Award Data

Advances in electronically controlled injection technologies for diesel engines have provided a method to improve medium- to heavy-duty engine performance through increased injection pressures, multiple injections, and injection rate shaping. Although these injection systems have been primarily limited to larger engines, the ability to rapidly and precisely meter fuel for smaller engines is partic ...

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 ...

Current issues with forward deployed flight simulator sickness prevent flight simulators from being used to their fullest potential. Infoscitex and the Mayo Clinic have been jointly developing a system for incorporating a vestibular display into flight simulators. In the Phase I program, we successfully demonstrated that using the vestibular display with a fixed-base simulator reduces both the inc ...

The objective of this proposed Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) effort is to develop an experimentally-validated, highly detailed chemical kinetic reference model of surface chemistry for C-SiC-SiO2 rubber composite materials exposed to high temperature, high pressure, oxidizing environments. This reference model will then be reduced into simplified reduced-order models that could be easi ...

Aerodyne Research, Inc. (ARI) and MIT are collaborating to extend their successful Phase I effort to fully develop and validate a comprehensive JP-10 combustion mechanism, using a novel automatic reaction mechanism generation tool (RMG) developed at MIT. JP-10 is a very attractive, but complex fuel whose combustion chemistry is poorly understood. In Phase I, the ARI/MIT team successfully developed ...

The primary objective of the proposed effort is to develop a validated computational tool to predict the afterburning of non-ideal munitions containing metal and hydrocarbon fuels. The activities outlined devise a well-coordinated collaboration among researchers from Reaction Engineering International (REI) and the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB). The activities proposed will build on ...

Investigations into JP-10 combustion chemistry thus far can be characterized as preliminary. The detailed chemical kinetic mechanisms that have been published are limited in their ability to reproduce experimental data. The combustion chemistry of JP-10 is highly complex, involving hundreds if not thousands of species and thousands of chemical reactions. A detailed kinetic model capable of predict ...

A team consisting of Spectral Sciences Inc., Boston University, Boston University Medical School, Radcliffe Consulting and Brighton Consulting will collaborate to develop and validate a novel optical device for the monitoring and evaluation of blood coagulation. In this proposal we describe a novel optical blood coagulation monitoring instrument. The instrument has no moving parts, uses very small ...

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 ...