The design of vertically firing gun is merely a simplified version of a normal large caliber gun system. The fixed orientation of the weapon simplifies the ammunition feed and loading system as well as eliminating the need for an equilibration The challenges of the current proposed system are presented by rate of fire, vertical height limitation, structural required to accomodate high loads o ...

A miniaturized lighter-than-air (LTA) unmanned air vehicle (UAV) is proposed as a low altitude, station keeping, optical instrumentation platform. The advanced airship design will be derived from parameters developed during the successful Small Aerostat Surveillance System, Low Intensity Target Exploitation (SASS LITE) UAV program. This miniature airship developed by Applied Research Associates, I ...

Current utilization of composite materials in air and surface weapons systems and structures is extensive, and the use of these materials can be expected to increase in the future. Weapons effectiveness assessments and the design of protective structures require methodologies to predict the terminal ballistic interactions between projectiles and fragments penetrating composite laminated target st ...

Warhead design calculations and weapons effectiveness estimates require a methodology to predict structural response and the associated damage to air targets from reactive munitions. The objectives for the proposed Phase I study effort are to develop candidate launch conditioning, reaction initiation and reaction rate methodology, to incorporate existing ballistic, blast and quasi-static pres ...

The goal of this program is to develop and implement optimal spectral signature detection techniques which provide automated detection and identification of materials in hyperspectral image sequences. The requirement to detect, identify and discriminate materials is a common theme in many applications of imaging spectrometry. In general, materials of interest are often smaller than the spa ...

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