Award Data

Mentis Sciences, Inc. and the University of New Hampshire will continue the design work started in Phase I of the program to develop an ultra-lightweight modular electronics enclosure. During the Phase I effort, a concept for the enclosure was developed, and preliminary structural and thermal analysis was conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the concept. At the conclusion of Phase I, the pr ...

The primary objective is to develop electric machine/drive topologies and power architectures that achieve the power densities required for 50% more power without the increase in weight or space requirements. In addition to PMSM-based designs, two new machine topologies will be considered. The first is a trapped flux coreless (TFC) machine that utilizes superconducting pucks made of YBCO to produc ...

The performance of modern combustion systems used in propulsion devices (e.g., gas turbine main combustors, augmentors, rockets, etc.) is largely dependent on the mixing of fuel and oxidizer (e.g., compressor air, vitiated air, and oxygen). This mixing process, usually involving a liquid jet emanating into a gaseous flow followed by subsequent breakup and atomization, is critically important to ma ...

Future military communication systems will utilize advanced superconductor digital electronics that will require efficient cooling at low temperatures near 4 K. We propose to improve the efficiency of pulse-tube cryocoolers by addressing the two primary performance limitations. These are operation in adverse orientations and performance of the regenerator at low temperatures. We will develop (1) a ...

Thermophotovoltaic (TPV) power systems offer an attractive approach for compact, simple, and reliable energy conversion needed in applications such as portable power systems and unmanned aerial vehicles. A key challenge with TPV energy systems is achieving a high-energy conversion efficiency, and one of the critical aspects of the energy conversion process is creating spectral emissions from the h ...

Generator and motor systems with high power density are needed as watercraft, aircraft, and land vehicles evolve toward more electric designs. In response, we propose to develop a system that operates at extremely high speed to provide ultra-high power density. The resulting system will be compact, lightweight, efficient, robust, and reliable. Our team is ideal for this project because we have foc ...

Measurement surveys of full-scale ship airwakes are needed to validate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models of these wakes. Airwake computations guide the design of ship superstructures, improve the fidelity of flight simulators, and save time and reduce risk during flight tests to define launch and recovery envelopes for ship and aircraft combinations. Current full-scale test techniques invo ...

Legacy power distribution cables will not be able to meet the future requirements of Navy electric ships. While power distribution systems employing high temperature superconductors (HTS) have the potential to meet this need, further development work is required to improve the performance and increase the technology readiness level of key system components. The proposed work focuses on the current ...

There are many efforts underway to develop distributed shipboard health monitoring sensors. These devices face strong opposition by fleet maintainers unless the requirements for power supply cabling and/or battery maintenance are eliminated. Consequently, methods for harvesting energy from local environmental conditions using heat, solar, and vibration are of great interest. As opposed to piezoele ...

Northwest UAV Propulsion Systems proposes using our purpose built heavy fuel engine designed and built in the USA for small unmanned aerial systems in the tier 2 & 3 class. We will be adding a lightweight ceramic material set combined with FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and heavy fuel atomizer (IRAD Project) to create a lightweight engine for a SUAS or STUAS class UAVs. The Ceramic material set is ...