Award Data

A unique type of air lubricated thrust bearing called a Wave Bearing is proposed to assist a rolling element bearing to carry the thrust load and to improve the bearing’s life when used in a micro gas turbine engine. The Wave Bearing technology will provide improved reliability, safety and life compared to rolling element bearings used alone, as well as to allow simplification of engine design a ...

While there are established methods available in determining the fatigue life of critical rotating components, there is still room for improvement for better understanding and prediction of life limiting factors. Improved risk assessment of jet engine disk components would require probabilistic modeling capability of the evolution of microstructural features, residual stresses and material anomali ...

The Navy seeks devices that can provide power to maintain charge in batteries for shipboard sensors. The transduction materials proposed for most energy harvesting devices under development are either too brittle to endure significant loading or are too compliant to extract significant energy from the small amplitude vibrations present on ships. Terfenol-D (in a composite form) and Galfenol each p ...

A boat’s coxswain is adept at analyzing the wave environment, adjusting the craft’s propulsion system and control surfaces to mitigate its motions and reduce the chance of capsizing. There is a significant predictive component in the coxswain’s control decisions. Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) lack the benefit of a highly trained coxswain reading and predicting oncoming waves - existing au ...

Diver communication is vital for the US Navy while carrying out strategic underwater missions. Diver-to-diver communication and diver-to-vehicle communication can allow the sharing of information as it is discovered and also enable performing cooperative maneuvers. Emergency situations can also benefit from such communication. In addition to the communication capability, it would be useful to know ...

Scientific Systems and Brigham Young University will develop and test an autonomous helicopter landing system using vision-based navigation and control.

There is need for fast, easy-to-operate, and low-risk methods for mapping geography, velocity, and bathymetry of rivers. River charts can be nonexistent or inadequate because of changes in water volume, tides, sediment transport, flooding, and other events. This is a hindrance and a hazard for navigation and other operations. Currently, procedures to map rivers involve navigating surface vessels i ...

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 ...

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 ...