Nanotechnology delivers military power

Scientists are using nanotechnology to create materials with properties that will revolutionize military technology, from processors to display screens and from body armor to air filters.

By Ben Ames

Army leaders are looking for a 21st century battlesuit. The lycra-tight clothing must stop bullets, detect chemical and biological agents, monitor a wounded soldier's vital signs, administer basic first aid, and communicate with headquarters.

One approach could provide answers for all those challenges -- nanotechnology.

In March 2002, Army planners granted $50 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., to create the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. Across the country, military research dollars are flowing to nanotechnology laboratories, as engineers find ways to build more-efficient batteries, more-powerful fuel cells, more-receptive solar cells, more-affordable titanium metal, and more-sensitive chemical and biological agent detectors.

Nanotechnology is no longer a dream discipline for future research -- it is creating products for specific applications today.

THE MORNING REPORT

"THE MORNING REPORT" 


NASA DEVELOPS NEW TOOL FOR AIRLINE ACCIDENT PREVENTION

A 'tool' created by NASA scientists to alert airline analysts to potential, unanticipated problems and to enhance safety and reliability in the industry is available for licensing.
Scientists at NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley, developed a 'Morning Report' of atypical flights. It automatically identifies statistically extreme flights to airline flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) analysts. The new software may help analysts identify the precursors of incidents or accidents.
"The Morning Report offers a promising method for identifying unanticipated problems and opportunities in flight data recorded by commercial aircraft," said Thomas Chidester, Aviation Performance Measuring System manager at NASA Ames. "The Morning Report implements concepts from flight science and statistics into practical applications usable in industry," he added.
"Our goal is to focus the limited time of experts on analyzing the most operationally significant events, while broadening and deepening their analytical capabilities," Chidester said. "The challenge is finding and understanding key information from the mass of data generated by aircraft and collected by data recorders," he said.
Only a small portion of the data generated by flights is analyzed through the identification of situations where aircraft operate outside pre-defined ranges. The Morning Report tool may be able to interpret more aircraft data for improved analysis. Unlocking information contained in data sets has the potential to enhance safety, reliability and the economics of flight operations.
The Morning Report tool has attracted the attention of industry-leading providers of flight data analysis software looking to improve their analysis tools. SAGEM Avionics of Grand Prairie, Texas, is the first to license the technology.
"The licensing of this analysis tool from NASA to SAGEM Avionics is another shining example of how NASA-developed technologies are transferred to the private sector to help benefit the American people," said Lisa Lockyer, chief of the Technology Partnerships Division at NASA Ames.
The tool provides airline quality assurance personnel with a list of atypical flights in an easy tabular format, highlighting the most extreme 5 percent. These may include groups of flights experiencing an operational problem or unique situations encountered by single flights. Highlighted flights are examined by FOQA analysts to determine whether they represent operational problems.
The Morning Report tool was developed by NASA's Aviation System Monitoring and Modeling Project under the Aviation Safety and Security Program. NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, Washington, manages the research.
SAGEM AGS is compliant with all the regulations such as FAA, JAA and UTRS and in action on more than 100 airlines and service companies.
In 2004, AGS analysed more than 5500 aircraft and more than 12 million flight hours

MOQA: what full flight data provide you with

Today all you get from the A/C’s are short snapshot parameter values from your ACMS.
AGS provides you with FULL FLIGHT DATA and A FLIGHT REPOSITORY for all your AC’s

If you get an engine exceedance from your ACMS on one AC, chances are that you have no idea where this comes from
 AGS full flight data: you might find the root cause on this same flight
 AGS flight repository: you might find the root cause on a flight from this same AC from 2 weeks ago
 AGS events: now you can program a pattern search and look for ALL AC’s displaying the same pattern that will lead to this failure

RESULT: PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE – FIX IT BEFORE IT HAPPENS


MOQA: Flaps Vibration Study

Flaps vibration study during during gated position transition on A320 (same could be done on any AC’s)

 A South American airlines had reports from pilot complaining about abnormal vibrations during flaps transitions.
 They run thanks to the extensive amount of data recorded on our DFDAU a study on the last 20 seconds vibrations on the flaps before each gated position using the AGS.

 They noticed indeed some abnormal vibrations on the flaps

 They visually inspected the flaps and realized that one plastic join on the flaps was abnormally used. They contacted Airbus to get this part – 3 months lead time to get the part from Airbus.