Award Data

Combustion instability in liquid rocket engines (LREs) has manifested in nearly all LRE development programs. While the driving mechanisms of combustion instability are vast and coupled, in all instances, the net result is significant cost and schedule over-runs. In today’s business environment, such over-runs are rarely tolerated and generally result in program cancellations. Development of hig ...

The proposed effort can provide the framework for a unified modeling & simulation program to substantially improve the capability for understanding, analyzing, and predicting the underlying mechanisms dictating the combustion stability characteristics of liquid-propellant rocket engines. Emphasis will be placed on the effects of atomization, mixing, and distributed combustion of liquid oxygen (LO ...

For many military operational scenarios there is an extremely large geographical theater. Providing coverage requires 100s to 1000s of sensing devices. Command and control (C2) of such a large number of devices, to provide time sensitive targeting (TST), poses a difficult technical challenge. Our solution to this problem is to use a hierarchy of unattended ground sensors (UGS). Ultra low-cost trig ...

The Air Force desires development of a commercial production source for nonlinear optical (NLO) gallium arsenide semiconductor crystals with orientation patterning, i.e., OP-GaAs. The need for these materials is driven primarily by applications for NLO laser frequency converters in Infrared Counter Measures (IRCM). The proposed Phase I project will demonstrate feasibility for a fabrication metho ...

In this Phase I project Pharad and UCLA propose to create new physically small, electrically large HF antennas for vehicle-mount and man-portable applications. We will utilize a combination of antenna size reduction techniques: volumetric engineering; fractal structures; and slow-wave structures to realize novel small, efficient 2 - 30 MHz radiators that meet the size requirements of 500 cubic ce ...

Demand for portable power continues to expand, and new portable devices require increased variability in form factor. Furthermore, expired batteries may not be easily replaceable due to the lack of standard geometries. New manufacturing technologies are necessary to respond to each of the challenges. Additive manufacturing (AM) is a promising approach that is well known for its ability to quickly ...

CONCUR develops a computational framework for assessing and characterizing urban environments stability or fragility in response to volatility and stress, identifying specific weaknesses as well as key tipping points which could lead to rapid systemic failure. CONCUR explicitly models urban environments as emergent complex systems, focusing attention on the critical triggers that could lead to rap ...

At present, turbine NDE is typically a time consuming collection of inspections that includes manual testing of holes and channels for blockages, multiple flow tests and various inspection technologies such as ultrasound, eddy current and radiography. Thermography has also become a widely method used to perform various inspections. However, many of thermographic inspections require different equ ...

Methods for interconversion between cell types (cellular reprogramming) are currently discovered through resource intensive trial and error. Experiments may test a multitude of transcription factors to identify correct combinations that influence cell fate. In addition, reprogramming approaches commonly use stem cell intermediates such as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which are generated ...

To meet the U.S. Navy, specifically PMA-201, need for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of concrete, including evaluating its strength, material properties, and damage localization, Luminit, LLC, and Southern Illinois University (SIU) propose to develop a novel Concrete Materials Characterization (COMAC) system, combining several methods of concrete characterization into a single sensor/software com ...