Award Data

Higher operating temperature for the gas turbine engine is needed for enhanced efficiency, lower emission and increased performance goal. The current state-of-the-art thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) are not adequate to provide the needed protection for the metallic components of the turbine engine operating at higher TBC surface temperature (>1300

The rapid ascent and adoption of social media as the dominant form of communication has led to significant analysis challenges. In particular, there is a gap in theoretically informed methods to analyze data mined and collected from social media. One primary cause of this gap is the lack of fusing structural sources of information (e.g. social network topology) with non-structural sources (message ...

While there are established methods available in determining the fatigue life of critical rotating components, there is still room for improvement for better understanding and prediction of life limiting factors. Improved risk assessment of jet engine disk components would require probabilistic modeling capability of the evolution of microstructural features, residual stresses and material anomali ...

The neurocognitive health of U.S. service members plays a vital role in the defense of the United States. It is critical to a service member"s effectiveness, to force readiness, and it is a key component of a service member"s successful reintegration into family life and society following deployment. Increased rates of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and psychological health problems experien ...

Covariance realism and consistency are critical to precision tracking and long-term orbit prediction of resident space objects (RSOs). This proposal tackles the key challenges that would yield realistic state estimation error covariance measures for tracking RSOs with relevant covariance consistency metrics. The anticipated result is a proposed estimation architecture that provides state estimatio ...

This will facilitate the development of remedial approaches for existing facilities and assist in planning new facilities, logistics, and procedures to protect the environment without impairing critical mission functionality. The commercial application will include software distribution and updates.

Firefly, in collaboration with Rochester Institute of Technology, proposes an STTR program for the development of a space solar cell having record efficiency exceeding 40% (AM0) by the introduction of nanowires within the active region of the current limiting sub-cell. The introduction of these nanoscale features will enable realization of an intermediate band solar cell (IBSC), while simultaneous ...

The ability to quickly and reliably simulate high-speed flows over a wide range of geometrically complex configurations is critical to many of NASA's missions. Advances in CFD methods and parallel computing have provided NASA the core flow solvers to perform these simulations. However, the ease of use of these flow solvers and the reliability of the results obtained are a strong function of the te ...

OptTek Systems, Inc (OptTek), proposes an affordable, effective UQ capability for both legacy and new BMDS M & S. The OptTek Team includes research institution partner Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and subcontractor RTSync Corporation (RTSync). The proposed BMDS M & S UQ capability maximizes insertability into existing and future MDA BMDS M & S-supported Event processes, analysis methods, a ...

Computational tools that accurately predict the performance of electric propulsion devices are highly desirable by NASA and the broader electric propulsion community. Large investments in running the long duration test programs (> 20 kHrs) at NASA GRC can be reduced with computer models and allow more focus on exploring the NEXT ion thruster design for future space missions. The current state of e ...