Award Data

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

We propose to enhance the capability of ASTRAL/ASPM by adding to it a treatment of several physical phenomena. Several methods enabling these new features have been developed and tested in recent years and are mature enough for transition. Efforts will be made to ensure the enhancement will not come with significant loss of efficiency. The Phase I effort consists of incorporating into ASTRAL/ASPM ...

During the proposed Navy STTR program, NanoSonic and Virginia Tech will design and synthesize innovative, high strength ceramic nanocomposite microcapsules filled with > 80 volume percent water that are empirically optimized to function as readily dispersed powdered additives with long-term water retention, durability during air craft bladder production, and rupture during ballistic shock. NanoSon ...

Waste heat from Naval diesel generators provides significant opportunity to introduce organic Rankine cycles (ORC) to increase their fuel efficiency. The objective of the proposed effort is to design and demonstrate a high-speed, spinning scroll expander (HiSSSE) ORC as a power dense waste heat recovery system for diesel generators on ships. The system will leverage Air Squared’s spinning scroll ...

We propose to design a high average power Er:Fiber ultrafast laser system which is pumped at 14xxnm, and at the same time solve other problems related to ultrashort pulses in fiber lasers. The advantage of using 14xxnm pumping is the reduction of the standard quantum defect from 37% to 5%, thus greatly reducing the thermal load on the system, which makes it inherently more efficient. We also inten ...

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 ...

The Navy is developing an electromagnetic (EM) launcher for long-range naval surface-fire-support. Severe operating conditions of the EM system place stringent requirements for materials, including high current and magnetic fields, high temperatures, contact with liquid metals, high stress/gouging from balloting contacts and high-speed-sliding electrical-contact with an Al armature. Engineered Coa ...