Award Data

Large aerospace composite structures currently require autoclaves and ovens to achieve desired performance which are expensive to purchase, costly to operate, and often limit part size and production rate. Ovens and autoclaves rely on convective heating which is inefficient, consumes large amounts of energy, and can be difficult to predict. Alternative cure processes using external heaters or hot ...

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 ...

For this research program, Mainstream will collaborate with Colorado State University (CSU) to develop a nanostructured heater capable of curing aerospace grade composites out-of-autoclave (OOA). The use of autoclaves is the primary cost driver in composite manufacturing due to size limitations, long processing times, and inefficient energy usage. Therefore, the Navy is looking to develop a nanost ...

The US Navy operates a vast fleet of combat and support vessels with complex power control systems under the control and decision authority of human operators. Several current resources such as SPY-1D radar and Vertical Launch System (VLS) and future resources such as railgun, AMDR, and high energy laser (HEL) are energy hungry, exceeding current and planned power generation capability when deploy ...

The use of laser technologies and high-power electronics is rapidly being incorporated into tactical platforms for imaging, target designation, and range finding. Electronic equipment including lasers demand power from a tactical aircraft and produce large amounts of thermal energy as a waste product. Current thermal management technologies will not be sufficient for future aircraft as thermal man ...

The STTR topic N19A-T013 seeks innovative technology to improve the power density and efficiency of propulsion and power generation devices. To address this challenge, Spectral Energies in collaboration with its academic partner Dr. Rory Roberts at Wright State University proposes to develop a compact heat recovery system based on a supercritical CO2 based Rankin Cycle. At the end of the STTR prog ...

Energy to Power Solutions (e2P) has teamed with quench detection (QD) expert Dr. Yuri Lvovsky (retired GE), Dr. Sastry Pamidi of the Center for Advanced Power Systems (FSU-CAPS), and American Superconductor Corporation (AMSC) to design, fabricate, and test a robust, reliable, and low cost QD system. e2P’s proposed system is a vastly different quench avoidance system that will provide multiple le ...

In this proposal, a meta model-based scaling law will be used to represent each system component. A components meta model-based scaling law describes the tradeoffs between performance metrics for that component or subsystem as a function of its ratings in relation to the system. This greatly reduces the number of degrees of freedom for each component, and at the same time, retains the information ...