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 ...

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 ...

The focus of our Intelligence and Intuition for Enhanced Decision Making (I2EDM) Phase 1 research is to provide efficient and timely automated production and dissemination of information products in support of doctrinal Decision Points for the Company and below in austere environments. Operating in the Cloud, I2EDM will continuously fuse tactical information with human intuition and experience to ...

Susceptibility to delamination is one of the major weaknesses of ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). Knowledge of the resistance of composite to interlaminar fracture is essential for life cycle prediction analyses of structural components. The current test method for Mode I-interlaminar fracture toughness, the double cantilevered beam (DCB), is not satisfactory for thin CMC specimens because the co ...

Autoclaves are typically used to fabricate high-quality composite components with acceptable thermal properties and low void volume. They provide elevated temperature processing cycles and external pressure required for adequate compaction to achieve these desired properties. However, autoclaves represent large capital and energy investment while limiting the size of fabricated parts and productio ...

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 ...

This project delivers a system to assess local uncertainties and track the evolution of the maritime environment around unmanned platforms at sea. The system uses Navy ocean forecasts for initial environmental guesses and outlooks and implements a Reduced Order Model (ROM) derived from Dynamically Orthogonal (DO) solutions to deliver a local uncertainty picture (for the next 24-48 hours). The ROM- ...

A unique type of air lubricated thrust bearing called a Wave Bearing is proposed to assist a rolling element bearing to carry the thrust load and to improve the bearing’s life when used in a micro gas turbine engine. The Wave Bearing technology will provide improved reliability, safety and life compared to rolling element bearings used alone, as well as to allow simplification of engine design a ...

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 ...

NanoSonic will work with Penn State to develop, demonstrate and manufacture materials and systems to allow unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to scavenge magnetic field energy from electric power lines and operate continuously in the field. NanoSonic will work with energy harvesting researcher Dr. Shashank Priya and a major US aerospace company to design, fabricate and demonstrate a prototype system ...