What the FY2027 request buys
Verbatim from the R-2A exhibit for project 624349 of PE 0602102F. This is the budget justification's own description of work that has not happened yet — the one thing no other level of the budget carries.
- Continue advancing nondestructive evaluation (NDE) modeling/simulation capabilities to assess emerging material states and degradation behavior. These improved material assessments will increase availability and ensure structural integrity for future DAF systems. Activities include: -- Developing innovative modeling approaches combined with assisted defect analysis methods to accurately and reliably assess advanced materials (i.e., additively manufactured, ceramic matrix composites, and bonded structures) critical for structural applications on future systems. - Continue quantifying the impact of material variability using destructive and/or nondestructive methods to understand the impact on system performance. Activities in this FY include: -- Applying innovative ground truth materials characterization approaches to correlate how the microstructure and defects impact the accuracy of NDE measurements. - Continue developing new frameworks for ensuring sensing technologies, such as ultrasound, eddy current, and x-ray computed tomography, can quantitatively assess material properties and/or damage state in aerospace systems. This will optimize asset availability and maintenance processes while ensuring system safety. Activities in this FY include: -- Expanding data sets and apply advanced statistical methodologies to ensure the accuracy and reliability of NDE technologies. - Continue improving sensing technologies and digitization methods to enable faster, more reliable characterization, registration, and tracking of degradation and damage in specialty materials to improve system availability. Activities in this FY include: -- Developing new electromagnetic characterization approaches for materials with directional based properties. - Continue validating tools to improve characterization for quality assurance and diagnosing failure modes of specialty multilayer coatings on aircraft. Activities in this FY include: -- Assessing new approaches and incorporating electromagnetic models to evaluate multilayer specialty materials. - Continue developing automation and robotic technologies for visual nondestructive assessments that will realize human assisted inspection capabilities. Activities in this FY include: -- Assessing options for automated multi-spectral surface characterization to increase mission availability while ensuring integrity. - Continue developing accelerated assessments using conventional and flexible soft robotics through optimized path planning and robotics configurations. Activities in this FY include: -- Integrating sensors with miniature robotics for accelerated assessment of aerospace structural components to increase system availability.
Funding in FY 2027 increased by $0.065 million compared to FY 2026 due to minor programmatic adjustments to the DAF Science and Technology portfolio.
FY2026: the year under way
Prior-year accomplishments and current-year plans from the same exhibit. Context for the FY2027 plan, not a series — an activity partitions its project exactly in the request year, but can under-cover it in earlier years.
- Continue advancing non-destructive evaluation (NDE) modeling/simulation capabilities and leverage these advancements to enhance the detection, characterization, and quantification of damage in realistic aerospace structures and engine components. These improved damage assessments will increase component availability and ensure structural integrity, ultimately reducing maintenance actions. - Continue quantifying the impact of material variability on nondestructive inspection capability and reliability in weapon system components and aerospace structures. - Continue validating sensing technologies, such as ultrasound, eddy current, and x-ray computed tomography for detecting and characterizing material property changes and damage evolution in aerospace systems. This will improve predictive maintenance, increase availability, and reduce unnecessary maintenance while ensuring structural integrity. - Continue improving sensing technologies and digitization methods to enable faster, more reliable characterization, registration, and tracking of degradation and damage in specialty materials, leading to more affordable coatings assessments. - Continue validating tools to improve characterization and failure modes of specialty multilayer coatings on aircraft. - Continue developing automation and robotic technologies for visual nondestructive assessments that will realize human assisted inspection capabilities; begin to provide capabilities for automated multi-spectral characterization to increase mission availability while ensuring integrity and to reduce manhours required for inspection. - Continue developing technologies, including conventional robotics, miniaturized/highly-flexible soft robotics and sensors, and augmented data analysis, to reduce inspection time and burden on maintainers.
Three years, and no five-year plan
An R-2A activity publishes the prior year, the current year and the budget year. The FYDP outyears exist at project and program-element level and are deliberately absent here rather than inferred. Estimate types are colored and never summed into one figure.
| Fiscal Year | Estimate Type | Amount ($M) |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 | Actual | 16.0 |
| FY2026 | Enacted | 16.1 |
| FY2027 | Request | 16.2 |
This activity is 35% of project 624349's FY2027 request and 12% of PE 0602102F's. In the request year the activities under a project sum to it exactly; in the current year they under-cover it in about 9% of cases, so an activity's delta can legitimately exceed its parent's and the two must not be compared row to row.
3 activities in project 624349
Every R-2A line of this project, largest FY2027 request first. Linked where the activity has enough of its own narrative to carry a page; the rest are shown in full on the project page.