Award Data

Gas turbine engines with prolonged exposure to sand and dust are susceptible to component and performance degradation and ultimately engine failure. Our proposed sensor will use an innovative hybrid and complimentary discrimination approach to incorporate material identification along with capability of size, size distributions, and concentration while maintaining the same form factor of the curre ...

This proposal is a collaborative effort between MRV Systems and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The goal is to develop a new, small, inexpensive autonomous vehicle to investigate mixed layer dynamics and turbulent mixing. The preliminary Phase I design, a Diagonally Operating Platform (DOP), is a profiling float with moveable fins. DOP will turn toward an intended direction within a few ...

A significant barrier to the insertion of ceramic matrix composite (CMC) materials into advanced aircraft engines is their inherent degradation under erosion and post erosion. Our team will develop and demonstrate a physics-based model for erosion/post erosion of CMC’s at room and elevated temperatures (RT/ET). The ICME (Integrated Computational Material Engineering) Physics based Multi Scale Mo ...

Active imaging systems are used in degraded visual environments, like those found in marine fog and other areas with a high level of attenuation and scattering from obscurants like rain, smoke and dust. These systems are still limited in range and resolution. SA Photonics is taking advantage of new eyesafe, hybrid fiber-bulk laser technology capable of high pulse energy at high repetition rate to ...

We propose to develop tunable, high-power handling, low-loss phase-to-amplitude conversion photonic-integrated circuit (PIC) based device on heterogeneous SiN platform. The use of SiN for waveguide is the key to meet the stringent requirements, while additional heterogeneously integrated components are the key to enable tuning and locking of the phase-to-amplitude device. Nexus Photonics, realizi ...

Detecting and Avoiding (DAA) manned aircraft from small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) remains the unsolved problem for safe integration of sUAS into civil airspaces where Navy UAS must pay Due Regard to the laws of civil aviation. The difficulties are manifold. The solution requires both ultra-low SWaP sensors that track aircraft over long ranges, providing 360o field-of-regard (FOR), and often ...

As modern-day ships require more advanced applications and systems to run directly on the vessel, they require large amounts of computational resources to execute the complex software and algorithms.  While these next generation capabilities provide immense value, the downside is that now the compute servers and clusters required to support these capabilities become single points of failure. To c ...

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the feasibility of using an innovative, durable, low friction, and non-toxic solid lubricant coating for foil air bearings for air cycle machines (ACM). Acrees coating provides superior wear characteristics at all temperatures and provides a substantial improvement over polyimide type coatings that are currently used on ACMs. The coating consists of tw ...

Current design tools for gas turbine engines invoke a variety of simplifying assumptions to estimate heat transfer to solid/metal engine components (e.g., isothermal boundary conditions). These approximations are often not valid, result in inaccurate predictions of heat transfer, and ultimately compromise the thermal integrity of propulsion and power systems. Wall-modeled large eddy simulation (WM ...

The objectives of the proposed work are twofold. The first goal is to develop and validate GPU-based static and moving versions of Cascade's large eddy simulation (LES) software CharLES that would fully leverage existing (and future) GPU-accelerated systems accessible by NAVAIR and other DoD agencies. These software developments will be performed by Cascade. For the current project, the targeted c ...