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 ...

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 ...

Micro gas turbine engines with state-of-the-art ultra-compact recuperators could be a real game-changer for small unmanned air vehicles and portable power generation. A key enabling technology for these engines is a low-cost, high speed bearing system that has long life, while operating without either a separate lubrication system, or oil in the fuel. For this Phase I STTR effort, Xdot Engineerin ...

Stealth is a primary consideration in design and operation of ships and submarines in the Navy fleet. Noise in hydraulic systems and piping is one source of unwanted noise. A method to measure and monitor this noise is essential to controlling and eliminating these noise sources. With the assistance of UMASS Dartmouth we will present a method to externally measure the fluidborne sound pressure lev ...

Prognostics and health management (PHM) systems are critical for detecting impending faults and enabling a proactive decision process for maintenance or replacement of avionics systems before actual failures occur. A PHM system is essential to enhancing aircraft systems reliability and maintaining a high level of mission readiness and affordability. Current PHM advancements are focused on aircraft ...

Electromagnetic launchers or rail guns are a key component of the Navy’s all-electric ship of the future, but they lack the durability required for repeated firings. TDA Research and the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) are developing a tough, durable and conductive refractory metal coating that will protect the copper alloy conductors (rails) from the extreme heat and wear conditions inside the ...

The Barron Associates/Virginia Tech team believes that intelligent use of ambient riverine environmental factors together with novel drifter design and low-energy articulation is the key to enabling large non-overlapping river coverage. The proposed phase I research program focuses on (1) identifying key river characteristics which may be leveraged by riverine drifters, (2) fabricating a novel riv ...

Although advancements in CFD technology and high performance computing have proven to be effective and reasonably accurate in assessing the hydrodynamic performance of naval vessels, the effort required to develop associated analysis models remains a challenging and time consuming task. Decomposing and manipulating the design geometry for mesh construction, while capturing near-field and far-field ...

Under this STTR, Imaging Systems Technology (IST) in cooperation with Georgia Institute Technology (GIT) will develop and mature models to predict mechanical properties of refractory alloys with an eye toward tailoring these alloys for specific applications. In particular, this research will focus on addressing core aspects of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) as it applies to ...

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 ...