National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research 2002 Program Solicitations

TOPIC A1 Aviation Safety

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A1.01 Flight Deck Situation Awareness and Crew Systems Technologies
A1.02 Propulsion and Airframe Failure Data and Accident Mitigation
A1.03 Automated On-Line Health Management and Data Analysis
A1.04 Aircraft Icing Systems

The worldwide commercial aviation accident rate has been nearly constant over the past two decades. Although the rate is very low, increasing traffic over the years has resulted in the absolute number of accidents also increasing. Despite the events of September 2001, the worldwide demand for air travel is expected to increase even further over the coming two decades doubling or tripling by 2017. Without improvements, this could lead to 50 or more major accidents a year. This number of accidents would have an unacceptable impact on the aviation system, impeding anticipated growth. General Aviation (GA) system safety is also critically important as its accident rate is many times greater than that of commercial transport operations. Growth of the GA market is highly dependent upon safety and security considerations. Objectives of NASA's Aviation Safety Program (AvSP) include: (1) Eliminating targeted accident categories through delivery of precision approach and landing technologies and displays that provide intuitive guidance and piloting decision support, at any runway, at any airport, for both general and commercial aviation; affordable data-linked communication and on-board graphical display of worldwide aviation weather information; turbulence modeling and detection; icing prediction, detection, avoidance, and mitigation; and synthetic vision technologies that provide immediate, clear-day equivalent visual awareness in any weather or light condition. (2) Increasing accident survivability in those cases where accidents do occur through advanced structural and material designs that demonstrate greatly improved crash survivability and fire hazard mitigation. (3) Strengthening the overall safety of the aviation system by developments in aviation system modeling, human-error assessment methodologies, and integrated aviation system monitoring tools.

A1.01 Flight Deck Situation Awareness and Crew Systems Technologies
Lead Center: LaRC

Information technology has and will continue to provide operational opportunities to increase the safe and efficient use of the National Airspace System (NAS). Significant challenges for applications of this evolving technology include maintaining or enhancing NAS operators’ situation awareness, facilitating and extending human perception and interpretation, counteracting human information processing limitations and biases, supporting collaborative work among geographically and temporally distributed operators, and sensitively evaluating the effectiveness of crew/system interfaces and procedures.

NASA seeks highly innovative crew systems technologies that will support appropriate situation awareness, decisions, and workload modulation for improved airspace safety and efficiency. These technologies may take the form of tools, models, techniques, procedures, substantiated guidelines, prototypes, and devices. In addition, NASA seeks tools and methods for measuring and analyzing human and group performance in complex, dynamic systems. Innovative and economically attractive approaches are sought to advance the current state of the art in the following areas:

• Systems monitoring with sensitive and informative advisements, alerts, and aids for NAS operators that enhance situation awareness and improve aviation safety.
• Crew-centered systems design methods and technologies.
• Innovative crew/system interface technologies.
• Human-error reduction in aircraft operations and systems monitoring.
• Error-tolerant flight deck systems including advanced displays, crew-system interfaces, and monitoring technologies.
• Human-error reliability approaches to analyzing flight deck displays, decision-aids, and procedures.
• Individual and team performance metrics, analysis methods, and tools for use in evaluating performance in complex systems.
• Human performance measurement technologies for use in operational environments.
• Integrated flight deck information systems and procedures.
• Decision-support tools and methods to improve collaborative and distributive decision-making among NAS operators.
• Integrated flight deck information systems and procedures.
  
• Decision-support to assist NAS operators in information acquisition, information integration, and response selection.
• Artificial Intelligence technologies and concepts that monitor crew and aircraft performance to ensure appropriate levels of engagement, crew workload, and situation awareness.
• Human-centered information technologies that enhance situation awareness and performance of less experienced NAS operators, especially at critical times.
• Development of human-centered information technology for intuitive guidance cues in advanced display concepts.
• Guidelines, measurement, and system design techniques that allow for successful assessment of the application of human-centered design principles to flight deck display concepts.

A1.02 Propulsion and Airframe Failure Data and Accident Mitigation
Lead Center: GRC
Participating Center(s): LaRC

NASA is concerned with the prevention of hazardous and accident conditions and the mitigation of their effects when they do occur. One particular emphasis is on fire. The prevention, detection, and suppression of fires are critical goals of accident mitigation. Aircraft fires represent a small number of actual accidents, but the number of fatalities due to in-flight, post-crash and on-ground fires is large.

A second emphasis is on crashworthiness. For all transport aircraft accidents, 45 percent of those which involve serious injuries or fatalities are survivable. Besides impact alone, survivability is often a function of the combined effects of subsequent fire and smoke. Technology is needed to further protect passengers from the effects of the crash or mitigate the after effects to allow the escape of passengers.

A third emphasis is on mitigating the safety risk and collateral damage due to unexpected failures of rotating components. Although the FAA mandates a blade containment and rotor unbalance requirement (FAR Part 33, section 33.94) as part of the airworthiness standards for (turbine) aircraft engines, there are substantial potential (aircraft-engine) system benefits to be gained by enabling safety assured, lighter weight, lower cost, and more damage tolerant designs for engine case/containment systems and associated (primary load path) structures.

A final emphasis for this Solicitation is on propulsion system health management in order to prevent or accommodate safety-significant malfunctions. Past advances in this area have helped improve the reliability and safety of aircraft propulsion systems. However, propulsion system component failures are still a contributing factor in numerous aircraft accidents and incidents. Advances in instrumentation, health monitoring algorithms, and fault accommodating logic are sought which help to further reduce the occurrence of and/or mitigate the effects of safety-significant propulsion system malfunctions.

With these four emphases in mind, products and technologies are sought to mitigate or prevent relevant accidents, to enhance human survivability in the event of an accident, and to monitor system health. Considerations should be made for affordability and retrofitability to the commercial transport, general aviation, and rotorcraft fleets. These include the following areas:

• Technology for fire prevention, detection, and suppression of potential in-flight fires in fuel tanks, insulation, cargo compartments, and other inaccessible locations.
• Technology to provide fuel tank vapor flammability reduction and onboard oxygen generation.
• Technology to minimize fire hazards in crashes and to prevent or delay fires. For example: fuel-system modifications to eliminate spills, and on-demand suppression while not presenting a weight or performance penalty.
• Design and injury criteria and dynamic analyses to enhance crash safety.
• Systems approach to crashworthy designs, which may include validated occupant/seat/structural interaction analyses.
• Energy-absorbing seat and structural concepts and materials.
• Technology for occupant protection in a crash, including advanced restraints and supplemental restraints.
• Advanced material/structural configuration concepts to prevent catastrophic failures of engine components, or to ensure fragment containment.
• Computational tools for analyzing blade-loss events and designing structural components/systems accordingly.
• Health management technologies such as advanced instrumentation, health monitoring algorithms, and fault accommodating logic, to predict, diagnose, and prevent safety significant propulsion system malfunctions.
• Low cost methods for failure prediction and testing of any of the above aircraft failure-prevention and mitigation technologies.
• Methods for integrating any of the above aircraft failure-prevention and mitigation technologies into existing or new aircraft.
  

A1.03 Automated On-Line Health Management and Data Analysis
Lead Center: DFRC
Participating Center(s): LaRC

Online health monitoring is a critical technology for improving transportation safety in the 21st century. Safe, affordable, and more efficient operation of aerospace vehicles requires advances in online health monitoring of vehicle subsystems and information monitoring from many sources over local/wide area networks. On-line health monitoring is a general concept involving signal-processing algorithms designed to support decisions related to safety, maintenance, or operating procedures. The concept of on-line emphasizes algorithms that minimize the time between data acquisition and decision-making.

This subtopic seeks solutions for on-line aircraft subsystem health monitoring. Solutions should exploit multiple computers communicating over standard networks where applicable. Solutions can be designed to monitor a specific subsystem or a number of systems simultaneously. Resulting commercial products might be implemented in a distributed decision-making environment such as a virtual flight research center, a disciplinary-specific collaborative laboratory, an onboard diagnostics system, or a maintenance and inspection network of potentially global proportion.

Proposers should discuss who the users of resulting products would be, e.g., research/test/development; manufacturing; maintenance depots; flight crew; airports; flight operations or mission control; air traffic management; or airlines. Proposers are encouraged to discuss data acquisition, processing, and presentation components in their proposal. Examples of desired solutions targeted by this subtopic include:

• Real-time autonomous sensor validity monitors.
• Flight control system or flight path diagnostics for predicting loss of control.
• Automated testing and diagnostics of mission-critical avionics.
• Structural fatigue, life cycle, static, or dynamic load monitors.
• Automated nondestructive evaluation for faulty structural components.
• Electrical system monitoring and fire prevention.
• Applications that exploit wireless communication technology to reduce costs.
• Model-reference or model-updating schemes based on measured data that operate autonomously.
• Proactive maintenance schedules for rocket or turbine engines, including engine life-cycle monitors.
• Predicting or detecting any equipment malfunction.
• Middleware or software toolkits to lower the cost of developing online health-monitoring applications.
• Innovative solutions for harvesting, managing, archival, and retrieval of aerospace vehicle health data.

A1.04 Aircraft Icing Systems
Lead Center: GRC

A major goal of the NASA Aircraft Icing Program is to increase the level of safety for all aircraft flying in the atmospheric icing environment. To maximize the level of safety, aircraft must be capable of handling all possible icing conditions by either avoiding or tolerating the conditions. Proposals are invited that lead to innovative new approaches or significant improvements in existing technologies for in-flight icing condition avoidance (icing weather information systems) or tolerance (aircraft icing protection systems and design tools). Creative teaming arrangements are encouraged to help meet proposal objectives. Of particular interest are technologies that are compatible with emerging aircraft designs (e.g. sensitive electronic systems, digital flight decks, and advanced wing designs). Onboard systems must be aerodynamically non-intrusive, practical, and must consider weight, power, size, and cost for successful integration into aircraft. To receive consideration for funding, all proposals submitted under this subtopic must demonstrate significant advantages over existing technologies. The areas of greatest interest are:

• New practical, ground-based, real-time scanning remote sensing techniques for the measurement of the supercooled water droplet and temperature environment. NASA is currently funding the development of radar and radiometry technologies that can profile the conditions directly above the ground station. Proposed technology must be capable of scanning a large volume of the atmosphere and quantifying the environment to allow for the prediction of the severity of airframe icing, and to identify potential avoidance and escape routes, and must have practical range (at least 20 km) and cloud penetration capability. Scanning update cycle rate needs to be on the order of one minute to account for rapid changes in the icing environment. Remote measurement systems must be capable of quantifying liquid water in both pure liquid clouds and those with ice crystals.
• Radome technology for microwave wavelength radar and radiometers that remain clear of liquid water and ice in all weather situations.
• In situ icing environment measurement systems that can provide practical, very low cost validation data for emerging icing weather information systems and atmospheric modeling.
• Measured information must include location, altitude, cloud liquid water content, temperature, and ideally cloud particle sizing and phase information. Solutions envisioned would utilize radiosonde-based systems.
• Low-power and low-cost anti-icing systems, including technologies that protect composite structures. A system must be capable of operating under all potential environmental conditions and should be capable of operating automatically or with minimal cockpit crew interaction.

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