National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Small Business Innovation Research & Technology Transfer 2003 Program Solicitations
TOPIC A1 Aviation Safety and Security
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A1.01 Crew Systems Technologies for Improved Airspace Safety and Security
A1.02 Propulsion and Airframe Failure Data and Accident Mitigation
A1.03 Automated On-Line Health Management and Data Analysis
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. Without improvements, doubling or tripling of air traffic by 2017 could lead to 50 or more major accidents a year. This number of accidents would have an unacceptable impact on the aviation system. The goal of NASA’s Aviation Safety and Security Program (AvSSP) is to develop and demonstrate technologies that contribute to a reduction in the fatal aviation accident rate by a factor of 5 by 2007. Research and technology will address accidents involving hazardous weather, controlled flight into terrain, human-error-caused accidents and incidents, and mechanical or software malfunctions. The Program will also develop and integrate information technologies needed to build a safer aviation system and provide information for the assessment of situations and trends that indicate unsafe conditions before they lead to accidents. NASA researchers are also looking at ways to adapt aviation technologies already being developed to improve aviation security. The AvSSP is focusing on areas where NASA expertise could make a significant contribution to security: 1) the hardening of aircraft and their systems; 2) secure airspace operation technologies; 3) improved systems to screen passenger and cargo information; and 4) sensors designed to better detect threats. NASA seeks highly innovative proposals that will complement its work in Aviation Safety and Security in the following subtopic areas:
A1.01 Crew Systems Technologies for Improved Airspace Safety and Security
Lead Center: LaRC
NASA seeks highly innovative crew systems technologies to improve airspace safety and security. Such advanced technologies may meet these goals by ensuring appropriate situation awareness; facilitating and extending human perception, information interpretation, and response planning and selection; counteracting human information processing limitations, biases, and error-tendencies; assisting in response planning and execution; and ensuring individuals have access to use of national airspace as appropriate. In addition, NASA seeks tools and methods for measuring and assessing crew and group performance in complex, dynamic systems. Technologies may take the form of tools, models, operational procedures, instructional systems, prototypes, and devices for use in the flight deck, elsewhere by pilots, or by those who design systems for crew use. Technologies should have a high potential for emerging as marketable products. Examples include:
- Intelligent systems monitoring and alerting technologies for improved failure mode identification, recovery, and threat mitigation.
- Innovative crew systems to improve situation awareness of airspace safety and security concerns.
- Designs for human-error prevention, detection, and mitigation.
- Decision-support tools and methods to improve communication, collaborative and distributive decision-making.
- Data fusion technologies to integrate disparate sources of flight-related information.
- Computational approaches to support response planning and selection by crew and/or automation.
- Computational approaches to monitoring crew health, stress level, state of duress, and performance.
- Computational approaches to modulate appropriate crew engagement, work load, and situation awareness.
- Human-centered information technologies to improve the performance of less-experienced NAS operators.
- Technologies to ensure access to airspace systems and infrastructure only by appropriate persons.
- Avionics designers and/or certification specialist tools to improve the application of human-centered principles.
- Human-error reliability approaches to analyzing flight deck displays, decision aids, and procedures.
- Individual and team performance metrics, analysis methods, and tools to better evaluate and certify human and system performance for use in operational airspace environments, simulation, and model-based analyses.
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A1.02 Propulsion and Airframe Failure Data and Accident Mitigation
Lead Center: GRC
NASA is concerned with the prevention of hazardous conditions and the mitigation of their effects when they do occur. One particular emphasis is on the prevention and suppression of fire and explosions. Aircraft fires represent a small number of actual accident causes, but the number of fatalities due to in-flight, post-crash and on-ground fires is large.
A second 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 third emphasis for this subtopic is on propulsion system health management in order to prevent or accommodate safety-significant malfunctions and damage. 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 technology are sought which help to further reduce the occurrence of and/or mitigate the effects of safety-significant propulsion system malfunctions and damage.
A fourth emphasis 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 conditions avoidance (icing weather information systems) or tolerance (aircraft icing protection systems and design tools).
A final emphasis for this subtopic is protection of the aircraft through communication, navigation and surveillance (CNS) systems which are themselves secure, as well as applications that support other aircraft failure or sabotage mitigation systems. Technology is needed to harden the CNS systems, both onboard and air-to-ground, and to provide next-generation airborne, ground- and space-based surveillance systems.
With these emphases in mind, products and technologies are sought which can be made affordable and retrofitable within the current aviation system, as well as for use in the future. These include the following areas:
- Technology for prevention and suppression of potential in-flight fires in fuel tanks, cargo bays, insulation, and other inaccessible locations due to accidents or deliberate acts.
- 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.
- 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 instrumentation, ground/on-wing nondestructive inspection, health monitoring algorithms, and fault accommodating logic, that will predict, diagnose, prevent, assess, and allow recovery from propulsion system malfunctions or damage.
- Ground and airborne radome technologies for microwave wavelength radar and radiometers that remain clear of liquid water and ice in all weather situations.
- All-weather, profiling cloud radar that are accurate to -40dBZ at 1 km and that utilize the latest microwave technologies to ensure a final customer cost of less than $100,000, including data acquisition and processing computer.
- Technology capable of real-time assessment of aero performance for clean and ice-contaminated wing surfaces. Concept must be capable of operating in the normal passenger-carrying flight domain and be unaffected by typical flight turbulence.
- 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.
- Next generation capabilities for remote monitoring of onboard systems and the aircraft environment
- Secure onboard information processing, computing and air/ground networking
- Technologies to harden aircraft communication, navigation, and surveillance systems against abnormality and deliberate attack.
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A1.03 Automated On-Line Health Management and Data Analysis
Lead Center: DFRC
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. Online applications empha- sizes 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 inspec- tion network of potentially global proportion.
Offerors 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. Offerors 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 moni- tors.
- Predicting or detecting any equipment malfunction.
- Middleware or software toolkits to lower the cost of developing online health-monitoring applica- tions.
- Innovative solutions for harvesting, managing, archival, and retrieval of aerospace vehicle health data.
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