Award Data

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 ...

This is a proposal to develop a unique, robust, fieldable, gated, picosecond, digital holography system for characterizing dense particle fields under harsh conditions. Many powerful imaging methods have failed to fulfill this requirement because noise from multiple scattering buries the signal needed to acquire a useful image. Solutions to this limitation are very expensive, hard to implement, an ...

The Phase I deliverable will be a physic-based model which represents a CMC gas turbine component concomitantly at the material level and the structural level. This model will be probabilistically analyzed to account for the uncertainties in material properties and the uncertainties in the size and impact velocities of possible foreign objects (FOD). A ceramic material must display sufficient capa ...

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 ...

A team led by NextGen Aeronautics Inc., and working with San Diego State University proposes the development of redundant wideband antennas that are embedded in composite armor structures The planned work builds upon the team’s extensive prior experience in conformal load-bearing antenna structures (CLAS), antenna design, and metamaterials. The proposed antenna is a combination of concepts that ...

The goal of the proposed research is the development of a high-volume, low-cost manufacturing along with a novel deposition process that enables fabrication of a structural-state electronic system-on film. This hybrid electronic system contains a multifunctional sensor suite that can measure a structure's static (such as deformation, stress and strain) and dynamic state (such as slow or under acce ...

NextGen Aeronautics in collaboration with Virginia Tech plan to build on our Phase I work and propose to further develop our concepts and designs for a scalable, fast and easy to use optical strain measurement system. Our proposed Phase II effort will focus on the development of a dual level optical camera system which uses one set of cameras to measure strains over the entire test specimen and a ...

Having realized the bottlenecks in electronic systems-on-film manufacturing, Omega Optics and the University of Texas at Austin propose to develop a low-cost, high rate, roll-to-roll manufacturing process for hybrid electronic systems on flexible substrates. Roll-to-roll fabrication of hybrid systems enables the utilization of the combined advantages of organic, inorganic and other material system ...