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Air Force Institute of Technology

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Articles 1441 - 1470 of 5699

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Assessment Of Structure From Motion For Reconnaissance Augmentation And Bandwidth Usage Reduction, Jonathan B. Roeber Mar 2018

Assessment Of Structure From Motion For Reconnaissance Augmentation And Bandwidth Usage Reduction, Jonathan B. Roeber

Theses and Dissertations

Modern militaries rely upon remote image sensors for real-time intelligence. A typical remote system consists of an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, with an attached camera. A video stream is sent from the UAV, through a bandwidth-constrained satellite connection, to an intelligence processing unit. In this research, an upgrade to this method of collection is proposed. A set of synthetic images of a scene captured by a UAV in a virtual environment is sent to a pipeline of computer vision algorithms, collectively known as Structure from Motion. The output of Structure from Motion, a three-dimensional model, is then assessed in …


Flightline Heroics And The Façade Of A Healthy Common Support Equipment Fleet, Benjamin D. Bobic Mar 2018

Flightline Heroics And The Façade Of A Healthy Common Support Equipment Fleet, Benjamin D. Bobic

Theses and Dissertations

Access to serviceable support equipment enables aircraft maintenance crews the ability to efficiently keep assigned aircraft safe and mission capable. Current Air Force policy does not require formal management and enterprise fleet health reporting of serialized support equipment. As such, articulating funding requirements to replace equipment has been a challenge for equipment managers. To better articulate support equipment requirements, equipment managers need quantifiable support equipment data. A previous study examined the relationship between aircraft availability and support equipment availability. While finding no significant correlation, the author identifies the practices of "Frankensteining" and "Beg-Borrow-Steal" as possible reasons for the absence of …


Market Basket Analysis With Shortened Web Link Click Data, James C. Gallagher Mar 2018

Market Basket Analysis With Shortened Web Link Click Data, James C. Gallagher

Theses and Dissertations

Market research is an indispensable part of an organization's ability to understand market dynamics in an area. Over the past 20 years data collection and analysis through Knowledge Discovery through Databases (KDD) has arisen to supplement the traditional methods of surveys and focus groups. Market Basket Analysis is an area of KDD that identifies associations between commonly purchased items. As social media use has grown, link shortening companies help users share links in a constrained space environment and, in exchange, collect data about each user when a link is clicked. This research applies market basket analysis techniques with graph mining …


Scheduling Tool For The Nevada Test And Training Range, Miguel J. Macias Mar 2018

Scheduling Tool For The Nevada Test And Training Range, Miguel J. Macias

Theses and Dissertations

Presently, the 57th Wing Scheduler at Nellis AFB schedules daily mission requests to the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) airspace manually. The process is time consuming and may lead to suboptimal range resource allocations. The goal of this study is to provide the scheduler with an automated scheduling approach that will improve range scheduling efficiency. The tool developed uses range request data from units at Nellis AFB to produce daily mission schedules for a month long scheduling horizon with Microsoft VBA code and a commercial Integer Program (IP) solver. Under our current understanding of scheduler priorities, we formulate the …


Experimental Designs, Meta-Modeling, And Meta-Learning For Mixed-Factor Systems With Large Decision Spaces, Zachary C. Little Mar 2018

Experimental Designs, Meta-Modeling, And Meta-Learning For Mixed-Factor Systems With Large Decision Spaces, Zachary C. Little

Theses and Dissertations

Many Air Force studies require a design and analysis process that can accommodate for the computational challenges associated with complex systems, simulations, and real-world decisions. For systems with large decision spaces and a mixture of continuous, discrete, and categorical factors, nearly orthogonal-and-balanced (NOAB) designs can be used as efficient, representative subsets of all possible design points for system evaluation, where meta-models are then fitted to act as surrogates to system outputs. The mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulations used to construct first-order NOAB designs are extended to solve for low correlation between second-order model terms (i.e., two-way interactions and quadratics). The …


Defining Success In Air Force Infrastructure Asset Management Through Use Of The Delphi Method, Brendan J. Maestas Mar 2018

Defining Success In Air Force Infrastructure Asset Management Through Use Of The Delphi Method, Brendan J. Maestas

Theses and Dissertations

Asset Management has a history of policy mandates within the US Government dating back to 1990’s. In order to accomplish these many directives, the Air Force Civil Engineer community has adopted a mindset and framework commonly referred to as Asset Management. Despite numerous references and guidance to establish Asset Management principles, the Air Force has not yet developed a clear and concise way to define or measure overarching success in Asset Management. This research effort focuses on closing the knowledge gap between issued policy and implementation. It examines Asset Management implementation efforts in other government agencies, private industries, and in …


Cost And Performance Difference Of High Performance Sustainable Buildings, Philip A. Ramsey Mar 2018

Cost And Performance Difference Of High Performance Sustainable Buildings, Philip A. Ramsey

Theses and Dissertations

Varying legislation and executive orders coupled with needs for energy resiliency have led the United States Air Force to pursue sustainable construction. The limited understandings of initial costs to implement these changes have contributed to poor project cost estimating and changed implementation of legal requirements. A student t-test for populations with unequal variance was accomplished on the final normalized contract cost of 1628 Air Force Military Construction (MILCON) projects executed between 2002 and 2017. Future design considerations for net zero energy buildings were compiled from a net zero energy residential community in Fontana, California. There was no statistically significant difference …


Conceptual Systems Security Analysis Aerial Refueling Case Study, Martin Trae Span Iii Mar 2018

Conceptual Systems Security Analysis Aerial Refueling Case Study, Martin Trae Span Iii

Theses and Dissertations

In today’s highly interconnected and technology reliant environment, systems security is rapidly growing in importance to complex systems such as automobiles, airplanes, and defense-oriented weapon systems. While systems security analysis approaches are critical to improving the security of these advanced cyber-physical systems-of-systems, such approaches are often poorly understood and applied in ad hoc fashion. To address these gaps, first a study of key architectural analysis concepts and definitions is provided with an assessment of their applicability towards complex cyber-physical systems. From this initial work, a definition of cybersecurity architectural analysis for cyber-physical systems is proposed. Next, the System Theory Theoretic …


An Open Source Approach To Social Media Data Gathering, Anthony J. Kallhoff Mar 2018

An Open Source Approach To Social Media Data Gathering, Anthony J. Kallhoff

Theses and Dissertations

Modern usage of social media affords the military intelligence and analytic communities novel approaches to gather information. However, the tools and resources to develop these methodologies are still maturing. Furthermore, current data acquisition tools are not available to the DoD for all social media platforms. This thesis addresses a small subset of this problem by developing an open source methodological approach to collect and manage data from a popular social media site that has previously been inaccessible to defense intelligence organizations. This approach was operationalized via the R package called instaExtract, and an exemplar analysis was performed to demonstrate its …


Plasmonic Grating Geometrics And Wavelength-Dependent Focus Depth In Infrared Detectors, Patrick R. Kennedy Mar 2018

Plasmonic Grating Geometrics And Wavelength-Dependent Focus Depth In Infrared Detectors, Patrick R. Kennedy

Theses and Dissertations

The objective for this research is to determine a relationship between plasmonic grating geometries and the wavelength-dependent focus depth. This research is focused on enhancing the signal collected by infrared detectors by using a metal grating as a planar lens to focus light in the detecting region of the substrate. This can be used to maintain a thinner absorbing region and possibly to create multi-color imaging in a single pixel. Simulations demonstrate that the plasmonic lens is capable of creating a wavelength dependent focus spot.


Land Cover Influences On Airborne Noise Propagation At Usaf Installations, Ariel L. Waiters Mar 2018

Land Cover Influences On Airborne Noise Propagation At Usaf Installations, Ariel L. Waiters

Theses and Dissertations

Mitigation of aircraft noise and encroachment by residential areas at various U.S. military installations remains a challenge and hampers effective military operations. The Air Force has established standard practices that utilize computational noise models to generate and display noise propagation from military installations. Despite great advances in models and mitigation action plans, the current USAF Noisemap modeling tool and methods do not consider the effects of variation in land cover. Moreover, such limitations could greatly affect the accuracy of predicting aircraft noise pollution. The standard modeling method assumes a ground cover impedance of 225 Kpa*s/m2, which …


A Study Of The Air Force Airworthiness Assessment Process With Recommendations For Reusable Launch Vehicles, Austin A. Troya Mar 2018

A Study Of The Air Force Airworthiness Assessment Process With Recommendations For Reusable Launch Vehicles, Austin A. Troya

Theses and Dissertations

Flight safety is a critical design and engineering consideration within the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and particularly the United States Air Force (USAF). This study conducts an independent evaluation of the airworthiness assessment process used by the United States Air Force’s Engineering Directorate through modeling and simulation. The airworthiness process is examined for its ability to effectively verify sound engineering design and efficiency with respect to the implementation of new software-based assessment tools and its impact on timeliness of reviews and resource utilization. Simulation results guide recommendations for reducing non-value-added activities and strategic leveling of resource demands to …


Optimal Trajectory Generation In A Dynamic Multi-Body Environment Using A Pseudospectral Method, Jacob A. Dahlke Mar 2018

Optimal Trajectory Generation In A Dynamic Multi-Body Environment Using A Pseudospectral Method, Jacob A. Dahlke

Theses and Dissertations

High-altitude parking orbits could provide resiliency to the military space infrastructure by providing redundancy in key assets, allowing for rapid reconstitution of underperforming satellites. When analyzing trajectories in a high-altitude regime, two-body models of Keplerian motion become less accurate since the gravitational effects of other bodies are no longer negligible. To provide a higher fidelity model of the dynamics in a high-altitude regime, a multiple-body model can be used. In the Earth-Moon system, a spacecraft operating in the high-altitude regime can be modeled with three-body dynamics. With certain simplifying assumptions, the model is called the circular-restricted three-body problem (CR3BP). The …


Influence Of Coolant Flow Rate Parameters In Scaling Gas Turbine Cooling Effectiveness On A Flat Plate, Jacob P. Fischer Mar 2018

Influence Of Coolant Flow Rate Parameters In Scaling Gas Turbine Cooling Effectiveness On A Flat Plate, Jacob P. Fischer

Theses and Dissertations

Effective film cooling relies on the performance of the selected cooling hole shape and placement of the holes on the surface of the blade. To test each holes effectiveness, large scale, low-temperature testing has been used to reduce cost and complexity. The resulting quantity from this testing is called the adiabatic effectiveness (n). The adiabatic effectiveness can then scaled up to engine operating conditions to predict how the selected film cooling hole will perform. This process is complicated by the nonlinear variation of gas properties between coolant and freestream conditions as well as between the experimental and engine conditions. In …


An Efficient Euler Method To Predict Shock Migration On A Straked Delta Wing Design, Dylan N. Hope Mar 2018

An Efficient Euler Method To Predict Shock Migration On A Straked Delta Wing Design, Dylan N. Hope

Theses and Dissertations

In support of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, this project sought to identify the significance of nonlinear aerodynamic phenomena in regards to LCO of a straked delta wing design. Previous works include unsteady Navier-Stokes aeroelastic analysis of various wing designs and flight test of F-16 transonic LCO with interest focused on oscillatory SITES behavior. The research presented within this investigation further expanded the understanding of unsteady aerodynamics by performing aeroelastic analysis of a wing oscillated in pitch with an Euler-based, boundary layer coupled numerical method (ZEUS). The wing was tested for a multitude of LCO parameters such as …


The Study And Application Of Carbon Nanotube Film Heaters For Space Applications, Christopher C. Rocker Mar 2018

The Study And Application Of Carbon Nanotube Film Heaters For Space Applications, Christopher C. Rocker

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to examine the feasibility of using Carbon Nanotube (CNT) sheets as thin film heaters for space applications. The ability to maintain the temperature of space components has a direct impact on a space vehicle's operation and longevity. Currently etched foil heaters are used to heat satellite batteries. Battery heaters are the focus of this research. However, as this study will show, they have limitations and are susceptible to failure. CNT sheets have many beneficial properties and show potential in replacing the etched foil design. In this study test specimens were created by forming laminate …


Defender-Assisted Evasion And Pursuit Maneuvers, Roger S. Anderson Mar 2018

Defender-Assisted Evasion And Pursuit Maneuvers, Roger S. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Motivated by the possibilities afforded by active target defense, a 3-agent pursuit-evasion differential game involving an Attacker/Pursuer, a Target/Evader, and a Defender is considered. The Defender strives to assist the Target by intercepting the Attacker before the latter reaches the Target. A barrier surface in a reduced state space separates the winning regions of the Attacker and Target-Defender team. In this thesis, attention focuses primarily on the Attacker's region of win where, under optimal Attacker play, the Defender cannot preclude the Attacker from capturing the Target. Both optimal and suboptimal strategies are investigated. This thesis uses several methods to breakdown …


An Analysis Of Multi-Domain Command And Control And The Development Of Software Solutions Through Devops Toolsets And Practices, Mason R. Bruza Mar 2018

An Analysis Of Multi-Domain Command And Control And The Development Of Software Solutions Through Devops Toolsets And Practices, Mason R. Bruza

Theses and Dissertations

Multi-Domain Command and Control (MDC2) is the exercise of command and control over forces in multiple operational domains (namely air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace) in order to produce synergistic effects in the battlespace, and enhancing this capability has become a major focus area for the United States Air Force (USAF). In order to meet demands for MDC2 software, solutions need to be acquired and/or developed in a timely manner, information technology infrastructure needs to be adaptable to new software requirements, and user feedback needs to drive iterative updates to fielded software. In commercial organizations, agile software development methodologies and …


Quality Of Service Impacts Of A Moving Target Defense With Software-Defined Networking, Samuel A. Mayer Mar 2018

Quality Of Service Impacts Of A Moving Target Defense With Software-Defined Networking, Samuel A. Mayer

Theses and Dissertations

An analysis of the impact a defensive network technique implemented with software-defined networking has upon quality of service experienced by legitimate users. The research validates previous work conducted at AFIT to verify claims of defensive efficacy and then tests network protocols in common use (FTP, HTTP, IMAP, POP, RTP, SMTP, and SSH) on a network that uses this technique. Metrics that indicate the performance of the protocols under test are reported with respect to data gathered in a control network. The conclusions of these experiments enable network engineers to determine if this defensive technique is appropriate for the quality of …


Expected Coverage (Excov): A Proposal To Compare Fuzz Test Coverage Within An Infinite Input Space, Evan V. Swihart Mar 2018

Expected Coverage (Excov): A Proposal To Compare Fuzz Test Coverage Within An Infinite Input Space, Evan V. Swihart

Theses and Dissertations

A Fuzz test is an approach used to discover vulnerabilities by intentionally sending invalid inputs to a system for the purpose of triggering some type of fault or unintended effect that renders the system vulnerable to an exploit. Fuzz testing is an important cyber-testing technique used to find and fix vulnerabilities before they are exploited. The fuzzing of military data links presents a particular challenge because existing fuzzing tools cannot be easily applied to these systems. As a result, the tools and techniques used to fuzz these links vary widely in sophistication and effectiveness. Because of the infinite, or nearly …


Securing Data In Transit Using Two Channel Communication, Clark L. Wolfe Mar 2018

Securing Data In Transit Using Two Channel Communication, Clark L. Wolfe

Theses and Dissertations

Securing data in transit is critically important to the Department of Defense in todays contested environments. While encryption is often the preferred method to provide security, there exist applications for which encryption is too resource intensive, not cost-effective or simply not available. In this thesis, a two-channel communication system is proposed in which the message being sent can be intelligently and dynamically split over two or more channels to provide a measure of data security either when encryption is not available, or perhaps in addition to encryption. This data spiting technique employs multiple wireless channels operating at the physical layer, …


Evaluating Contingency Construction Methods: A Delphi Study, William E. Bentley Mar 2018

Evaluating Contingency Construction Methods: A Delphi Study, William E. Bentley

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to evaluate which existing RED HORSE vertical construction system was “best” suited for contingency operations and the relative pros/cons/challenges associated with each. RED HORSE units, having existed for over 50 years, currently have 4 active duty squadrons currently employed overseas in multiple military contingency environments. Based on site visits, it was established that the Ultimate Building Machine (UBM)/K-Span, Professionally Engineered Buildings (PEB), and the FrameCAD system are the three most prevalent vertical construction systems/methods in use by RED HORSE. Fourteen Subject Matter Experts (SME) from across the Air Force participated in a Delphi study …


Comparison Of Traditional Versus Cubesat Remote Sensing: A Model-Based Systems Engineering Approach, Daniel L. Cipera Mar 2018

Comparison Of Traditional Versus Cubesat Remote Sensing: A Model-Based Systems Engineering Approach, Daniel L. Cipera

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis compares the ability of both traditional and CubeSat remote sensing architectures to fulfill a set of mission requirements for a remote sensing scenario. Mission requirements originating from a hurricane disaster response scenario are developed to derive a set of system requirements. Using a Model-based Systems Engineering approach, these system requirements are used to develop notional traditional and CubeSat architecture models. The technical performance of these architectures is analyzed using Systems Toolkit (STK); the results are compared against Measures of Effectiveness (MOEs) derived from the disaster response scenario. Additionally, systems engineering cost estimates are obtained for each satellite architecture …


A Study Of The Hexakis Icosahedron Vacuum Lighter Than Air Vehicle And The Effects Of Air Evacuation On The Structural Integrity, Anthony A. Castello Mar 2018

A Study Of The Hexakis Icosahedron Vacuum Lighter Than Air Vehicle And The Effects Of Air Evacuation On The Structural Integrity, Anthony A. Castello

Theses and Dissertations

The research this paper focuses on is comparing the structural differences between the icosahedron and hexakis icosahedron frame and skin for use as a vacuum lighter than air vehicle (VLTAV), analyzing the stress concentrations in the hexakis icosahedron both with and without the skin, and finding the optimal location and size of the air evacuation method for creating the internal vacuum. Previous research to date has identified dynamic loading on the structure and optimization of the structure, but this will be the first research to analyze the manufacturing of the structure through the development of the air evacuation design. Findings …


Numerical Simulation Of Heat Transfer And Chemistry In The Wake Behind A Hypersonic Slender Body At Angle Of Attack, Matthew J. Satchell, Jeffrey M. Layng, Robert B. Greendyke Mar 2018

Numerical Simulation Of Heat Transfer And Chemistry In The Wake Behind A Hypersonic Slender Body At Angle Of Attack, Matthew J. Satchell, Jeffrey M. Layng, Robert B. Greendyke

Faculty Publications

The effect of thermal and chemical boundary conditions on the structure and chemical composition of the wake behind a 3D Mach 7 sphere-cone at an angle of attack of 5 degrees and an altitude of roughly 30,000 m is explored. A special emphasis is placed on determining the number density of chemical species which might lead to detection via the electromagnetic spectrum. The use of non-ablating cold-wall, adiabatic, and radiative equilibrium wall boundary conditions are used to simulate extremes in potential thermal protection system designs. Non-ablating, as well as an ablating boundary condition using the “steady-state ablation” assumption to compute …


Study Of Abnormal Grain Growth In Beta Annealed Ti-6al-4v Forgings, Lee R. Morris Mar 2018

Study Of Abnormal Grain Growth In Beta Annealed Ti-6al-4v Forgings, Lee R. Morris

Theses and Dissertations

Beta annealed Ti-6Al-4V has been used extensively in current aerospace platforms due to properties such as high strength to weight ratio. Recent inspections during aircraft production have revealed regions of excessive grain sizes, resulting in quarantined parts and excessive time spent on root cause analysis and risk mitigation efforts. Uncertainty surrounding these parts has led to increased costs and may cause future aircraft production delays. Part manufacturers have intermittently reported problems with abnormal grain growth in these alloys for years, but to date no supplier has been able to determine the source of this microstructural phenomenon. Leveraging common Finite Element …


Analysis Of Additively Manufactured Injectors For Rotating Detonation Engines, Michael C. Waters Mar 2018

Analysis Of Additively Manufactured Injectors For Rotating Detonation Engines, Michael C. Waters

Theses and Dissertations

This research represents an experimental and computational analysis of additively manufactured injectors for Rotating Detonation Engines (RDEs) for use in rocket propulsion. This research was based on the manufacture and testing of existing injector element designs using additive techniques. The designs were modeled from geometries gathered from Sutton and Biblarz Elements of Rocket Propulsion [23]. The goal of this research was to characterize the viscous losses of each design based on the discharge coefficient. The designs were computationally simulated to gain insight to the flow characteristics using multiple sets of conditions for surface roughness and inlet pressure. The results were …


Comparison Of Plume Dynamics For Laser Ablated Metals: Al And Ti, William A. Bauer, Glen P. Perram, Timothy J. Haugan Mar 2018

Comparison Of Plume Dynamics For Laser Ablated Metals: Al And Ti, William A. Bauer, Glen P. Perram, Timothy J. Haugan

Faculty Publications

Emissive plumes from pulsed laser ablation of bulk Ti and Al from KrF laser irradiation at laser fluence up to 3.5 J/cm2 and argon background pressures of 0–1 Torr have been observed using gated intensified charged-coupled device imagery. Mass loss for Ti increases from 0.1 to 0.8 μg/pulse as pulse energy increase from 174 to 282 mJ/pulse (35–170 photons/atom) and decreases by ∼30% as pressure increases from vacuum to 1 Torr. Early plume energies are described by the free expansion velocities of 1.57 ± 0.02 and of 1.81 ± 0.07 cm/μs for Ti and Al, respectively, …


Demonstration Of Versatile Whispering-Gallery Micro-Lasers For Remote Refractive Index Sensing, Lei Wan, Hengky Chandrahalim, Jian Zhou Mar 2018

Demonstration Of Versatile Whispering-Gallery Micro-Lasers For Remote Refractive Index Sensing, Lei Wan, Hengky Chandrahalim, Jian Zhou

Faculty Publications

We developed chip-scale remote refractive index sensors based on Rhodamine 6G (R6G)-doped polymer micro-ring lasers. The chemical, temperature, and mechanical sturdiness of the fused-silica host guaranteed a flexible deployment of dye-doped polymers for refractive index sensing. The introduction of the dye as gain medium demonstrated the feasibility of remote sensing based on the free-space optics measurement setup. Compared to the R6G-doped TZ-001, the lasing behavior of R6G-doped SU-8 polymer micro-ring laser under an aqueous environment had a narrower spectrum linewidth, producing the minimum detectable refractive index change of 4 x 10−4 RIU. The maximum bulk refractive index sensitivity (BRIS) …


Computational Investigation Using Bleed As A Method Of Shock Stabilization, Dayle L. Chang Mar 2018

Computational Investigation Using Bleed As A Method Of Shock Stabilization, Dayle L. Chang

Theses and Dissertations

Shock-wave/boundary layer interactions (SWBLI) produce undesirable dynamic loads and separated unsteady flows, adversely impacting the performance and structural integrity of supersonic vehicles. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a successful tool in experimental planning and shows promise as a critical tool in understanding and mitigating negative effects of SWBLI. The goal of this research is to demonstrate the effect of bleed holes on shock stability using the OVERFLOW CFD solver to inform the planning of an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) SWBLI wind tunnel experiment. First, a two-dimensional, flat plate, single-hole configuration was developed. Massflow discrepancies of 14.8% were initially observed …