Award Data

Hot Corrosion of turbine engine components has been studied for many years. The underlying mechan-isms of Type I Hot Corrosion and Type II Hot Corrosion are increasingly well-understood. Modern turbine engine designs that seek to achieve better fuel efficiency in part by increasing turbine inlet temperatures are strong candidates for nickel-based superalloy turbine disk materials. As disk tempe ...

Building on our successful Phase I Tactile Data Entry program, Barron Associates proposes development of a Glove-Enabled Computer Operations (GECO) system to permit suited crewmembers to perform virtual keyboard/mouse interactions using an instrumented EVA glove. The Phase II system will use two-hand motion tracking, multi-finger gesture recognition, and vibrotactile feedback to create an intuiti ...

The key innovation of this project is the application of advanced Bayesian methods to integrate real-time dense stereo vision and high-speed optical flow with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to produce a highly accurate planetary rover navigation system. The software developed in this project leverages current computing technology to implement advanced Visual Odometry (VO) methods that will acc ...

Research on desensitized optimal filtering techniques and a navigation and sensor fusion tool kit using advanced filtering techniques is proposed. Research focuses on reducing the sensitivity of Kalman filters with respect to model parameter uncertainties using a robust trajectory optimization approach called Desensitized Optimal Control, developed by the proposing company. The proposed tool kit i ...

In NASA is seeking an electric propulsion system capable of producing 20mN thrust with input power up to 1000W and specific impulse ranging from 1600-3500 seconds. The key technical challenge of the topic is the target mass of 1kg for the thruster and 2kg for the power processor (PPU). In Phase 1 Busek develop an overall subsystem design for the thruster/cathode, PPU and XFS. The feasibility of ...

Busek leveraged previous, internally sponsored, high power, Hall thruster discharge converter development which allowed it to design, build, and test new printed circuit board converter within this Phase 1 effort. The new converter consists of two series or parallel boards (slices) intended to power NASA GRC HiVHAC thruster or other similarly sized EP devices. The converter accepts 80 to 160V in ...

The High Melt Coating system is applied to a carbon-carbon structure and embeds HfC, ZrB2 in the outer layers. ACC High Melt builds on the time tested base material system of T-300 fibers, impregnated with phenolic resin, pyrolyzed, densified, and SiC Conversion coatedFor Phase 2, C-CAT proposes to team with Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne to fully develop High Melt into a material system that when ...

Pressurized space suits impose high joint torques on the wearer, reducing mobility for upper and lower body motions. Using actual space suits in training or experimentation is problematic due to the expense, bulk, weight, and difficulty in donning/doffing. The goal of this project was to demonstrate a novel method for simulating space suit joint torques, which are non-linear and vary with angula ...

Maxion Technologies, Inc. (Maxion) proposes to develop and field test a Carbon Monoxide (CO)-sensor prototype for post fire cleanup and CO detection. The sensor will have the dynamic range required to detect and monitor CO from approximately 1 to 500 ppmv with a resolution to 1 ppmv. Maxion will grow, fabricate and test a Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) at a unique single-mode wavelength ideal for CO ...

A new high capacity anode composite based on mesoporous silicon is proposed. By virtue of a structure that resembles a pseudo one-dimensional phase, the active anode material will be able to accommodate significant volume changes expected upon alloying and de-alloying with lithium. The mesoporosity will be created without the aid of a surfactant template using a novel high volume synthetic process ...