Award Data

The Navy seeks devices that can provide power to maintain charge in batteries for shipboard sensors. The transduction materials proposed for most energy harvesting devices under development are either too brittle to endure significant loading or are too compliant to extract significant energy from the small amplitude vibrations present on ships. Terfenol-D (in a composite form) and Galfenol each p ...

Resource virtualization concepts are in heavy commercial use for optimizing the performance of distributed applications. Resource virtualization allows resources to be allocated and adapted on-the-fly, and enables a wide range of distributed computing, networking, and sensing applications. However, resource virtualization has traditionally been developed for fixed, stable networks, and cannot adeq ...

Icing is among aviation’s most serious weather hazards because it renders aircraft unflyable before flight and severely reduces aircraft performance during flight. Existing approaches for mitigating ice accretion on leading edges, such as the inflatable boot and liquid deicer can significantly increase weight, power requirements and manufacturing complexity without providing sufficient reliabili ...

Current issues with forward deployed flight simulator sickness prevent flight simulators from being used to their fullest potential. Infoscitex and the Mayo Clinic have been jointly developing a system for incorporating a vestibular display into flight simulators. In the Phase I program, we successfully demonstrated that using the vestibular display with a fixed-base simulator reduces both the inc ...

This NAVY Small Business Technology Transfer project is directed toward the development of a novel hydrogen generator that employs nanostructured metal foam catalysts. Special coating and form factor will also be employed to the hydrogen generating materials to ensure the safety of storage and transportation, while maintaining very high packing density compared with conventional powder packing.

The objective of this project is to develop a methodology for predicting reaction violence of full-scale munitions in either a fast or slow cook-off scenario. This methodology will use a combination of existing heat transfer models and thermal stimulus simulation tools coupled with an empirical model to be developed from data collected from various lab and subscale experimental hardware. Hardware ...

A boat’s coxswain is adept at analyzing the wave environment, adjusting the craft’s propulsion system and control surfaces to mitigate its motions and reduce the chance of capsizing. There is a significant predictive component in the coxswain’s control decisions. Unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) lack the benefit of a highly trained coxswain reading and predicting oncoming waves - existing au ...

This proposal is being submitted in response to the solicitation topic N10A-T002 (Development of a Computational Method for Prediction of After Burning Effect) by BUSA Engineering Consulting (Dr. Jianghui Chao) in collaboration with University of Florida (PI: Prof. S. Balachandar). The overall objective of the proposed effort is to contribute to national defense and security by advancing the state ...

Northwest UAV Propulsion Systems proposes using our purpose built heavy fuel engine designed and built in the USA for small unmanned aerial systems in the tier 2 & 3 class. We will be adding a lightweight ceramic material set combined with FEA (Finite Element Analysis) and heavy fuel atomizer (IRAD Project) to create a lightweight engine for a SUAS or STUAS class UAVs. The Ceramic material set is ...

Areas of research relating to self-healing composites structures have been undertaken by well-known and respected institutions under the auspices of the Department of Defense. Patent literature and public technical communiqué describe their novel engineering approaches using microencapsulated systems that release polymeric healing agents through suitable mechanisms. While these approaches have me ...