Award Data

We propose to design, develop, implement, simulate, and demonstrate an autonomous control and sensing system for the safe vertical landing of autonomous aerial cargo delivery system (ACDS). The landing site is expected to be unprepared mountain sides with slopes up to 15 degrees and rough terrain containing rocks and brush. We also plan to reduce the amount of ground equipment required to operate ...

US forces are increasingly involved in asymmetric warfare, peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance missions. These scenarios can place soldiers in direct contact with harmful biological and chemical warfare organisms and agents, toxic industrial chemicals, and explosives. Current portable sensor technology solutions rely on visible and near-IR Raman or Fluorescence spectroscopy. But operations ...

Sensor development researchers and engineers have perpetually sought novel methods to reduce sensor size and improve performance. Continued miniaturization of sensors through micromachining has enabled novel applications and introduced new paradigms for engineered systems to interact with the world. The challenge has always been to improve performance while continually reducing size. In the cur ...

Recent years have seen a shift in threats to US national security. Today increasing focus for national security is management of terrorist activities. Deliberately exposing a civilian population to chemicals and explosives to cause harm represents a looming terrorist threat. Early detection and identification is a difficult but essential element to minimizing the threat. The Seacoast Science/U ...

Aurora and Georgia Tech"s Phase I efforts demonstrated the feasibility of a partially distributed control scheme with separate controllers on the engine core and fan, where the controllers are linked by a supervisory controller. This scheme is representative of the situation encountered in VTOL UAV design and the design of new turbo-props and variable pitch turbofans by the large commercial gas t ...

Two-dimensional (2D) visualization techniques have limit capacity to achieve understanding of full dimensionality of the battlefield. Rewritable 3D holographic storage is promising for updatable 3D display applications. In Phase I, New Span Opto-Technology has demonstrated novel concepts of both holographic recording technique and recording material system without the use of high voltage. We have ...

ABSTRACT: EDEN PARK ILLUMINATION, INC. and the University of Illinois have formed a team to pursue the demonstration and commercialization of large arrays of microcavity plasmas capable of producing white light panels with luminous efficacies above 30 lumens/W. This proposed project will demonstrate the ability of arrays of microplasmas to yield flat lamps of high efficiency, luminance, and col ...

The occurrence of combustion instability has long been a matter of serious concern in the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines due to the high rate of energy release in a confined volume in which energy losses are relatively small. Shear layer instabilities and intermittent growth rates of the mixing layer cause fluctuations in the burning rates and result in acoustic waves triggering ...

The occurrence of combustion instability has long been a matter of serious concern in the development of liquid-propellant rocket engines due to the high rate of energy release in a confined volume in which energy losses are relatively small. Positive feedback between the acoustic waves and unsteady combustion could lead to the destruction of an engine in a fraction of a second. The situation is ...

A significant barrier to the insertion of ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials into advanced aircraft engines is their inherent lack of toughness under foreign object Damage (FOD) as well as post FOD. Our team will develop and demonstrate a physics-based model for FOD/post FOD in CMC’s. The model will incorporate physical mechanisms associated with impact for two different CMC systems: a) ma ...