Award Data

Effective mission planning is critical for military strategy and execution. This process is complex as human operators must consider many variables (e.g., resource limitations, threats, risks) when formulating a plan to accomplish mission goals. Although powerful tools, such as the Navy’s Joint Mission Planning System (JMPS), provide advanced functionality, mission planning remains a hybrid acti ...

Manufacturing of structural composites traditionally employs autoclaves to achieve high quality parts, including high fiber-volume-fractions and low porosity. A laminate comprised of stacked prepreg plies are cured under a vacuum in addition to ~7 bar of pressure to prevent formation of voids, particularly in interlaminar (inter-sheet/ply) regions. However, manufacturing composites within an autoc ...

The Phase I effort of this STTR aimed to reinforce ply-drop laminates. When laminates taper from a thicker to thinner cross section, the termination of plies locally create resin pockets that can reduce the life of a part due to the lower strength of the resin compared to the fibers, local stress concentrations, and the propensity for voids in these resin rich areas. Thus, Metis Design Corporation ...

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of using an innovative, durable, low friction, and non-toxic solid lubricant coating for foil air bearings for air cycle machines (ACM). Acrees coating provides superior wear characteristics at all temperatures and provides a substantial improvement over polyimide type coatings that are currently used on ACMs. The coating consists of tw ...

Current design tools for gas turbine engines invoke a variety of simplifying assumptions to estimate heat transfer to solid/metal engine components (e.g., isothermal boundary conditions). These approximations are often not valid, result in inaccurate predictions of heat transfer, and ultimately compromise the thermal integrity of propulsion and power systems. Wall-modeled large eddy simulation (WM ...

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a very promising technique for rapid, low-cost production of aircraft parts directly from a CAD file. AM is especially appealing for complex parts that would be costly or impossible to fabricate by machining or casting. At the current time there are no reliable, cost-effective techniques to qualify the finished parts. Several government studies have noted this gap an ...

SI2 Technologies, Inc. (SI2) proposes to accelerate development of printed, high-efficiency phased arrays operating at Navy-relevant frequencies. The proposed development effort will include optimization of the array printing techniques from Phase I to meet the Navys phased array performance goals. The printed arrays will incorporate both printed radiating elements and an innovative printed packag ...