Post by SBIR.org

💡 Today's Innovation Index Spotlight is on MetroLaser, Inc. for their Navy STTR Phase I award that seeks to develop a noninvasive sensor designed to measure temperature and water vapor concentrations in full-scale aircraft engine exhaust plumes. High-temperature jet plumes from aircraft engines and missiles produce optical, infrared, and acoustic signatures of interest for threat detection, environmental noise assessment, and engine development. Yet significant uncertainty remains in modeling aircraft jet plume phenomena, partly due to a lack of data from high-temperature and high-velocity exhaust plumes. Intrusive sensors like thermocouples (devices that measure temperature through direct contact) and pressure transducers degrade rapidly in reactive, particle-laden, high-temperature, high-velocity plume flows, while optical techniques are challenged by optically thick flows with large density gradients and high levels of thermal emission (heat radiation that can interfere with measurements). MetroLaser and Stanford University plan to develop a sensor system designed to provide quantitative, two-dimensional spatial distributions of temperature and water vapor concentrations with anticipated measurement uncertainties of better than +/- 5%. The approach takes advantage of tomographic measurements (a technique that reconstructs cross-sectional images by combining data from multiple viewing angles), combining MetroLaser's expertise in industrial burners with Stanford's experience in propulsion flows. Time-resolved measurements of temperature and species concentrations may serve as indicators of engine health and efficiency and could help better understand transient phenomena including startup and shut down sequences, combustion instabilities (irregular burning patterns), and flow nonuniformity. 🔗 Learn more about this and other SBIR technologies @ https://lnkd.in/gdybr_ar #STTR #DefenseTech #Aerospace #Propulsion #OpticalDiagnostics #NavyResearch