Award Data

Vertical short takeoff and landing (VSTOL) operators face numerous challenges, particularly during takeoff, hover, and landing operations. Threats take the form of power lines, structures, and—in the case of combat—enemy fire. Often, these threats are obscured when visibility is compromised by dust, sand, or snow. Maintaining awareness of the surrounding environment becomes almost impossible. ...

Advances in electronically controlled injection technologies for diesel engines have provided a method to improve medium- to heavy-duty engine performance through increased injection pressures, multiple injections, and injection rate shaping. Although these injection systems have been primarily limited to larger engines, the ability to rapidly and precisely meter fuel for smaller engines is partic ...

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 ...

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 ...

The objective of this proposed Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) effort is to develop an experimentally-validated, highly detailed chemical kinetic reference model of surface chemistry for C-SiC-SiO2 rubber composite materials exposed to high temperature, high pressure, oxidizing environments. This reference model will then be reduced into simplified reduced-order models that could be easi ...

The primary objective of the proposed effort is to develop a validated computational tool to predict the afterburning of non-ideal munitions containing metal and hydrocarbon fuels. The activities outlined devise a well-coordinated collaboration among researchers from Reaction Engineering International (REI) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB). The activities proposed will build on ...

A team consisting of Spectral Sciences Inc., Boston University, Boston University Medical School, Radcliffe Consulting and Brighton Consulting will collaborate to develop and validate a novel optical device for the monitoring and evaluation of blood coagulation. In this proposal we describe a novel optical blood coagulation monitoring instrument. The instrument has no moving parts, uses very small ...

In this STTR program, Photonic Systems Inc. and Prof. Jacob Khurgin at Johns Hopkins University propose novel optical external and internal fiber cooling approaches to efficiently cool the high power GaN microwave amplifier. The external cooler is a single end, square-shape, Yb:ZLAN fiber with high reflection (HR) coated surface which can attach to the amplifier surface and create a cold spot at t ...

Future naval operations are expected to make extensive use of unmanned vehicles to support a range of operations, including intelligence gathering, mine warfare, force protection, and anti-submarine warfare. Current unmanned systems are typically controlled remotely by an operator who directly manipulates a control interface for the vehicle. The effectiveness of this approach is obviously limited ...

The proposed Automated Linguistic Analysis Revealing Misrepresentation and Messaging (ALARMM) system significantly advances the state of the art in detecting deception in unstructured data such as Web sites and chat messages. Our research focuses on automated techniques based on linguistic theory that can detect both misrepresentations and hidden messages. The proposed work draws on the field of s ...