Quality, Reliability, and Durability

Reliability

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Briefs: Aerospace
Highly capable small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide substantial business opportunity, especially if allowed to operate in the suburban market. Reliability issues force the use of a safety pilot for each vehicle in...
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Briefs: Energy
High-Power Solid-State Power Amplifier System
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) has developed a High-Power Solid-State Power Amplifier System that combines 1-KW modules (16 amps total) to generate up to 16KW of radio frequency (RF) power from 230 MHz. The NASA device is a first step toward increasing the power of solid-state power amp...
Briefs: Materials
Researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have developed an inexpensive electrochemical sensing system that significantly improves the ability to rapidly and accurately detect heavy...
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Briefs: Software
AMMOS-PDS Pipeline Service (APPS)
APPS provides a multi-mission instrument data and metadata (i.e. label) transformation service that interfaces local or remote Mission Data provider’s data processing pipeline/end-products and the PDS (Planetary Data System) data archive to ensure compliance to standards in a schedule/cost-efficient manner (i.e....
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
A new approach was developed that overcomes the limitation of conventional chip-testing methods on 3D chips, which include many thin horizontal “floors” connected to one another by vertical...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Interest in wearable electronics for continuous, long-term health and performance monitoring is rapidly increasing. The reduction in power levels consumed by sensors and electronic...
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Briefs: Medical
Automatic navigation systems have been developed previously to aid the visually impaired, but these devices have not been as reliable and easy to...
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Briefs: Test & Measurement
Overspeed Protection for Turbine Flowmeters in Cryogenic Applications
Flowmeters for cryogenic applications often fail in service. Turbine flowmeters in particular fail due to very high speeds encountered during chill-down operations. Very cold, very high-velocity gas causes the turbine to spin uncontrollably, which quickly degrades bearings. Those...
Briefs: Software
High-Speed Network Protocol for Faster, More Reliable Emergency Response
Anew network protocol — the Multi Node Label Routing (MNLR) protocol — was developed to improve the information flow between emergency responders at the scene of an incident and decision-makers at the office of emergency management.
Briefs: Unmanned Systems
Reliable, long-range acoustic communications (LRAC) is an enabling technology for numerous applications of manned and unmanned underwater systems. For example, with the capability of communicating at...
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Briefs: Software
Shift: Self-Healing Independent File Transfer
In high-end computing environments, remote file transfers of very large data sets to and from computational resources are commonplace, as users typically are widely distributed across different organizations and must transfer in data to be processed, and transfer out results for further analysis. Local...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
Before a new high-power semiconductor device can be used for industrial applications, it must be thoroughly tested to determine if it will survive environmental stresses and continue to meet...
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Briefs: Green Design & Manufacturing
Data Informatics Infrastructure for the Megacities Carbon Project
With the goal of assessing the anthropogenic carbon-emission impact of urban centers on local and global climates, the Megacities Carbon Project has been building carbon-monitoring capabilities for the past two years around the Los Angeles metropolitan area as a pilot effort....
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
NASA technologists have developed a novel, superconducting transition edge sensor (TES). Such TES devices are thermometers that are widely used for particle...
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Briefs: Materials
Carbon Nanotube-Assisted Microwave Healing of Thermally Re-Mendable Composites
A method creates thermally healable composites using carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotube microwave heating provides a pathway to overcome issues associated with electrical resistive heating networks. Carbon nanotubes embedded within a thermally reversible polymer can be...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Reliability Assessment of CCGA 1752 Advanced Interconnect Kyocera Packages for Extreme Thermal Environments
Ceramic Column Grid Array (CCGA) packages have been increasing in use based on advantages such as high interconnect density, very good thermal and electrical performance, compatibility with standard surface-mount packaging assembly processes,...
Briefs: Sensors/Data Acquisition
Extensible Data Gateway Environment (EDGE)
The NASA Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC) is NASA’s designated data center for information relevant to the physical state of the ocean. Its core datamanagement and workflow system, Data Management and Archive System (DMAS), is responsible for processing hundreds of...
Briefs: Information Technology
Ontological System for Context Artifacts and Resources (OSCAR)
Current data systems catalog and link data using a synthetic modeling approach that requires much domain knowledge in order to interact with the system. Domain knowledge includes what keyword to look for and how data artifacts are linked. OSCAR offers a semantic solution to data...
Briefs: Green Design & Manufacturing
Terrestrial Observation and Prediction System (TOPS)
TOPS is a modeling software system that integrates data from satellite, aircraft, and ground sensors, and weather/climate models with application models to expeditiously produce operational nowcasts and forecasts of ecological conditions. TOPS allows determination of the options for different...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
An Empirical Metric of Individual Datapoint Utility Given Ample Metadata as Applied to the OCO-2 Flight System
Traditionally, quality flags provided a binary yes/no estimation of a datapoint’s utility. However, in modern instrumentation, significant auxiliary information for each datapoint can be obtained. This permits prediction of more than a...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Low-Excess-Noise, High-Gain Avalanche Photodiodes
Avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are widely used to sense and amplify optical signals into electric signals based on their high quantum efficiency of photon detection and desirable internal gain. The high internal gain associated with APDs, however, may also lead to increased levels of excess noise that...
Briefs: Information Technology
Design and Construction of Protograph-Based LDPC Codes
Writing (recording) to a storage device and reading from it can be considered as a noisy channel. A storage device such as magnetic recoding and optical recording can be modeled as a partial response channel. Partial-response techniques are a special case of precoding technique where the...
Application Briefs: Motion Control
Hamburg Airport in Germany handles nine million pieces of baggage every year. For the baggage handling staff, the reliability of the conveyor system and the prevention of faults are...
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INSIDER: Electronics & Computers
Fujitsu has developed a new smartphone with iris recognition, and a Clarkson University professor says she expects the technology to be available in the United States in the near future....
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Briefs: Test & Measurement
Isotopic Biomarkers for Rapid Assessment of Bone Mineral Balance in Biomedical Applications
Development of new treatments for metabolic bone disease, and evaluation of the effectiveness of existing therapies in individual patients, are severely hampered by the lack of any reliable tool for quickly measuring changes in bone mineral balance in...
Briefs: Medical
Chromosomal inversions, such as those occurring following exposure to ionizing radiation, are especially difficult to detect by current techniques. Therefore, their true frequency and...
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Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Motion blur results when a moving edge travels across a display, such as a liquid crystal display (LCD), that has limited temporal response. It is important to be able to quantify this effect in visual terms....
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
A new technology delivers temperature hardening in a number of products at the CMOS process level while increasing overall product reliability and longevity. Providing...
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Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Method for Providing Semiconductors Having Self-Aligned Ion Implant
This is a modification to technology for realizing durable and stable electrical functionality of high-temperature transistors. This modification is believed crucial to experimental implementation of SiC junction field effect transistors that electrically operated continuously at...

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