Award Data

A diagnostic is being developed for aircraft engine exhausts that measures three velocity components in a slice through the plume. The method measures the Doppler shift of laser light scattered from particles naturally present in the flow, such as soot or dust. Two key areas of uncertainty were investigated in the Phase I study: 1) scattered light intensity from soot particles of sizes and concent ...

The Toyon-MST team proposes to perform research and development of a system which fuses multi-spectral EO and 3D data collected with a low-cost LIDAR to enable improved perception for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). The scope of the proposed work includes development of algorithms and software, and development, implementation, integration, testing, and delivery of a prototype, to perform EO-LIDAR ...

In recent years, the need for highly reliable, durable and non-intrusive systems for monitoring the health condition of naval structures becomes more and more recognized. Of particular importance is the condition based maintenance of Navy rotating machinery (motors, generators, pumps, gear systems, etc.). Such Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems should be able to detect failures in their ea ...

technical abstract

Vescent Photonics proposes to develop a compact laser system and integrate it with a cold-atom micro primary standard developed under the DARPA IMPACT program. In phase I we will investigate performance enhancements resulting from immobilizing the cold-atom sample with an optical lattice formed from an optical field whose wavelength is chosen to minimize the differential light shifts between the s ...

New material systems are required as a result of advanced performance criteria for the next generation destroyer program and other Navy ships. As a part of these requirements there is high demand for high strength structural composites. The objective of the STTR Phase II project is to develop high strength and light weight structural composites utilizing functionalized single-walled carbon nanotub ...

The proposed effort leverages the capabilities of data-driven and physics of failure (PoF) based prognostic techniques for electronic systems by combining them within a hybrid approach. Data-driven and PoF-based techniques both have shortcomings; combining them into a hybrid framework allows using their capabilities in a complementary fashion, and thereby providing a reliable way of prognostics an ...

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 ...