The potential benefits from the successful completion of this program are enormous and will significantly impact the way critical aerospace, power devices, controllers, and other systems are designed, particularly in the alternative power generation and management domains. Examples of key customers that could benefit through use of the developed technologies include power system manufacturers, commercial airlines, power semiconductor device and drive manufacturers, commercial power utilities, land and marine propulsion systems, unmanned air vehicles, Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), future combat systems (FCS), industrial actuation systems, and robotic applications. Particularly, the reliance on solar power generation and DC system in commercial applications specific requirements on health management performance for which these technologies can provide value by increasing reliability and safety for critical components. Impact has existing contracts with all these potential customers and has an excellent commercialization record.
The development of the proposed prognostics and fault tolerant reconfiguration strategies will directly contribute to NASA's ISHM efforts, particularly for several components of the Constellation program. Although the Constellation program and its scope are uncertain at the moment, the techniques Impact is developing will be leveraged into systems that are a mainstay in space exploration such as satellites and solar power systems. The proposed technologies are generic in nature and are applicable to future generation aviation platforms, leading to benefits in the form of improved reliability, maintainability, and survivability of safety-critical electrical power and electro-mechanical systems. The long-term implications of a successful completion of this program will provide reliability tools for the state-of-the-art technologies in power generation, management, and intelligent control. Several of NASA's NextGen and current activities can take immediate advantage of these technologies. In the short term, the device level modeling and reconfigurable strategies to be developed in this program can be directly transitioned to ongoing research at the NASA research centers. The adaptable nature of modules presented in this program will allow them to act as design and development tools for a wide variety of NASA applications.
More »