Award Data

The application of high-temperature refractory materials such as rhenium, iridium and tungsten to liquid rocket engines holds substantial potential for improvement in the life of the components. Currently, Ir-Re rocket engines and thrusters are manufactured by chemical vapor deposition. Although this technique has been successful, it is plagued by prohibitively high costs and low rate of product ...

The objective of this Phase I is to develop a high quality, high speed, cost effective technique for polishing silicon carbide mirrors that are machined using single point diamond turning methods. The finished optic should have a more perfectly polished surface with uniform shape and thickness than is presently being produced. We will achieve this by using two different approaches, a novel non-con ...

As electronic packaging densities increase, more heat is being generated per unit area. The reliability of electronic components is, therefore, increasingly dependent on the ability to transfer heat. Current chip performance is limited in keeping up with the increased power densities, 30% of which is attributed to packaging materials. The disadvantages of current methods of fabrication of thermal ...

Aluminum nitride is as an ideal thermal management material since it has a very high thermal conductivity and its electrical resistivity is comparable to that of ceramic insulators. Aluminum nitride has thermal conductivity five times greater than alumina and has mechanical strength twice that of alumina and beryllium oxide. The current methods of synthesizing and consolidating aluminum nitride re ...

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Rocket motors that develop greater thrust with lower weight and volume require-ments are an ever present goal of the BMDO. One method of providing this is through formulation of higher energy propellant mixtures. TPL proposes to develop a new method of effectively producing new high perfor-mance propellant constituents for launch, orbit-orbit transfer and station keeping propulsion systems. The p ...

BMDO seeks development of novel methods to cut tabrication cost of metallic spacecraft and interceptor structures. UTRON proposes to develop an innovative rapid powder consolidation technique called Combustion Driven Dynamic Consolidation (CDDC) to consolidate metal (and other) powders. This technique is versatile and can be applied to various material systems such as metal and alloy powders, inte ...

IT IS PROPOSED THAT ADVANCED ARCJET ENGINES CAN BE DEVELOPED USING KNOWN PRINCIPLES FOR ADVANCED NOZZLE DESIGN, ARC ATTACHMENT, INCREASED CHAMBER EFFECTIVE TEMPERATURE AND SO FORTH. SUCH STUDIES ARE PARTIALLY SUPPORTED BY EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS BY RESEARCHERS IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION. YET THESE PRINCIPLES RESULT IN INCREASED HEATING OF THE ANODE, AS THE ARC MORE EFFECTIVELY HEATS THE ANODE. THIS CA ...

Reconfigurable computing architectures based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) offer extaordinary real time processing rates in inexpensive programmable hardware. The key to using FPGAs for reconfigurable computing is to reformulate algorithms in terms of parallel operations that are easily implemented with chains of simple processing elements. Currently available commercial integrated cir ...