Award Data

The automotive and aerospace industries use topology optimization to minimize structural weight while satisfying functional constraints. However, the industry-standard fictitious material or density approach has been less effective when applied to physics beyond simple structural mechanics. Known issues include: failed numerical convergence or so-called gray material in computed optimal designs, n ...

Improved temperature measurements of thermal barrier coating (TBC) components are needed for gas turbine research and development.Imaging pyrometry systems are preferred because they are non-contact and can measure the complex spatial temperature distribution on components.Measurement in the long-wave infrared (LWIR) band is required for accurate temperature measurements of modern TBCs.Fiber coupl ...

Computational design is encountering barriers due to chaotic dynamics. The characteristic unpredictability, aperiodicity, and sensitivity to initial conditions in chaotic dynamics requires computationally costly time-dependent analysis. Computationally costly analysis precludes sampling-based optimization, indicating that chaotic systems would significantly benefit from gradient-based optimization ...

Achieving cyber security has been problematic given the general lack of foundational quantitative metrics to gauge the advantages of one security solution over another. This work significantly advances the development of quantitative metrics and the sec...

Thermoelastic structures poses a critical challenge to designers due to the inherent proportionality of the thermal loading on the structural thickness. This is further exacerbated by structural nonlinearity where any out-of-plane deformation further increases the effective loading on the structure. As a result of this, conventional design optimization procedures, which are typically based on line ...

The proliferation of commercial, visible and infrared wavelength laser systems is increasingly becoming an existential threat to our warfighters, which drives the need for further EO/IR sensor and eye protection development. Current fielded sensor protection is limited to fixed wavelength filters. Broadband filters designed to circumvent multi-wavelength laser threats are plagued by low transmitta ...

Several birds and insects use sky features such as sun, moon or star positions, sky polarization and even forest canopy structures to navigate and maintain heading in day or night conditions. To better understand this ability in insects, a sky projector is needed to allow researchers to project realistic sky images to the insect so that insect response can be studied. Polaris proposes to partner ...

ABSTRACT: Researchers are identifying new biomarkers to help monitor, diagnose, and treat growing threats to the human body and enhance human performance. Recent sensor work combining biorecognition elements with field effect transistors (bio-FETs) has been shown sensitive and selective to biomarkers in the picomolar range with continuous detection; however device-to-device performance variability ...

The Interdisciplinary Consulting Corporation (IC2), in partnership with the University of Florida (UF) and Innoveering, LLC, proposes to develop an innovative precision micro-scale surface-mountable sensor for measuring local wall shear stress in [a] high speed flow field (approximately 0.8 < M < 5) to enable characterization of critical boundary layer flows in ground and flight tests in response ...

The objective of the proposed Phase-I effort by Spectral Energies LLC is to design and develop a fiber-coupled hyperspectral LWIR thermal imaging sensor suite for temperature measurements in practical combustors. The proposed sensor suite will be capable of performing spectrally resolved imaging to achieve accurate temperature measurements in practical gas-turbine engines while resolving optical i ...