Award Data

The Navy is developing an electromagnetic (EM) launcher for long-range naval surface-fire-support. Severe operating conditions of the EM system place stringent requirements for materials, including high current and magnetic fields, high temperatures, contact with liquid metals, high stress/gouging from balloting contacts and high-speed-sliding electrical-contact with an Al armature. Engineered Coa ...

Frontier Technology, Inc. (FTI) and Northeastern University propose to investigate and develop an innovative approach to predict stall events of aircraft engines prior to occurrence and in sufficient time to allow the FADEC controller to adjust engine variables. The team will utilize vector quantization and neural network techniques to develop accurate models of engine behavior that will be used t ...

We propose to design, develop, implement, simulate, and demonstrate an autonomous control and sensing system for the safe vertical landing of autonomous aerial cargo delivery system (ACDS). The landing site is expected to be unprepared mountain sides with slopes up to 15 degrees and rough terrain containing rocks and brush. We also plan to reduce the amount of ground equipment required to operate ...

Free electron lasers (FEL) made from Nb cavities offer high performance, but they are complex, bulky, and expensive. For Navy FEL applications, where footprint, power consumption, and cost are severely constrained and reliability is of great importance there is a critical need for an alternative to Nb. MgB2 is a recently discovered superconductor with a high critical temperature and critical field ...

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 ...

This is a proposal to develop a unique, robust, fieldable, gated, picosecond, digital holography system for characterizing dense particle fields under harsh conditions. Many powerful imaging methods have failed to fulfill this requirement because noise from multiple scattering buries the signal needed to acquire a useful image. Solutions to this limitation are very expensive, hard to implement, an ...

Applied Physical Sciences (APS) and the Pennsylvania State University Applied Research Laboratory (ARL/PSU) will collaborate in the development of a novel sensor system to measure the low frequency acoustic pressures within a fluid-filled pipe. The proposed concept improves upon the Navy’s current Array Based Acoustic Measurement (ABAM) system for laboratory characterization of full-scale piping ...

Although many off-the-shelf and semi-custom Battery Management Systems (BMS) are available, the Navy recognizes with this STTR Topic, and recent history illustrates, that a safety system with the required reliability and performance for mission critical applications has not been demonstrated. This proposal will detail the Spectral Labs Incorporated (SLI) and University of California, Davis (UCD) t ...

We propose to design a high average power Er:Fiber ultrafast laser system which is pumped at 14xxnm, and at the same time solve other problems related to ultrashort pulses in fiber lasers. The advantage of using 14xxnm pumping is the reduction of the standard quantum defect from 37% to 5%, thus greatly reducing the thermal load on the system, which makes it inherently more efficient. We also inten ...

TSC and Purdue University will demonstrate a lab prototype of software and hardware capable of doing high speed monitoring of a Lithium-Ion cell. This monitoring needs to be specifically designed to predict failures. When a predictive failure is indicated a defensive countermeasure needs to be implemented. Our specific project goals are to: 1) Select a Lithium-Ion battery that consists of multiple ...