Nextgen Aeronautics, Inc. SBIR Phase I Award, February 2019

The primary objective of this program is to design, model and demonstrate a shape memory alloy (SMA) heat engine with high efficiency utilizing improvements in material composition, processing and heat engine design developed by the NextGen Aeronautics/Penn State team. The proposed SMA engine design will provide high power density and efficiency at low temperature gradients and improved fatigue lifetimes over the current state-of-the-art. The proposed SMA heat engine will provide a practical, cost efficient method for powering structural and system health monitoring sensor networks. To achieve these objectives, during the Phase I effort we will focus development and evaluation of specific SMA compositions to meet phase transition and fatigue life requirements and processing of thin-film SMA belts. We will also perform further refinement of our proposed SMA heat engine architecture and develop system level models for simulation and optimization of the SMA heat engine. Successful completion of Phase I will result in feasibility assessment and proof-of-concept demonstration of the proposed SMA heat engine. We expect to achieve a TRL = 3 during the Phase I effort and with further technology maturation and evaluation during the Phase II effort we anticipate achieving TRL = 7 for the proposed technology.