Award Data

Thick, 3D woven carbon/phenolic composites offer potential improvement over legacy thermal protection systems (TPS) for re-entry vehicle heat shield applications. However due to the scale and complexity of typical re-entry vehicle structures, it is likely that multiple 3D woven panels would need to laid up to create the overall heat shield, creating a potential weak spots at the panel joints. ...

Lithium-Ion batteries have been a main source of energy for many aerospace applications over the past decade. Future space missions are facing a number of challenging requirements, including significant increase in specific energy, approaching 500 Wh/kg, and energy density of 700 Wh/l at cell level. Compared to state-of-the-art technology today, a reduction in mass and volume are necessary, along ...

In order to maintain our nation’s technological superiority on air, sea and land, we must respond quicker to emerging threats and reduce the cost of major sensing platforms. Every DoD platform developed nowadays contains at least one sensor, whether it be RF, EO/IR, or acoustic. In fact, in a lot of recent developments, the platform is built around the sensor and exists only to support the senso ...

Self-aware systems have three essential properties: they build empirical models of their own performance; they use those models to inform optimal plans of action; and they continually refine their models and plans based on the outcomes of their actions. Although engineers routinely build some degree of intelligence into the systems they design, an explanatory gap inevitably grows between what engi ...

This program proposes to demonstrate an ultra-low power design methodology and circuits for digital logic employing advanced dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) for asynchronous NULL Convention Logic (NCL) circuits operating in sub-threshold to super-threshold voltage regimes. The power supply voltages of logic block partitions will be independently set by on-chip voltage controllers based on the data p ...

Touchstone Research Laboratory, Ltd. (Touchstone) has developed a novel and innovative Out-of-Autoclave (OOA) composites manufacturing process with an electrically heated carbon foam tooling system. Electrically Heated Tooling (EHT) utilizes a coal-based carbon foam (CFOAMREG) core that serves as both the tool substrate and the heating source for a composite part being cured. The tool heating is a ...

Metal Matrix Composite (MMC) materials offer tremendous potential for lightweight propellant and pressurant tankage for space applications. Thin MMC liners for COPVs would have enough strength to withstand tensile loading at maximum expected operating pressure (MEOP) and compressive loading at zero pressure without buckling. Thus, performance benefits would be expected when compared to aluminum, ...

A detailed design is proposed to compare one and two mirror, parabolic and aspheric optics to achieve high numerical aperture, high-throughput, sub-micron resolution from 200 to 800 nanometers. An optimization phase will follow for the concept(s) that best satisfy the requirements. Predicted performance will be analyzed for the selected concepts including evaluation of point spread function, mod ...

Simulation-based design optimization has been steadily maturing over the past two decades, but not without its own unique and persistent challenges. The proposed project will develop a novel solution to one of the long-standing bottlenecks in simulation-based design optimization. Particularly, we will develop a flexible geometry toolkit for shape parameterization and modification as required for d ...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its publication Technology News and Trends in 2009 featured the Navy's work that saved 6 years and $3 million delineating chlorinated solvent plumes in soil and groundwater. The Navy used EPA's TRIAD process, which incorporates systematic planning, field analytics, and dynamic work strategies, during its hazardous waste site investigation. A direct ...