Award Data

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 ...

The research objective is to develop Modeling and Simulation (M&S) tools to accurately predict the performance of new state-of-the-art material systems as protection for high value missiles deployed in their launchers or canisters. The focus is on adapting multi-layered novel and non-traditional material technologies to improve protection against penetration and fragment impacts, focused detonatio ...

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 ...

While there are established methods available in determining the fatigue life of critical rotating components, there is still room for improvement for better understanding and prediction of life limiting factors. Improved risk assessment of jet engine disk components would require probabilistic modeling capability of the evolution of microstructural features, residual stresses and material anomali ...

Aurora Flight Sciences and MIT have been developing tools and techniques that, together with existing 3D environment decision-making and navigation tools developed by AMRDEC in the PALACE program, are well-suited to the problem of autonomous vertical landing on unprepared landing sites. In this program, Aurora will team with MIT researchers and UC Santa Cruz (UCSC licenses PALACE technologies for ...

Impact Technologies and Montana State University propose to develop a Dynamic Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) modeling capability and related test, validation, and support toolsets that will enable standardized approaches to model representation, information exchange, and PHM system support, providing for improved integration, interoperability and reuse of developed and emerging capabilitie ...

This research investigates the feasibility of improving operational readiness, reliability and availability of high current cryogenic rf linear accelerators using a cryogenic compatible resonant coupling technique to couple all of the accelerator sections together, including any room temperature portion. This technique guarantees a single resonant frequency for the system insuring rapid turn on. T ...

In this project we propose to demonstrate the feasibility of an external pipe sensor for measuring sound pressure levels in submarine piping systems. The sensor consists of flexible PVDF wire wrapped a number of integral turns around the pipe exterior. The charge/voltage output of the sensor can be shown to be directly proportional and highly sensitive to the amplitude of the contained fluid pulsa ...

The objective of the work described in this proposal is to aid in the advancement of Mo-Si-B alloys for use in high temperature applications such as hot gas stream components in turbine engines. Such alloys are being characterized for their monotonic tensile properties in tension and compression as well for their creep resistance. Likewise, multiphase Mo-Si-B alloys have been studied in terms of m ...

Clear Science Corp. and the University of Texas at Austin will develop and demonstrate technology that accurately quantifies aero-optical distortion associated with high-energy laser (HEL) weapons on rotorcraft and will utilize the information in designing adaptive optics (AO) systems to maximize HEL system performance over the full range of flight conditions. Aero-optical distortion arises from v ...