Award Data

Rocket motors that develop greater thrust with lower weight and volume require-ments are an ever present goal of the BMDO. One method of providing this is through formulation of higher energy propellant mixtures. TPL proposes to develop a new method of effectively producing new high perfor-mance propellant constituents for launch, orbit-orbit transfer and station keeping propulsion systems. The p ...

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Demand for micrometer size metal powders is increasing rapidly as new technologies emerge which can make use of their unique characteristics. One rapidly growing application requiring such powders is metal injection molding, a powder metallurgy process for forming near-net-shape components with higher dimensional accuracy than earlier processes. A significant need also exists for micrometer size s ...

BMDO seeks development of novel methods to cut tabrication cost of metallic spacecraft and interceptor structures. UTRON proposes to develop an innovative rapid powder consolidation technique called Combustion Driven Dynamic Consolidation (CDDC) to consolidate metal (and other) powders. This technique is versatile and can be applied to various material systems such as metal and alloy powders, inte ...

BMDO seeks development of novel low-to-no outgassing joining/bonding techniques for advanced composites. Explosive welding, employing actual chemical explosives, is a versatile process that can be used, in principle, with any two materials. In some situations involving difficult materials, explosive bonding is the only practical joining method. Typically, a layer of explosive is carefully coated o ...

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The objective of this research is to demonstrate the feasibility of spray forming aluminum Metal Matrix Composites (MMC) in the solid-state physical form as a light weight structural material. It is anticipated that this innovative manufacturing process will provide opportunities to fabricate near-net-shape spacecraft and interceptor structures with unique material properties. The process called S ...

Reconfigurable computing architectures based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer extaordinary real time processing rates in inexpensive programmable hardware. The key to using FPGAs for reconfigurable computing is to reformulate algorithms in terms of parallel operations that are easily implemented with chains of simple processing elements. Currently available commercial integrated cir ...