Award Data

The leakage of electromagnetic (EM) energy into air vehicles, and particularly into ordnance, poses a hazard that requires careful evaluation. Under current guidelines, such evaluations are primarily to be carried out through extensive testing of items under possible field conditions, a process that can be both time-consuming and costly. The scope of this STTR Phase I activity is to implement a h ...

The gap between research in numerical methods and popular commercial solvers in CFD and related areas has been gradually widening in the recent past, particularly in the realm of high order accurate algorithms. At HyPerComp we are advancing a suite of high order codes based on the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) technique that can be used in electromagnetics, fluid mechanics, MHD and radiative heat tr ...

Radiative heat transfer is a dominant mode of heat transfer in combustion and propulsion systems as well as for hypersonic flow encountered during planetary entry. Solution of the Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE), which is an integro-differential equation, places stringent requirements on the computational resources as: (a) the radiation depends both on spatial and angular dimensions, (b) radiati ...

Our objective is to develop advanced mediator architectures for efficient electron transfer in enzymatic fuel cells (EFCs) for low power systems. The proposed EFC will leverage ongoing research at both CFDRC and Michigan State University to provide a fully-integrated lightweight, low-cost, manufacturable, and renewable power supply, for various military and civilian applications. EFC systems offer ...

The goal of the proposed research is to develop advanced computational tool for high-fidelity simulations of hypersonic non-equilibrium plasmas. Octree adaptive Cartesian mesh will be used for automatic mesh generation and dynamic mesh adaptation to plasma properties, particularly important for hypersonic flows with strong shock waves, transient laminar and turbulent domains with large gradients o ...

Higher efficiency solar cells are needed to reduce solar array mass, volume, and cost for Air Force space missions. Intermediate-band quantum-dot (QD) solar cells can yield dramatically higher efficiencies than current multi-junction (MJ) technologies. However, several issues must be addressed to demonstrate manufacturable, high efficiency devices. CFDRC aims to develop: 1) High-efficiency, ligh ...

The objective of this Phase I project is to evaluate the use of novel Laser Induced Surface Improvement (LISI) techniques to provide surface modification to substrate materials which will provide superior wear resistance in extreme conditions. The specific application of interest is the hypersonic metal-to-metal contact that occurs at high speed test track facilities that can and has lead to catas ...

The design of future hypersonic vehicles requires detailed understanding of flow regimes ranging from rarefied to continuum. Hypervelocity flows are characterized by high temperatures, real gas effects, nonequilibrium chemistry, and ionization. The goal of this project is to develop unified kinetic/continuum solution methods with automatic domain decomposition for a wide range of Air Force applic ...

AEDC personnel have developed and demonstrated the effectiveness of coupling a control volume model with a wind tunnel control system. The performance of the model was hampered because parameters of the model were assumed to be constant, when they are likely variables. A method for using facility data to determine functional relationships defining these parameters would allow them to vary during ...

Quantum cryptography, and in particular Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is a secure method to distribute a secret key between two distant authorized partners whose security is based on the laws of physics. Current public key cryptosystems have not been proven to be secure and are based on the computational complexity of evaluating one-way functions. These functions are easily evaluated, but extrem ...