22 April, 2019: CDO Technologies is all set to support the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) 711th Human Performance Wing Airman Systems Directorate Warfighter Interface Division which is based at WPAFB, by taking care of the facility operations at the Aeroacoustic Research Complex (ARC) at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
A cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) is an agreement between a private company and a government agency on research and development. With the help of the CRADA agreement, commercial companies will get the facility to test their aircraft for a fee.
"This is a really exciting opportunity because we're really breaking new ground. We're taking something very specific we've been doing for the Air Force for years and commercializing it," said Al Wofford, Founder and President of CDO Technologies. "This will be one of the first times we can successfully transfer advanced technology capability from a government client to the commercial space."
Aeroacoustic Research Complex is an Acoustic Signature Capture and Modeling Research and Development facility. Its primary purpose is to characterise air vehicle audibility signatures. The facility includes a control system, a full-scale outdoor sensor array of 50 microphones calibrated down to 20 micropascals positioned on the ground and on two vertical towers sampling at a rate of 48 kilohertz and 24 bit in addition to five miles of buried cable. The ARC permits high-fidelity, 3-D modeling of aircraft sound signatures in the environment when aircraft overfly the array. The facility began its operations in 2009, modeling the audible footprint of over 50 military aircraft to include fixed wing, rotary wing, manned, and unmanned aircraft.
"We've got this facility that is capturing this fine fidelity on the acoustics of aircraft so we can provide customers data they can use to quiet aircraft and comply with noise abatement at commercial airports or even for drones as they become more prevalent," said John Hall, Research Scientist for the Air Force Research Laboratory. "If you look at companies delivering packages with drones, we have the facilities to make sure those drones aren't disrupting people's daily lives in urban and even rural areas."