Award Data

In the proposed STTR study, Catto Propellers, Inc. (Catto) and the University of North Dakota (UND) will create an efficient new propeller design utilizing advanced composite materials for use on small unmanned x systems.  During Phase I, a comprehensive study will be conducted to develop a new propeller design in order to increase propeller efficiency, reduce aerodynamic noise and utilize innova ...

Towing of a Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) system is an important aspect of rotorcraftmaritime operation. The oscillatory rotorcraft combined with the long and flexible towingcable, the low mass ratio of the towed body to the towing aircraft, and the rotor wake effecton the towed body presents a challenge for integration of a modern MAD system withrotorcraft platform. The research objective is t ...

Novel approaches are needed to improve the performance and reduce the size, number and signature of antennas with significantly enhanced efficiency in HF-UHF. It has been shown recently hesitivity, which is able to characterize the performance of the material and categorize the radiation efficiency of magnetodielectric wire antennas; the higher the hesitivity, the higher the attainable antenna eff ...

A particularly challenging task for the US Navy today is that of Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) of underwater mines; the Mine Countermeasures (MCM) mission. The semi-submersible Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle (RMMV) has emerged as an unmanned solution to handle MCM missions. While the RMMV is groundbreaking, the basis of the technology is a relatively slow-moving watercraft.GreenSight Agronomics, ...

The U.S. Navy is seeking new technologies and platforms to advance airborne anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and related maritime surveillance. Current magnetic anomaly detection (MAD) sensors, such as the latest versions of atomic magnetometers, are capable of very low noise operation. However, the performance of these sensors can be limited by the geomagnetic noise environment more so than by eithe ...

The Navy desires a compact and highly efficient S-band magnetron source with stabilized output capable of modulation over a narrow bandwidth. In this Phase I STTR proposal, Physical Sciences Inc (PSI) outlines the development of an injection locked “cooker” magnetron which can be used for frequency shift keying (FSK) or phase shift keying (PSK) in a portable high power transmission device. In ...

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a very promising technique for rapid, low-cost production of aircraft parts directly from a CAD file. AM is especially appealing for complex parts that would be costly or impossible to fabricate by machining or casting. At the current time there are no reliable, cost-effective techniques to qualify the finished parts. Several government studies have noted this gap an ...

Although metal AM technologies have continued to progress, there are still many different challenging factors to a build that impact part quality and the amount of time it takes to successfully process a first-run component without defects. Triton Systems proposes to develop a machine learning algorithm that adjusts print parameters during the build in reaction to in-situ sensor data in order to ...

The Phase I effort of this STTR aimed to reinforce ply-drop laminates. When laminates taper from a thicker to thinner cross section, the termination of plies locally create resin pockets that can reduce the life of a part due to the lower strength of the resin compared to the fibers, local stress concentrations, and the propensity for voids in these resin rich areas. Thus, Metis Design Corporation ...

Effective mission planning is critical for military strategy and execution. This process is complex as human operators must consider many variables (e.g., resource limitations, threats, risks) when formulating a plan to accomplish mission goals. Although powerful tools, such as the Navy’s Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS), provide advanced functionality, mission planning remains a hybrid acti ...