Award Data

In miniature gas turbines for UAV applications, traditional bearings exhibit a typical lifetime of only 25 hours due to excessive axial loading. Mainstream proposes to use a passive, permanent magnet thrust bearing to alleviate this problem and increase service life to over 1000 hours. Since this type of bearing is non-contacting, it can operate at very high rotational speeds with minimal heat gen ...

Intelligent Fiber Optic Systems Corporation (IFOS) and Georgia Tech propose a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) integrated sensor system capable of measuring the pipe wall "breathing mode" in order to infer the fluid-borne sound pressure level (SPL) in a pipe. The proposed new measurement technique makes it possible to externally measure the fluid-borne sound level in a noisy piping system. The state-of-a ...

IFOS will demonstrate the feasibility of a minimalistic, yet powerful, distributed network of piezoelectric actuators and ultrasonic wave detecting fiber optic Bragg grating (FBG) sensors interrogated by a high frequency parallel processing FBG interrogator together with innovative mathematical and computational algorithms to process, store and visualize (via damage index maps) massive amounts of ...

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 ...

Electromagnetic launchers or rail guns are a key component of the Navy’s all-electric ship of the future, but they lack the durability required for repeated firings. TDA Research and the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) are developing a tough, durable and conductive refractory metal coating that will protect the copper alloy conductors (rails) from the extreme heat and wear conditions inside the ...

Micro gas turbine engines with state-of-the-art ultra-compact recuperators could be a real game-changer for small unmanned air vehicles and portable power generation. A key enabling technology for these engines is a low-cost, high speed bearing system that has long life, while operating without either a separate lubrication system, or oil in the fuel. For this Phase I STTR effort, Xdot Engineerin ...

Stealth is a primary consideration in design and operation of ships and submarines in the Navy fleet. Noise in hydraulic systems and piping is one source of unwanted noise. A method to measure and monitor this noise is essential to controlling and eliminating these noise sources. With the assistance of UMASS Dartmouth we will present a method to externally measure the fluidborne sound pressure lev ...

Luna Innovations Incorporated and CURBC (Calspan – University of Buffalo Research Center) are proposing to develop miniature, high-speed, high-temperature, fiber-optic pressure sensors that will fill the void that currently exists between ground and flight test instrumentation. The sensors small size (ø 0.007”) and high-sensitivity (better than ±0.01 psi) combined with a high-speed fiber-op ...

The need for faster highly resolved solutions coupled with the advent of General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) architectures and the development of GPGPU algorithms at the University of California, Davis present an opportunity that JMSI Inc. proposes to leverage by developing algorithmic and software solutions for GPGPUs in “Innovative CFD Algorithms, Libraries & Python Frameworks for ...

The ever-decreasing size of the electronic microchips and the ever-increasing density of electronic components required to support future Air Force platforms are creating the problem of substantial localized heat generation that can impair component operation. State of the art thermal interface materials (TIMs), that are used to dissipate heat from the source to the spreader in a microchip, are se ...