NASA STTR 2005 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (SBC):		RESEARCH INSTITUTION (RI):
NAME:	Luna Innovations Incorporated	NAME:	Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
ADDRESS:	1703 South Jefferson Street, SW, Suite 400	ADDRESS:	460 Turner Street, Suite 306
CITY:	Roanoke	CITY:	Blacksburg
STATE/ZIP:	VA  24016-4909	STATE/ZIP:	VA  24060-3362
PHONE:	(540) 769-8400	PHONE:	(540) 231-5281

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name,Email)
Roger   Duncan
duncanr@lunainnovations.com

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT ( Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
In the future, exploration missions will benefit greatly from advanced metrology capabilities, particularly structural health monitoring systems that provide real time in-situ diagnostics and evaluation of structural integrity. Safety- and mission-critical components and systems will be instrumented with embedded sensors to provide a real-time indication of health, helping to ensure that America's space exploration remains safe and cost efficient. One of the most promising technologies for accomplishing this is fiber-optic sensors. Due to their light-weight and multiplexing potential, fiber-optic sensors are highly desirable for employment in this fashion. However, most commercial fiber-optic sensor interrogators are bench sized units and are too large and heavy to be easily integrated for space-based applications.

To address this shortcoming, Luna Innovations proposes to develop a compact, light-weight, multi-parameter distributed fiber-optic instrumentation system based on the OFDR technique. The interrogator will incorporate photonic integrated circuit technology, a highly integrated swept-wavelength laser, and state-of-the-art integrated processing technology to dramatically reduce the size, weight, and cost and to dramatically increase the performance and robustness relative to existing technology. This interrogator will interface with fiber-optic strain, temperature, and shape sensor arrays, enabling simultaneous interrogation of a multitude of sensors, dramatically reducing the per sensor cost of instrumentation.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The interrogator as well as the sensors will be designed to perform in the high-stress and hostile conditions expected on launch vehicles and space environments. The resulting miniaturized, ruggedized device will thus be capable of operation in high-vibration environments, resulting in a high-reliability device that will have great utility as a portable multi-parameter sensing unit. Such instrumentation could continuously provide distributed strain, temperature, and shape measurements in a space environment. Strain measurements, for example, could yield information on highly-stressed or fatigued structural members, enabling condition-based maintenance of the crew exploration vehicle or composite over-wrapped pressure vessels.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS ( Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
The resulting instrumentation system is expected to be extremely attractive in a number of commercial applications. For example, the long term monitoring of civil structures using sensor arrays would be enabled by a permanently installed interrogator. In addition, technology is expected to find use in many health monitoring applications as a sensing network in air-, land-, and sea-based military vehicles. The proposed instrumentation is also expected to have applications within the medical field, permitting the deployment of Luna's novel shape sensing capability for tracking the relative position of catheters and colonoscopes used for minimally invasive medical procedures.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Aircraft Engines Airframe Architectures and Networks Composites Erectable Human-Robotic Interfaces Inflatable Instrumentation Kinematic-Deployable Launch and Flight Vehicle Modular Interconnects Multifunctional/Smart Materials Optical Perception/Sensing Photonics Portable Data Acquisition or Analysis Tools Propellant Storage Sensor Webs/Distributed Sensors Solar Structural Modeling and Tools Tankage Teleoperation Tethers