Spinoffs

Spinoffs

NASA Langley research produces wide-ranging benefits

By J.R. Wilson

NASA critics from time to time ask why the United States spends so much money in space when there are major problems that need to be addressed on Earth. It is an argument that overlooks the space- and aviation-related developments that have benefitted a range of civilian and commercial activities.

NASA supporters are fond of drawing attention to the fact that the agency’s budget is only about a half of 1 percent of the overall federal budget. Yet NASA does a lot with what could be considered – in relative terms – a shoestring budget. What’s more, that doesn’t even take into account the multitude of technologies, science, materials, and other spaceand aviation-related developments that have spun off into everyday civilian and commercial use.

That is especially true – although perhaps more difficult to recognize – with the output of a research organization, such as NASA’s Langley Research Center, than from NASA’s more publicly visible flight centers, such as Johnson and Kennedy.

For more than 40 years, NASA has highlighted these Earth-bound benefits in its annual Spinoff publication, a record of the agency’s Technology Transfer Program. While Spinoff’s tagline is “Bringing NASA Technology Down to Earth,” not everything at NASA is space related. At Langley, for example, research areas include materials and coatings, sensors and detectors, aeronautics and software, with most of the technology transfer licenses involving materials and coatings. Langley is the most prolific of NASA’s nine active centers in terms of patents licensed to industry and available for licensing, with 239 spinoffs since 1976, averaging five per year.

Jennifer Hubble-Viudez, a licensing specialist in the Office of Innovation, part of Langley’s Office of Strategic Analysis, Communications and Business Development, described the process by which intellectual property patented by Langley makes its way into the commercial world, in line with the Technology Transfer Program’s own tagline: “Improving life on Earth, one technology at a time.”

“When a business wants to use our technology, they do that through a license, usually a commercial license for a specific product or service, each of which is evaluated on its own. There is no set rate, but they normally pay an up-front fee at signing, then annual minimums each year and a royalty-based annual fee based on sales,” she explained.

“NASA Langley owns the intellectual patents. Provisions are sometimes put in place for the inventor to work with the licensee and, if during the course of that work, new information or a new technology is developed, a joint ownership agreement goes into effect, sharing ownership of that property with the business. NASA also gets the benefit of learning what the business is doing, which helps further our research. When the license fees are paid, they are distributed among the inventors as well as Langley.”

The LZR Racer® swimsuit by licensee SpeedoUSA. These racing swimsuits designed for U.S. Olympic swimmers were based on Langley’s experience studying friction and drag. In March 2008, athletes wearing the LZR Racer broke 13 world records.

Speedo USA Photo

NASA’s charter in the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act called for the new agency to establish a technology transfer program. After 60 years, that has resulted in a great deal of government-funded space, military, and aviation-related technology becoming available for public use.

“We have a pretty stringent process. We have a team of civil servants and contractors who determine what is commercially viable. They meet monthly to discuss those, then decide whether to go forward with patenting or to release it open source,” Hubble-Viudez said. “As civil servants, our people are required to electronically report any ideas they have and get them on the record, then go to the monthly meeting.

“We also have a team of contractors responsible for assessments. They get information about a technology we have been working on, then cold-call companies to see if they might be interested in licensing it. If you have more than one interested, they will be at different levels of funding and development and ways they want to use the technology, all of which go into the type of license issued. I know of one versatile sensor – SansEC (without electrical connectivity) – that has had seven or eight different licenses issued.”

While Langley does not conduct research specifically targeted for commercial licensing, she said its mission within NASA is so diverse, it can touch virtually anything.

One example of how NASA researchers work not only with Langley’s technology specialists, but also outside agencies is a research effort to determine if space-age flexible heatshield materials that are able to withstand high heat could be used to protect firefighters. When 19 firefighters died in a wildfire in Arizona in 2013, Langley engineers reached out to the U.S. Forest Service about working together to help create a new emergency fire shelter. A team of Forest Service and Langley researchers has tested a number of possible shelter designs that include materials developed for spacecraft. The Forest Service is expected to approve a new emergency fire shelter design by next year.

Workers add grooves to the main runway at Congonhas International Airport, Sao Paulo, Brazil. The grooves, a NASA development, improve drainage and create additional friction to aid aircraft braking, and are used on highways as well.

Agencia Brasil Photo

Langley’s Technology Transfer Program website [technology-larc.ndc.nasa.gov] offers a wealth of information on Langley patents available for licensing, a Technology Marketplace with some detail about potential commercial applications, as well as links to contacts, licensing procedures, and other information through its Technology Gateway.

Langley also offers college students insight into the tech transfer and licensing program through its Technology Transfer University (T2U), which enables business students to create market assessments and business plans using the center’s hightech patent portfolio. They also have access to NASA scientists and innovators, who provide a unique and detailed look into the technologies on which they are working.

“Through the T2U program, NASA Langley is helping to educate young entrepreneurs, tomorrow’s industry leaders, about the benefits of using federal government research and development assets in commercial applications,” according to the website.

As to the overall technology transfer effort, Langley’s website sums it up in a single sentence: “Through technology licensing and other partnerships, we can create new technologies and relationships that can be mutually valuable in reducing R&D costs, expanding capabilities, accelerating solutions to technical challenges, and creating new products.”

Langley’s Technology Transfer Program involves virtually every area of research in which the center is or has been involved, including:

• Aeronautics – The design, construction and operation of aircraft based on the scientific study or art of flight

• Electrical and Electronics – The scientific and technological development, behavior and application of electronic devices, circuits and systems involving the flow of electrons in semiconductors, gaseous media or a vacuum.

• Environment – The development of devices, processes and systems that protect and preserve the sustainability of natural resources and positively influence the growth, development and survival of a given organism, population or ecological community through scientific study of the behavioral contribution of the air, water, minerals, organisms and all other external factors surrounding and affecting an ecological system.

• Health, Medicine and Biotechnology – The development and manufacture of a technique or product to provide for the maintenance of a healthy level of physical, mental, and psychological fitness. The use of organic substances that are only existing in or derived from plants, animals or other living tissue, organisms or microorganisms to biologically engineer a compound or substance to improve lives. The use of inorganic substances to perform chemical processing or to produce other materials that improve lives, industrial processes, and the environment.

• Information Technology and Software – The development, implementation and maintenance of computer hardware and software systems to produce, store, organize, analyze, model, simulate and communicate information electronically.

Two differing wingtip designs, a winglet on a Boeing 737-800 (foreground) and a wing fence on an Airbus A319, achieve the same end, of increasing efficiency and decreasing fuel burn, employing research pioneered by Langley’s Richard T. Whitcomb.

D Tom Via Wikimedia Commons

• Instrumentation – The development, manufacturing and utilization of instruments used in science and industry to monitor an application so that information about the application’s progress, performance and status is captured and reported.

• Manufacturing – The development of processes, devices and systems to make goods and wares by manual labor or machinery on a large or small scale.

• Materials and Coatings – The development of substances as raw matter to be composed of or to be used as a constituent element in the processing of various products.

• Mechanical and Fluid Systems – The development of devices controlled or operated by or as if by a machine, machinery or human via the influence of physical forces or substances capable of flowing and changing shape at a steady rate when acted upon by a force so as to automatically execute human tasks.

• Optics – Based on the branch of physical science that studies the properties and phenomena of both visible and invisible light, the development, design and building of devices, processes or systems for the generation, propagation and implementation of the nature and behavior of electromagnetic light.

• Power Generation and Storage – The development of devices, processes and systems that generate and store electrical, mechanical or fluid power or energy.

• Propulsion – The development, design and build of machinery and fluids that propel or thrust, or are configured to do so, by means of force generated from mechanical, electrical or fluid power or energy.

• Robotics, Automation and Control – Mechanical devices or machines that resemble a human or are designed to replace human beings semi- or fully-autonomously by performing a variety of complex or routine mechanical tasks, either on command or by being programmed in advance.

• Sensors – Mechanical or electronic devices used to measure or receive stimulus in the form of light, temperature, pressure, sound, radiation level or the like, convert that stimulus into an electronic signal and transmit the signal to a measuring or control instrument “A lot of our products have a low TRL [Technology Readiness Level] and it takes a lot of R&D to get it to a point where it can be used. So we have other licenses that are less expensive, such as the start-up license that gives a new company three years with no fees,” Hubble-Viudez said.

“There also are short-term evaluation licenses, if the company is not sure the technology will really work the way they need. Those are for 12 months with a fixed fee of $2,500. If at the end of 12 months they believe it will work as needed, then it can be converted to a commercial license – or sooner, if they prefer.”

“We currently have 53 licenses in place, including 294 Langley-developed technologies, and generally have about 300 patents pending at any given time that are available for licensing,” she added. “Overall, NASA has about 1,200 patents available for licensing, with about a quarter of those coming from Langley.

Rob Bryant, a senior researcher at NASA Langley, examines a lab model of a cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) device. Bryant is the inventor of a high-tech aerospace plastic called LaRC-SI that is resistant to chemicals and withstands extreme hot and cold temperatures. The technology was developed for an aerospace high-speed research program, but among its other applications now serves as the insulation material on one of the thinnest left-heart leads available for a CRT.

NASA Photo

Each center collects annual royalties and fees. “Of that, money that does not go to the inventors goes to the Technology Transfer Office, which reinvests in the research programs,” said Hubble-Viudez.

Some of the most interesting technology transfers to come out of Langley’s research programs have included:

• a polymer coating researcher Rob Bryant originally created in 2008 for resins and composites for high-speed aircraft, but since then has been used to coat at least half-a-million heart pacemakers implanted in human patients. The devices resynchronize contractions of the heart’s ventricles by sending tiny electrical impulses to the heart muscle, helping it pump blood throughout the body more efficiently

• fetal heart monitors

• aerodynamic racing swimsuits designed for U.S. Olympic swimmers. Based on Langley’s experience studying friction and drag, the LZR Racer ® by licensee Speedo USA reduces skin friction drag 24 percent over Speedo’s previous racing suit. In March 2008, athletes wearing the LZR Racer broke 13 world records

• Extreme Low Frequency Acoustic Measurement System, a portable device for detecting atmospheric turbulence, aircraft wake vortices, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, explosions, human movement, etc.

• a device to more accurately measure localized air pressure for improved weather forecasting

• an aircraft wing design stemming from work by a Langley engineer in the 1960s and ’70s that produced a significant increase in subsonic efficiency. It’s used on most commercial aircraft flying today, saving the airline industry billions of dollars in fuel every year

• aerodynamics for trucks and automobiles, improving highway stability and reducing fuel consumption

• the cutting of grooves in concrete to increase traction and prevent injury, first developed in the mid-1980s to reduce aircraft accidents on wet runways and later expanded to highway and pedestrian applications by industry, reducing skidding and stopping distance and increasing a vehicle’s cornering ability in curves

The SansEC sensor: It doesn’t look like much more than a piece of copper foil cut in a fancy spiral pattern. But don’t let the modest appearance fool you. It’s an open-circuit, resonant sensor that needs no electrical connections (thus the name SansEC or “without electrical connection”). It can simultaneously measure different physical phenomena — temperature and fluid level, for example — and functions even when badly damaged. Langley’s SansEC sensor technology has been licensed by more than 10 companies for a variety of commercial applications.

NASA Image

• advances in bio-feedback

• winglets are a drag-reducing technology advanced through the research of Langley engineer Richard T. Whitcomb in the 1970s. Although the upturned ends on aircraft wings were not incorporated onto large airliners until the late 1980s, today they are common on commercial and civilian aircraft, reducing fuel burn by billions of dollars and jet engine carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 21.6 million tons

• improved carbon monoxide detection

• a device that allows electronic game players to augment traditional controller or video inputs by adjusting their physiological state, such as heart rate and breathing

• Fiber Optic Shape Sensing Technology, offering 10 times the accuracy of comparable optical techniques for robotics, tracking, integrated vehicle systems, etc.

• Compact Active Vibration Control System, a small actuator/sensor that can be located anywhere on large flexible structures to sense and reduce vibrations and noise

• Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication (EBF3), an augmentation to additive manufacturing (3-D printing) designed to build complex parts with substantially less raw material and greater speed

• wound healing facilitated by electrical activity, a bandage – stimulated by body heat and cell growth – that combines faster, active healing with wound protection while minimizing infection and related complications

• non-invasive methods of accurately measuring intracranial pressure for patients with head injuries that may affect subarachnoidal fluid pressure around the brain or who have undergone brain surgery, using ultra-low power ultrasonic wave intensities that greatly reduce possible tissue damage

• an all-organic, high-performance electroactive device fabricated with a novel single-wall carbon nanotube for use in prosthetics, artificial muscles, artificial diaphragms and valves, active Braille displays, chiropractic patches, and a wide range of other applications, medical and non-medical

“Licensees typically are given eight hours of free time with the inventor(s), although that is not part of the license agreement, no matter what type of license it is. If they want more time, the licensee does have to pay an additional fee,” Hubble-Viudez said.

“The biggest message, from an historical perspective, is that there is a Technology Transfer Program at Langley, which may not be known by everyone who could benefit from a license. This program has been in place for decades, has worked very well, and will continue to operate in the future. We believe we are helping the Langley researchers and inventors and helping businesses, NASA, and the nation take advantage of the smart brains we have in the agency.”