Award Data

JM Harwood, LLC, and UAH Propulsion Research Center propose the development of an electronic miniature Direct Fuel Injection (DFI) system for 5-20 hp heavy fuel engines. This highly integrated Very Small Injection Technology (V-SInTech) DFI system will be capable of (a) multiple injections per cycle, (b) variable injection timing, (c) variable spray penetration depth, (d) real-time closed loop mod ...

Free electron lasers (FEL) made from Nb cavities offer high performance, but they are complex, bulky, and expensive. For Navy FEL applications, where footprint, power consumption, and cost are severely constrained and reliability is of great importance there is a critical need for an alternative to Nb. MgB2 is a recently discovered superconductor with a high critical temperature and critical field ...

The proposed STTR will demonstrate how magnetic meta materials based antennas are ideal for integration into composite structures where the graphite composite backplanes can be integrated with dielectric ballistic protection materials that surround, yet do not interfere with the antenna. In ongoing research we have shown such antennas can approach the theoretical Gain-Bandwidth Product (GBWP) limi ...

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 ...

For Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) to operate seamlessly in both the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) and abroad, it will be crucial that they possess a sense-and-avoid (SAA) capability that can ensure safe operations among maneuvering, non-cooperative aircraft. Numerica Corporation, in partnership with Johns Hopkins University, proposes to develop a set of algorithms to model the uncertaintie ...

We are proposing to develop a process for large area fabrication of metamaterial films with electromagnetic responses that can be manipulated in the infrared region to enable tailored reflectivity and emissivity. Because the approach is based on metamaterials, this technique can readily be scaled to higher or lower frequencies.

Ceramic Matrix Composite (CMC)'s are highly susceptible to interlaminar shear failure at elevated temperatures. Therefore, interlaminar properties, critical design limitation of CMC should be assessed accurately with appropriate test methods to ensure overall structural reliability/integrity of components in Naval gas turbine engines. AlphaSTAR proposes to develop rigorous, precise, and innov ...

The focus of our Intelligence and Intuition for Enhanced Decision Making (I2EDM) Phase 1 research is to provide efficient and timely automated production and dissemination of information products in support of doctrinal Decision Points for the Company and below in austere environments. Operating in the Cloud, I2EDM will continuously fuse tactical information with human intuition and experience to ...

M4 Engineering and UCLA propose to develop software for rapidly and accurately assessing the impact of blend repairs on bladed disk structures. Reduced order modeling techniques will be employed to efficiently simulate modal responses and parametric models of blend repairs will be generated. This approach will be coupled with an optimization scheme for determining optimal blend geometry with minim ...

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 ...