Award Data

The ability to restore large amounts of vented gaseous helium (GHe) at rocket test sites preserves the GHe and reduces operating cost. The used GHe is vented into the atmosphere, is non-recoverable, and costs NASA millions dollars per year. Helium, which is non-renewable and irreplaceable once released into the atmosphere, is continuously consumed by rocket test facilities at NASA centers such a ...

Computational tools that accurately predict the performance of electric propulsion devices are highly desirable by NASA and the broader electric propulsion community. Large investments in running the long duration test programs (> 20 kHrs) at NASA GRC can be reduced with computer models and allow more focus on exploring the NEXT ion thruster design for future space missions. The current state of e ...

The innovation proposed here is a high performance, high fidelity simulation capability to enable accurate, fast and robust simulation of unsteady turbulent, reacting flows involving cryogenic propellants (such as LOX/LH2 and LOX/LCH4). The key features of this proposed capability are: (a) Hybrid RANS-LES (HRLES) methodology, and (b) flamelet modeling for turbulent combustion incorporated in a pr ...

The ability to quickly and reliably simulate high-speed flows over a wide range of geometrically complex configurations is critical to many of NASA's missions. Advances in CFD methods and parallel computing have provided NASA the core flow solvers to perform these simulations. However, the ease of use of these flow solvers and the reliability of the results obtained are a strong function of the te ...

Our team proposes to develop, test, and commercialize a Micro Air Vehicle Tether Recovery APparatus (MAVTRAP). This system operates by deploying an instrumented MAV capture device attached via a tether system from a mothership unmanned air vehicle (UAV). The instrumented MAV capture device contains an integrated avionics suite. Our team will determine and control the precise mother ship UAV loi ...

Impact Technologies, in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Rochester Institute of Technology and the Boeing Company, is proposing to complete the development, testing and evaluation of a novel biologically-inspired Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) conceptualized in Phase I and capable of agile and high endurance flight operations in dense and cluttered urban environments. Phase I a ...

Military shelters currently use electrically driven Environmental Control Units (ECUs) to provide cooling for the air inside the shelter. The ECU is vapor compression cycle powered by a diesel generator, operating on JP-8 fuel. Other than fueling jet engines, the largest drain on U.S. military fuel supplies in current operations comes from running generators at forward operating bases. In hot cli ...

In this Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) - Phase II project we will build photonic integrated circuits that perform flip-flop and optical switching operations on silicon platform. These circuits are based on our Phase I work where we have established the feasibility of using coupled microdisk resonators and active waveguides coupled to a single microring resonator to realize bista ...

Jet engine disk components are increasingly subjected to higher operating temperatures. To meet the demands of increasing thrust and higher operating temperatures, a newer generation of nickel based superalloys such as LSHR, Alloy 10, Rene104 and RR1000 are being processed with dual microstructure distributions. Fine grain, high strength, fatigue resistant bore properties are contrasted with co ...

We propose to develop a computational model of leadership designed to capture complex variables including cultural differences in leadership requirements along with task differences, primarily ill-defined goals, which pose leadership challenges. Rather than avoiding these kinds of complexity and developing a computational model that is unlikely to scale up, we believe there is more to be gained b ...