North Carolina

Advanced Heat Exchanger based on 3D Woven Metal Wires

Heat exchangers find application in a multitude of consumer products, transportation systems, and industrial processes. Published research on 3-D woven Al wire heat exchangers demonstrated heat transfer rates exceeding the performance of state-of-the art fin structures. This project will demonstrate the concept's feasibility by the design, fabrication, and testing of a prototype heat exchanger. Data from the testing will provide both characterization of the heat transfer and flow restrictions of the 3-D woven structure and provide a direct comparison to a standard structure.

3TEX, Inc.
109 MacKenan Drive
Cary, NC 27511

Improved Joints Based on 3D Fiber Architecture Preforms

The labor-intensive manufacture of wind blades with numerous heavily bonded joints generates high installation and operating costs for wind turbines used to generate electricity. This project will develop wind blades based on 3-D fiber architectures that will lead to not only stronger joints, but a more robust, less costly manufacturing process. Installation costs of the turbines will be reduced by the lower cost wind blades and operating costs will be reduced by the lower number of wind blade defects and failures.

Rivis, Inc.
8100 Brownleigh Drive, Suite 120
Raleigh, NC 27617

Back-Gate Field Emission-Based Cathode RF Electron Gun

This project will develop high electron current sources for the Department of Energy. The use of high frequency radio waves to extract the electrons allows the electron sources to be incorporated into electron guns that are needed for high energy accelerators used by the DOE for basic research and electron microscopes to image the materials at near atomic resolution, for example.

STTR Project
Signatech Systems
P.O. Box 614
Matthews, NC 28106

Visualization Technologies for Distribution Systems

Expensive outages of the electricity system occur because the distribution operator is not able to digest the vast amounts of data in a timely manner. Operators have desired a more pictorial view but these efforts have been stymied by the lack of proper tools and fast computational methods. This project will develop visualization tools that can provide such capabilities.