NVision, Inc.
Southlake, TX
817-416-8006
www.nvision3d.com

Swift work by NVision, Inc. helped a major U.S. airline quickly repair a bird-damaged Boeing 737 wing and return the restored jet back to flight in just two days. The rapid turnaround helped the airline avoid the financial losses typically incurred by grounding aircraft.

Ampex Data Systems
Hayward, CA
650-367-2011
www.ampex.com

Ampex Data Systems (Ampex), a Delta Information Systems Company, recently received a Full Rate Production Lot 7 (FRP-7) contract from Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation. In addition to multiple TuffServ^®282 (TS282) Rugged Network File Servers (NFS), Ampex will be delivering supporting storage media for use in the United States Navy's E-2D Hawkeye airborne surveillance aircraft. Ampex will supply multiple shipset systems over a five-year period.

Seventy years ago, military aviation moved from reciprocating engines to vastly more reliable turbo jets and turboprops. Shortly after, the commercial air transport industry followed suit, enabling modern air transport. Today, virtually all large aircraft rely on turbine propulsion, yet small aircraft, both manned and unmanned, have not exploited the advantages of turbines for propulsion.

Most of today’s collision-avoidance, in-flight-entertainment (IFE), air-to-ground-communications, and other avionics systems employ electronics packaging based on the Aeronautics Radio INC (ARINC) 600 standard. Compared to the older ARINC 404 standard dating from the 1970s that defined “black box” enclosures and racks within aircraft, ARINC 600 specified a Modular Concept Unit (MCU) – the basic building block module for avionics. An ARINC 600 metal enclosure can hold up to 12 MCUs, allowing a lot of computing power to be placed in a centralized “box.” By making it possible to run numerous applications over a real-time network, ARINC 600 enabled “next generation” integrated modular avionics (IMA).

Sandia National Laboratories’ (Albuquerque, NM) Radar Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems enable a new product paradigm in radar capabilities and modalities. With the ability to shrink sensor size, increase resolution, raise image quality, and advance realtime onboard processing, Sandia has been producing next-generation systems for nearly three decades. Sandia specializes in the full system design of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI), target recognition, and other sensor systems for the Department of Defense, other government agencies, and industry partners.

Fuel economy is one of the biggest challenges facing the aviation industry. To overcome these challenges, researchers are working on next generation aviation systems.

A critical technology challenge for structural material applications in the aerospace and defense industries is to have a means for the reliable analysis of material damage and failure. Experimental structural assessments are typically expensive and often do not provide full information about coupled, multiscale damage processes. Computer-aided analysis has established itself as a useful tool for complementing experimental structural assessments. A comparative summary of current computer-aided approaches is presented in the accompanying table.