Frequency Steered Acoustic Transducer

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to develop, fabricate, and characterize a novel frequency steered acoustic transducer (FSAT) for the structural health monitoring of aerospace structures for impacts, damage, and leakage. A single compact, cost effective FSAT is expected to replace high-element-count phase arrays, significantly reducing cost, weight, size, and power requirements for multiple channel data handling, wiring, electronics, and powering. FSAT will allow for permanent continuous leakage detection and localization of simple and complex structures.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will allow the structural health monitoring of impacts, defects, and leakage of aerospace structures, pipelines, dams, levees, tanks, oil wells and rigs, industrial and biomedical equipment, and HVAC equipment.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will allow the structural health monitoring of impacts and leakage of numerous NASA structures including airframes, airlocks, vehicles, space structures, spaceport infrastructure, and tankage.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 5) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.