Award Data

A software tool for fracture evaluation and load deflection prediction of welded aluminum ship structures subjected to impulsive loading will be developed by enhancing and integrating an existing extended finite element method (XFEM) for dynamic fracture of thin shells in Abaqus. The software package will be able to model arbitrary crack paths as dictated by the physics of the scenario, completely ...

JM Harwood, LLC, and UAH Propulsion Research Center propose the development of an electronic miniature Direct Fuel Injection (DFI) system for 5-20 hp heavy fuel engines. This highly integrated Very Small Injection Technology (V-SInTech) DFI system will be capable of (a) multiple injections per cycle, (b) variable injection timing, (c) variable spray penetration depth, (d) real-time closed loop mod ...

This research investigates the feasibility of improving operational readiness, reliability and availability of high current cryogenic rf linear accelerators using a cryogenic compatible resonant coupling technique to couple all of the accelerator sections together, including any room temperature portion. This technique guarantees a single resonant frequency for the system insuring rapid turn on. T ...

Synthetic scenario-based training of Navy personnel in the use of Navy SIGINT/IO systems has helped to reduce training costs, and it has enabled the personnel to be trained in an environment that sufficiently approximates real-world situations that could not otherwise be accomplished within the class room. However, scenario development is highly complex and involves a great deal of human effo ...

We propose to design a high average power Er:Fiber ultrafast laser system which is pumped at 14xxnm, and at the same time solve other problems related to ultrashort pulses in fiber lasers. The advantage of using 14xxnm pumping is the reduction of the standard quantum defect from 37% to 5%, thus greatly reducing the thermal load on the system, which makes it inherently more efficient. We also inten ...

Aging aircraft commonly suffers from several types of degradation including fatigue cracking and lack of bonding. It is virtually impossible to predict degradation in structural performance or when a component or structure will fail due to the inability to test new material systems under all loading conditions and under all environmental conditions. A material state awareness system using minimali ...

Free-play nonlinearity of the control surfaces has a direct impact on aircraft’s dynamic stability characteristics. . It is impossible to design and manufacture a control surface with zero free-play. As control surface free-play increases, tighter limits must be imposed on the aircraft mission capability. Typically, researchers have utilized an oversimplified piecewise-linear torque-rotation rel ...

This is a proposal to develop a unique, robust, fieldable, gated, picosecond, digital holography system for characterizing dense particle fields under harsh conditions. Many powerful imaging methods have failed to fulfill this requirement because noise from multiple scattering buries the signal needed to acquire a useful image. Solutions to this limitation are very expensive, hard to implement, an ...

Compelling applications of infrared ultrafast lasers—ranging from ship self defense and aircraft self defense, to medical and micromachining applications—have defined a critical performance point at about one millijoule per pulse from a reliable and robust portable laser system with high average power. Increasing amplifier efficiency is a critical need in order to reach high average powers nee ...

Ultrafast laser technology offers compelling capabilities for national defense, state-of-the-art health care, and the materials processing industry. The development of this technology into commercial form factor hardware has been limited mostly by the size, cost, complexity, and/or pulse energy limitations of current ultrafast laser systems. Optical fiber based ultrafast lasers have dramatically d ...