The Army-led science and technology Joint Multi-Role (JMR) Demonstrator effort to design a next-generation vertical-lift aircraft by 2030 is heavily focused on leveraging advanced electronic and avionics capabilities. Sensors, electronics, avionics and cutting-edge mission and...

Dr. Jen-Ping Chen, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at The Ohio State University, is working to improve the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that engineers use to simulate and evaluate the operation of turbomachinery. Chen was the chief architect...

Improved safety, operational effectiveness and efficiency are a few reasons Air Force Air Mobility Command (AMC) officials are looking into using tablet devices such as electronic flight bags (EFBs) for aircrew members’ reference materials in the cockpit during in-flight...

A University of Oklahoma interdisciplinary research team will field test a newly developed ‘quad porosity model’ for shale gas reservoirs in the next few months. The three-year, $1.5 million project was funded by the Research for Partnership to Secure Energy for America and a consortium of nine oil...

Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, slows down an object sliding across its surface. New software from the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) simulates the tip of an atomic force microscope moving across a stack of graphene sheets. Research using this software indicates that...

To advance the acceptance and incorporation of sustainable remediation metrics into the larger body of remedial work, the Center for Sustainable Groundwater and Soil Solutions (CSGSS) within the Savannah River National Laboratory (SNRL) created the Sustainable Remediation Initiative (SRI).

According to a seismologist investigating regional earthquakes, a northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes. Some environmentalists are already critical of the drilling method known as hydraulic...

New technology from North Carolina State University and West Virginia University can reduce air pollutant emissions from some chicken and swine barns while also reducing their energy use by recovering and possibly generating heat. A proof-of-concept unit incorporates a biofilter and a heat exchanger to reduce...

Leaping lizards and agile dinosaurs may have used their tails as stabilizers, a technique that UC Berkeley biologists and researchers are studying in hopes of developing robots with increased capabilities.The interdisciplinary team focused on testing the value of a tail. In the lab, lizards were...

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have usedthe capabilities of the Rensselaer Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) supercomputer touncover the properties of a promising form of graphene, known as graphenenanowiggles. The graphitic nanoribbons can be segmented into several...

An online toolkit developed at MIT and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been designed to make it easier for researchers to find materials with specific properties. The Web site, the Materials Project, allows users to explore an ever-growing database of more than 18,000 chemical...

Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory are looking into a novel approach that could some day aid scientific space and planetary research without the need for power-intense options often used today. Integrating the NRL-developed technologies in microrobotics, microbial fuel cells, and low...

An acoustic energy-based probe has been developed that incorporates multiple acoustic sensing elements in order to obtain the acoustic pressure and threedimensional acoustic particle velocity. With these quantities, the user can obtain various energy-based quantities,...

Lightweight, electromagnetic interference (EMI) immune, fiber-optic, sensorbased structural health monitoring (SHM) will play an increasing role in aerospace structures ranging from aircraft wings to jet engine vanes. Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensors for SHM...

A process was designed to fuse data from multiple sensors in order to make a more accurate estimation of the environment and overall health in an intelligent rocket test facility (IRTF), to provide reliable, high-confidence measurements for a variety of propulsion test articles.

Traditionally, nodes in a sensor network simply collect data and then pass it on to a centralized node that archives, distributes, and possibly analyzes the data. However, analysis at the individual nodes could enable faster detection of anomalies or other...

Any manned missions to extraterrestrial locations will require shelter structures for a variety of purposes ranging from habitat to biomass production. Such shelters need to be constructed in such a way as to minimize stowed volume and payload weight. The structures must also be very durable and have...

Five improvements are reported in cold-plate fabrication. This cold plate is part of a thermal control system designed to serve on space missions.

detect minute amounts of emitted electromagnetic energy. Calibration of these receivers is vital to the accuracy of the measurements. Traditional calibration techniques depend on calibration reference internal to the receivers as reference for the calibration of the observed...

A novel cognitive computing architecture is conceptualized for processing multiple channels of multi-modal sensory data streams simultaneously, and fusing the information in real time to generate intelligent reaction sequences. This unique architecture is capable of...