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

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to address the unmet need for high-throughput, cost-effective research tools to model the metastasis of cancer cells. The proposed research objectives are to (1) discover cost-effective, commercially scalable methods allowing the production of aligned nanofibers in a 96-well plate format and (2) verify that the fiber alignment is ...

The ever-decreasing size of the electronic microchips and the ever-increasing density of electronic components required to support future Air Force platforms are creating the problem of substantial localized heat generation that can impair component operation. State of the art thermal interface materials (TIMs), that are used to dissipate heat from the source to the spreader in a microchip, are se ...

The proposed project will develop three actively configurable metamaterial of relevance to both i) MDA’s high-priority and near-term need for stray light testing and diagnosis and ii) the interceptor functions of THAAD, Ascent Phase Interceptors, MKV and Space Systems. Phoebus’s configurable metamaterials aperture arrays will consist of single-layer metallic thin films patterned with light-cha ...

Analysts are faced with the challenge of sifting through enormous quantities of documents, blog posts, communications, etc. to find deceptive behaviors. We propose novel techniques for efficiently and automatically detecting deception on large data with high accuracy by using methodologies from both stylometry and topic modeling. This combined approach will learn models of authors and will detect ...

The goal of BLUE is to identify the function or purpose of buildings using persistant surveillance video such as Constant Hawk or Angel Fire. In Phase 1, we developed preliminary algorithms demonstrating that functional recognition of buildings and other scene elements such as parking spots and doorways is possible, using both supervised and unsupervised techniques to define functional models of b ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The broad objective of this proposal is to improve the clinical effectiveness of liver lesion biopsy by fusing respiratory-compensated PET with CT images in the CT suite. On CT imaging alone, localization of liver lesions can potentially be challenging, particularly in selected cases where differentiation of the tumor from adjacent liver parenchyma may be diffi ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Validation of computing algorithms has been a challenging topic over the last few years. In fact, several international workshops in the medical imaging field started to involve the community through grand challenges . A grand challenge involves selecting driving biological/scientific problem and asking experts to submit their best results and methods to solve ...

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 ...