Award Data

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 ...

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 ...

Free-play nonlinearity of the control surfaces has a direct impact on aircraft’s dynamic stability characteristics. . It is impossible to design and manufacture a control surface with zero free-play. As control surface free-play increases, tighter limits must be imposed on the aircraft mission capability. Typically, researchers have utilized an oversimplified piecewise-linear torque-rotation rel ...

The Phase I deliverable will be a physic-based model which represents a CMC gas turbine component concomitantly at the material level and the structural level. This model will be probabilistically analyzed to account for the uncertainties in material properties and the uncertainties in the size and impact velocities of possible foreign objects (FOD). A ceramic material must display sufficient capa ...

A unique type of air lubricated thrust bearing called a Wave Bearing is proposed to assist a rolling element bearing to carry the thrust load and to improve the bearing’s life when used in a micro gas turbine engine. The Wave Bearing technology will provide improved reliability, safety and life compared to rolling element bearings used alone, as well as to allow simplification of engine design a ...

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 ...

Electromagnetic launchers or rail guns are a key component of the Navy’s all-electric ship of the future, but they lack the durability required for repeated firings. TDA Research and the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) are developing a tough, durable and conductive refractory metal coating that will protect the copper alloy conductors (rails) from the extreme heat and wear conditions inside the ...

While there are established methods available in determining the fatigue life of critical rotating components, there is still room for improvement for better understanding and prediction of life limiting factors. Improved risk assessment of jet engine disk components would require probabilistic modeling capability of the evolution of microstructural features, residual stresses and material anomali ...