REDSTONE ARSENAL, Ala. -- Members of the Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center were among the recipients of the 2010 achievement awards for Army Small Business Innovation Research.

AMRDEC's winners included Dr. Robin Buckelew, Director, Weapons Development and Integration Directorate; Dawn Gratz, SBIR program co-coordinator; Otho Thomas Jr., SBIR program co-coordinator; Dr. Bruce Moylan, technical monitor; Andy Eiermann, contracting officer; and Celeste Hogan, contracting specialist.

The Army conducts an annual awards program to recognize SBIR Phase II efforts which exemplify the SBIR goal of bringing innovative technologies and products to the workplace.

Award winners are selected based on four criteria: originality and innovation of research; relevance of the research to the Army mission; immediate commercialization potential of the research, reflecting the primary goal of bringing technology and products to the marketplace; and overall quality performance of the project.

Moylan, of the Weapons Development and Integration Directorate, initially submitted the SBIR topic entitled "Missile Flight Weather Encounter Software for System Requirements Development." CFD Research Corporation submitted the winning SBIR Phase II proposal for the Moylan's topic; Sami Habchi, Executive Vice President; and Shawn Ericson, group leader of the Defense Application Branch, received the achievement awards for their work with Moylan.

"Operation of missiles and weapons systems' platforms in adverse weather has always been an issue. At high speeds, raindrop collisions have effects similar to small projectiles. Dr. Moylan's tool will enable accurate prediction of total environmental exposure for weapons and platforms during their requirements development and design phases," said Buckelew.

Changing weather scenarios during the weapons systems' design phase will enable the testing phase to move faster and be less costly.

"This global weather tool, integrated with other software packages for trajectory, electrical, aerothermal, and structural simulations, will significantly advance the understanding of high-speed flight through adverse weather. This tool allows us to plan ground tests which are mapped to the statistical flight environment, and to perform high-fidelity flight predictions of the system performance for a host of possible weather scenarios. The emerging approach to system requirement validation for weather has the potential to revolutionize the way all DOD flight systems are ground tested for robustness in non-ideal flight environments," said Moylan.

The Army will be able to equip the Warfighter with weapon systems on a global scale on an accelerated timeline.

"In this way the Warfighter can be provided with systems that meet performance requirements over the lifetime, and yet are no costlier than necessary due to over design. Dr. Moylan's work will enable the Army to field affordable weapons and systems that still meet Warfighter requirements," said Buckelew.

The Army is the only federal agency to hold such an awards program and it is competitive. This year, 27 out of 471 projects were forwarded to the selection committee and only 11 were chosen for the achievement award.

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