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Design

Meeting the Need for Engineering Talent

Perhaps no one knows the realities of the U.S. engineering job market more than Laura Kurtz, Manager, U.S. Recruiting at Ford Motor Co. The shortage of engineers and the increased competition among...

Application Briefs

Defense

Unmanned Ground Vehicle

RE2 Pittsburgh, PA 412-681-6382 www.resquared.com RE2, Inc. recently announced that the company has been awarded additional funding by the Department of Defense to commercialize its high speed inspection robot called the...

News

Design

Job Market for Engineers Remains Hot

Automotive industry recruiters know the supply of engineers is thinner than the demand.

Briefs

Unmanned Systems

Simultaneous Vibration Suppression and Energy Harvesting

The goal of this work was to investigate the concept of using harvested energy to directly control the vibration response of flexible aerospace systems. Small, lightweight, flexible micro...

Application Briefs

Aerospace

Tactical Fighting System Simulator

Environmental Tectonics Corporation Southampton, PA 215-355-9100 www.etcusa.com Most fighter aircraft simulators are fixed-base, with no motion or sustained G-capability. Even those with six degree of freedom...

News

Electronics & Computers

Thermal Management for Fuel-Cell Systems Studied

Reducing the environmental impact of aircraft in terms of carbon dioxide, noise, and pollutant emissions is an important objective. Fuel-cell systems deliver electrical energy with high...

Articles

RF & Microwave Electronics

Improving Signal to Noise Ratios in Defense Electronics

As a vertical market, “defense electronics” encompasses a huge range of systems, from portable communications to transportation, avionics, and shipborne radar. While the power...

Articles

Aerospace

UAV Applications Challenge the Limits of Embedded Computing Technologies

Unmanned Vehicles (UAV/UAS) have proven to be vital, strategic new weapons in the military’s arsenal by providing needed critical intelligence, surveillance and...

Application Briefs

Defense

Weapons Control System Computer

COTS I/O and Processor Technology Controls Machine Guns Engineers from SSAI (Support Systems Associates, Inc.) have selected commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) 3U CompactPCI technology from North Atlantic...

Articles

Aerospace

How Digital “Sand Tables” Will Guide Future Military Strategy

Throughout history, the use of sand tables has been common practice in rehearsing military strategy in the field. Built on piles of sand with scale models of operational units,...

Articles

Aerospace

The Role of FPGAs in Next- Generation Secure A&D Systems

Electronics system security is a growing and ever-present concern in all applications areas, but in aerospace and defense (A&D) systems, security is a must. As such, the ICs used in these...

Application Briefs

Aerospace

AWACS Real-Time Operating System

LynuxWorks, Inc. announced recently that the Mission Systems and Sensors Division (MS2) of Lockheed Martin in Owego, NY, selected the LynxOS real-time operating system (RTOS) and Luminosity Integrated...

Briefs

Electronics & Computers

Analysis of Voltage and Current Signal Processing in a Li-ion Battery Management System

A Battery Management System (BMS) manages Li-ion batteries in a storage system for pulsed power weapons aboard Naval vessels. The system charges the...

Articles

Aerospace

FPGA Software Tests Telescope Microshutters

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the next big telescope at NASA, will be placed at a stable Lagrange point approximately 1 million miles from the Earth. This telescope is the next stepping stone...

Articles

Aerospace

UAV Airframes and Missions Drive Embedded Computing Choices

Every branch of the armed forces has a need for capabilities delivered from unmanned aerial vehicle/ unmanned aerial system (UAV/UAS) platforms. These unmanned vehicles have proved...

Articles

Aerospace

Integrating Formal Methods into Software Toolsets for Avionics Certification

Current practice in certification of avionics systems (e.g. DO-178B1) is centered on testing. The testing process has been prescribed to incorporate a semi-formal...

Briefs

Mechanical & Fluid Systems

Stability Analysis of Distributed Engine Control Systems

Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC), based on a centralized architecture framework, is being widely used for gas turbine engine control. However, current FADEC is not able to...

Articles

Aerospace

Electrically Driven General Systems for UAVs

General systems are defined as all of the flight safety critical systems of an aircraft, excluding the engine and flight control computing. Usually, the main subsystems in a general system include...

Briefs

Mechanical & Fluid Systems

Using a Steering Shaping Function to Improve Human Performance in By-Wire Vehicles

Currently, there is a performance issue regarding vehicle control at higher speeds for some indirect-vision, by-wire military vehicles; that is, those vehicles...

Briefs

Photonics/Optics

Developments in Adaptive Filtering and System Identification

Progress has been made on several fronts in a continuing program of research oriented toward the development of real-time algorithms, and computer and control systems that utilize the...

Briefs

Information Technology

Sensor Validation Using Nonlinear Minor-Component Analysis

Aconcept of sensor validation using nonlinear minor-component analysis (NLMCA) has been proposed as a theoretical basis of a sensor fault-detection-and isolation (FDI) module in a...

Articles

Design

Data-Centric Distributed Application Architecture for Shipboard Systems

System architects design distributed applications leveraging computer resources connected by a network infrastructure: CPU-intensive tasks may be located on powerful core...

Briefs

Electronics & Computers

Monitoring and Charging System for a High-Power Battery

Figure 1 is a simplified block diagram showing (1) a high-power rechargeable battery comprising multiple series-connected modules, each module containing multiple series-connected...

Articles

Aerospace

The Altair/Predator B: An Earth Science Aircraft for the 21st Century

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, CA, has partnered with General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) of San Diego, CA, to demonstrate technologies that...

Briefs

Information Technology

Two-Processor Autopilot System for a UAV

A two-processor autopilot control system for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been proposed and partly developed. Relative to prior such systems, this would be a lightweight, inexpensive autopilot...

Briefs

Aerospace

Active Flow Control Demonstrated on “Airborne Wind Tunnel”

AFRL engineers, collaborating with aerospace manufacturers and other Air Force groups, recently demonstrated the first-ever airborne active flow control system when they manipulated...

Briefs

Mechanical & Fluid Systems

Total In-Flight Simulator 50th Anniversary

AFRL's Total In-Flight Simulator (TIFS), a Convair C-131 Samaritan aircraft, entered service on March 22, 1955. The C-131 aircraft had performed various transport operations for approximately a decade...