Potential NASA Commercial Applications: Our active VIS will initially focus on niche applications that exploit its high performance, modularity, and scalability. This includes a wide range of military and non-military applications. Military applications focus on equipment on ships, vehicles, and aircraft and some ground equipment and have potential for growth to more general military equipment that can yield very large markets, especially for ship borne applications. Although ships are in constant motion, which is sometimes harsh during high sea-states, the most stringent requirements are during combat which lead to severe shock rating requirements of 50 g's or more. Non-military applications involve commercial applications where our VIS could provide sufficient vibration isolation to allow use of commercial instrumentation in applications which heretofore have required specialized hardware. Customers we have initially identified include oilfield service groups such as Baker Hughes, Dresser, Schlumberger, Weatherford, Welltec, and WesternGeco. The electronics industry, with a large base in Austin, Texas, also has a need for vibration isolation for some of their process and possibly using our VIS actively controlled/programmable actuators in a shaker table role to induce vibrations into electronics equipment that must be tested for vulnerability to vibration. A sampling of the large electronics companies with a significant presence in Austin includes, National Instruments, IBM, AMD, Samsung, and Motorola.
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