Award Data

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 ...

Current software development and testing methodologies are inadequate for validating software in mission-critical applications. As Dijstra famously stated: "testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." When lives and national security is at stake, there is a need for mathematically rigorous techniques that can verify the absence of bugs. We propose to devel ...

Analysts are faced with the challenge of sifting through enormous quantities of documents, blog posts, communications, etc. to find deceptive behaviors. We propose novel techniques for efficiently and automatically detecting deception on large data with high accuracy by using methodologies from both stylometry and topic modeling. This combined approach will learn models of authors and will detect ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Aurora Flight Sciences and MIT have been developing tools and techniques that, together with existing 3D environment decision-making and navigation tools developed by AMRDEC in the PALACE program, are well-suited to the problem of autonomous vertical landing on unprepared landing sites. In this program, Aurora will team with MIT researchers and UC Santa Cruz (UCSC licenses PALACE technologies for ...

Software is rarely written entirely from scratch. Typically, third-party commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components are integrated into larger software systems used both in the commercial sector and in critical infrastructure. Third-party components often come in binary form, e.g., as dynamically linked libraries, Active X controls, or plain executables. That is, the source code for those componen ...