Award Data

Current software development and testing methodologies are inadequate for validating software in mission-critical applications. As Dijstra famously stated: "testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." When lives and national security is at stake, there is a need for mathematically rigorous techniques that can verify the absence of bugs. We propose to devel ...

MZA partnered with the University of Notre Dame proposes to conduct high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations providing volumetric time-resolved aero-optical disturbance modeling for rotary-wing aircraft flow dominated by wing-tip vortices. We will develop detailed wave-optics models of a baseline Navy helicopter beam director including engineering-level simulations of the beam ...

Advances in electronically controlled injection technologies for diesel engines have provided a method to improve medium- to heavy-duty engine performance through increased injection pressures, multiple injections, and injection rate shaping. Although these injection systems have been primarily limited to larger engines, the ability to rapidly and precisely meter fuel for smaller engines is partic ...

In miniature gas turbines for UAV applications, traditional bearings exhibit a typical lifetime of only 25 hours due to excessive axial loading. Mainstream proposes to use a passive, permanent magnet thrust bearing to alleviate this problem and increase service life to over 1000 hours. Since this type of bearing is non-contacting, it can operate at very high rotational speeds with minimal heat gen ...

Military shelters currently use electrically driven Environmental Control Units (ECUs) to provide cooling for the air inside the shelter. The ECU is vapor compression cycle powered by a diesel generator, operating on JP-8 fuel. Other than fueling jet engines, the largest drain on U.S. military fuel supplies in current operations comes from running generators at forward operating bases. In hot cli ...

Intelligent Fiber Optic Systems Corporation (IFOS) and Georgia Tech propose a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) integrated sensor system capable of measuring the pipe wall "breathing mode" in order to infer the fluid-borne sound pressure level (SPL) in a pipe. The proposed new measurement technique makes it possible to externally measure the fluid-borne sound level in a noisy piping system. The state-of-a ...

IFOS will demonstrate the feasibility of a minimalistic, yet powerful, distributed network of piezoelectric actuators and ultrasonic wave detecting fiber optic Bragg grating (FBG) sensors interrogated by a high frequency parallel processing FBG interrogator together with innovative mathematical and computational algorithms to process, store and visualize (via damage index maps) massive amounts of ...

We propose to continue the development of software designed to model the propagation of light pulses through atomic media by including the capability to model propagation in optical cavities with active laser media, among other improvements. The software will be used to design and analyze a gyroscope based on the Sagnac effect that achieves enhanced sensitivity by employing a highly dispersive ato ...

The goal of this program is to develop and fabricate an ultra-low Size, Weight, and Power (SWAP) integrated electro-optic beam-steering technology that utilizes ultra-fast electro-optic active plasmonic waveguide arrays to achieve very wide scanning angle with diffraction limited beam quality. We develop a very scalable electro-optic plasmonic waveguides array that provides the electro-optic pha ...

The NAVY solicits new non-destructive inspection (NDI) methods to address detection and evaluation of kissing bonds and bondline integrity in aerospace composites since no currently accepted standard exists. In response AS & T Inc. propose, the Conformal Array Laser Imager for Bondline Evaluation and Repair (CALIBER), designed expressly for this purpose. The novelty of the proposed approach lies i ...