National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research & Technology Transfer 2003 Program Solicitations
TOPIC A6 Engineering for Complex Systems
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A6.01 Modeling and Simulation of Aerospace Vehicles in a Flight Test Environment
A6.02 Flight Sensors, Sensor Arrays and Airborne Instruments for Flight Research
A6.03 Knowledge Engineering for Safe Systems in Lifecycle Engineering
The Engineering for Complex Systems program is part of the Engineering Innovation objective of NASA's Aerospace Enterprise Pioneer Revolutionary Technology goal: To demonstrate advanced, full-life-cycle design and simulation tools, processes, and virtual environments in critical NASA engineering applications. The ECS program, in particular, focuses on the representation, reasoning, and mitigation of risk. Achieving this vision will require infusing new risk mitigation technologies and processes into our standard engineering practices throughout the program lifecycle. The Engineering for Complex Systems program is designed specifically to achieve the following goals: 1) Significantly advance the scientific and engineering understanding of system complexities and failures, including human and organization risk characteristics; and 2) Develop processes, tools, and organizational methods to quantify, track, visualize, and trade-off system designs and/or mission options with an emphasis on risk management throughout the lifecycle of the programs.
A6.01 Modeling and Simulation of Aerospace Vehicles in a Flight Test Environment
Lead Center: DFRC
Safer and more efficient design of advanced aerospace vehicles requires advancement in current predictive design tools. The goal of this subtopic is to develop more efficient software tools for predicting and under-standing the response of an airframe under the simultaneous influence of aerodynamics and the control system, in addition to pilot commands. The benefit of this effort will ultimately be increased flight safety (particularly during flight tests), more efficient aerospace vehicles, and an increased understanding of the complex interactions between the vehicle subsystems. This subtopic solicits proposals for novel, multi-disciplinary, linear or nonlinear, dynamic systems simulation techniques. Proposals should address one or more of the objectives listed below:
- Prediction of steady and unsteady pressure and thermal load distributions on the aerospace sur- faces, or similar distributions due to propulsive forces, by employing accurate finite element CFD techniques.
- Effective finite element numerical algorithms for multidisciplinary systems response analysis with adaptive three-dimensional grid/mesh generation at selected time steps.
- Effective use of high-performance computing machines, including parallel processors, for inte- grated systems analysis or pilot-in-the-loop simulators.
- Innovative applications of high-performance computer graphics or virtual reality systems for visu- alizing the computer model or results.
- Correlation of predictive analyses with test data or model update schemes based on measured in- formation.
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A6.02 Flight Sensors, Sensor Arrays and Airborne Instruments for Flight Research
Lead Center: DFRC
Real-time measurement techniques are needed to acquire aerodynamic, structural and propulsion system performance characteristics in flight and to safely expand the flight envelope of aerospace vehicles. The scope of this subtopic is the development of sensors, sensor systems, sensor arrays or instrumentation systems for improving the state of the art in aircraft ground or flight testing. This includes the development of sensors to enhance aircraft safety by determining atmospheric conditions. The goals are to improve the effectiveness of flight testing by simplifying and minimizing sensor installation; measuring new parame- ters; improving the quality of measurements; minimizing the disturbance to the measured parameter from the sensor presence; deriving new information from conventional techniques; or combining sensor suites with embedded processing to add value to output information. This subtopic solicits proposals for improv- ing airborne sensors and sensor-instrumentation systems in subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flight regimes. These sensors and systems are required to have fast response, low volume, minimal intrusion and high accuracy and reliability, and include wireless technology. Innovative concepts are solicited in the following areas:
Vehicle Environmental Monitoring
- Nonintrusive air data parameters (airspeed, air temperature, ambient and stagnation pressures, Mach number, air density, flow angle, and humidity at air temperatures as low as -20 deg. F).
- Off-surface flow field measurement and/or visualization (laminar, vortical, and separated flow, turbulence) zero to 50 meters from the aircraft.
- Boundary layer flow field, surface pressure distribution, acoustics or skin friction measurements or visualization.
- Any of the above measurements in hypersonic flow.
Vehicle Condition Monitoring
- Optical arrays for robust flight control surface position and velocity measurement.
- Sensor arrays for structural load monitoring.
- Robust arrays for engine monitoring and control applications.
Advanced Instrumentation for Aeropropulsion Flight Tests
- Thin film and fiber optic sensors, especially those compatible with advanced propulsion system materials such as ceramics and composites, and capable of withstanding the high temperatures and pressures associated with turbomachinery.
- Onboard processing for data condensation, failed sensor identification or other valuable onboard processing capability.
Vehicle Far Field Environmental Monitoring
- Nonintrusive measurements at range of 2-5 kilometers of environmental data (natural and induced flowfields, turbulence, weather, traffic).
- Onboard processing of sensed and telemetered data for integrated storage and strategic presentation to the flight crew.
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A6.03 Knowledge Engineering for Safe Systems in Lifecycle Engineering
Lead Center: ARC
The Knowledge Engineering for Safe Systems area represents a synergy of human organizational modeling and simulation capabilities with knowledge management approaches that address explicitly issues of mis-sion risk and safety in lifecycle engineering. Innovative proposals that are relevant to NASA missions are sought in the following areas:
- Computational organization models of risk management throughout the lifecycle of design, manufacture, operations, and maintenance
- Model-based simulation of the interactions between organizational decision making and hardware and software systems design and engineering that predict issues related to risk and resiliency
- Computational models of human and team performance that include fatigue, stress, workload, and risk-based decision making in a dynamic environment
- Ontologies and architectures for advanced product data management systems that explicitly incorporate the notions of risk, resiliency, and decision-making rationale
- Integration and interoperability of knowledge management, knowledge capture, and design ration-ale management capabilities into a heterogeneous distributed computing environment
- Immersive virtual environments and geospatial navigation approaches for user exploration of en-gineering facility and vehicle data
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