Award Data

Impact Technologies, in cooperation with Dr. Mohammed Daqaq from Clemson University, propose to develop a magnetostrictive materials based device for harvesting energy from mechanical vibration. The energy harvesting device will harness power from ship-hull vibrations in order to power sensing devices. This technology will be a key enabler for improved structural and machinery health management. K ...

The research objective is to develop a fully functional computational method for prediction of the after-burning effect of different fuels in a wide range of temperature, pressure, and turbulence regimes. Achievement of the objective requires understanding and modeling of key phenomena including (a) post-detonation response of the fuels, (b) near-field coupling of detonation products with particul ...

The Barron Associates/Virginia Tech team believes that intelligent use of ambient riverine environmental factors together with novel drifter design and low-energy articulation is the key to enabling large non-overlapping river coverage. The proposed phase I research program focuses on (1) identifying key river characteristics which may be leveraged by riverine drifters, (2) fabricating a novel riv ...

Thermo-mechanical processes of turbine disks have been progressively improved to meet microstructural requirements tailored for advanced, sustainable high temperature performances. However, the chemistry of typical Ni-base turbine disk alloys is very complex, and yields a variety of phases and microstructural anomalies under different thermo-mechanical heat treatments. These microstructural hetero ...

Current software development and testing methodologies are inadequate for validating software in mission-critical applications. As Dijstra famously stated: "testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." When lives and national security is at stake, there is a need for mathematically rigorous techniques that can verify the absence of bugs. We propose to devel ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase-I project will constitute design of algorithms, toolsets, and interfaces to detect and visualize complex events from video and communications data. Our proposed system would be based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) which will allow users to integrate services and data from multiple sources and operate in a networked environment. The key ...

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 ...

Aluminum as a structural material for naval applications has a number of advantages over steel, owing mainly to significant weight reductions which translate to higher speed and range attainable by aluminum vessels. A comprehensive study of research needs for aluminum structures conducted under the ONR program identified the key research areas, which included material behavior and fracture evaluat ...

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 ...

The Phase I deliverable will be a physic-based model which represents a CMC gas turbine component concomitantly at the material level and the structural level. This model will be probabilistically analyzed to account for the uncertainties in material properties and the uncertainties in the size and impact velocities of possible foreign objects (FOD). A ceramic material must display sufficient capa ...