Award Data

KCF Technologies will develop compact Broadband Vibration Power Harvesting devices to enable Navy distributed wireless sensor systems. Building on KCF's ongoing work in low-cost vibration power harvesting for industrial wireless sensors, a primary technical advance is to develop a harvester with "broadband" performance over unknown or changing vibration sources. The power harvester will be devel ...

Traditional finite element methods require conversion of a CAD model into an alternate geometric representation called the finite element mesh. Tools like Cubit, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, have greatly reduced the time to mesh. However, it is still expensive to produce a complete analysis and difficult to have that analysis affect the design cycle in a timely manner. Our studies ...

The present text proposes the development of a computational infrastructure to enable rapid creation of high-quality conforming finite-element computational models---compatible with all existing finite-element simulation tools. The specific proofs-of-concept to be pursued in the Phase I will revolve around generation of tetrahedral meshes, but extensions to other types of finite-element types (e.g ...

Light absorption by aerosols is a key component to atmospheric extinction, and affects a number of processes relevant to the Navy. Satellite and other remotely sensed measurements can be strongly impacted by aerosols, obscuring targets and/or confounding interpretation of data products. Directed energy applications, including weapon and communication systems, are also impacted by absorption, which ...

This Phase I STTR project will further develop our technique for uniformly dispersing single walled carbon nanotubes into polymeric resins. This project will specifically aim to provide them with a mechanism for anchoring themselves to an epoxy matrix during curing in such a way that they are able to accept and absorb an applied load. The successful development of this technology will result in n ...

This proposal is a joint effort between Qualtech Systems, Incorporated (QSI), the Institute for Software Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University (VU), and Hamilton Sundstrand (HS) in Rockford, IL. QSI and VU have the combined knowledge and experience in successful development of a novel solution to aircraft system and subsystem prognostics and maintenance tools and have developed state-of-the- ...

Prognostics and health management is a critical technology for accurately predicting impending failures and providing a decision process for replacing components before actual failures occur. This is particularly critical in aircraft Electrical Power Systems. Significant gains in maintenance decision making, safety, system availability, productivity, and cost savings, could be realized by the Nav ...

New technologies for assessing how blending affects structural and aerodynamic mistuning will be developed using the combined strengths of Blade Diagnostics Corporation and Duke University. BDC has developed an approach for identifying aerodynamic mistuning from engine data that will be further developed under this STTR. Duke will develop new methods for computing the effect of blending on the a ...

Advanced sensors and effectors are driving shipboard power distribution systems toward higher voltages, resulting in greater thermal demands on the power conversion modules.  Wide Bandgap (WBG) semiconductors, such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), can be utilized to reduce thermal inefficiencies with high-frequency switching topologies, but heat generation is still a primary li ...

The high manufacturing success rate achieved in the fabrication of glass fabric laminates and sandwich constructions using the Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer molding (VARTM) process has not been duplicated for carbon fabric parts due to the slower, more complex flow processes that occur in carbon fabrics. Part reject rates have been high due to the presence of significant void concentrations and/ ...