Award Data

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 ...

This Navy SBIR Phase II program looks at the updating (both structural and electronics) of the current Controlled Towed Vehicle (CTV) and the fabrication of a new mount/enclosure that will allow for the mounting of the CTV system on a standard military style wing plyon. The vehicle is primarily for use in atmospheric research, specifically the surface flow over the ocean. Towed behind a research a ...

Fine-scale, well-calibrated probabilistic weather forecasts are increasingly in demand for such weather-critical applications as battlespace management, and accurate prediction of high-value airborne operations. Built upon the Phase I effort we have just completed, the principal objective of this proposed study (Phase II) is to develop a reliable, efficient, and easily deployable reforecast-calibr ...

Embedded wireless sensors for corrosion monitoring of critical aircraft components are needed for improved condition based maintenance and future structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. The objective of this Phase I SBIR proposal is to design, develop, and test a corrosion measurement and data collection system that can utilize multiple types of corrosion sensors. A key design criterion is t ...

In the proposed work, we will develop a highly efficient and miniaturized vibration energy harvesting device suitable for use on drive system components of helicopters. The goal is to provide power to run a wireless corrosion hub and sensors (to be developed simultaneously in a separate program). The target power generating capability is 5mW under vibration conditions typical of steady state ...