Company Profile

About Cortana Corporation

Cortana Corporation is a small business that was established in 1976 to provide leading edge technologies and consulting services to governments, private industry, and commercial activities. Our core skills are hydrodynamics, process engineering, and team leadership.  Cortana has military, commercial, and international experience in the field, including signature reduction for a wide range of ship types and classes.

Cortana Corporation has successfully completed many multi-year technical research efforts for U.S. and international customers.  Topics within these programs included boundary layer control techniques; suppression of submerged and surfaced ship signatures in the visual, near-IR, mid-IR, and radar bands; characterization of specific hydrodynamic signatures generated by candidate submarine designs (Bernoulli humps, wakes, surface scars, etc.); and development of operational procedures or modified designs to enhance system effectiveness and avoid potential vulnerabilities.

Core Advantage:

Cortana Corporation is uniquely positioned with patented, mature drag reduction technologies to provide solutions to real world problems of fuel efficiency and payload efficiency for both DoD and commercial marine vessels.  These core advantages have positioned Cortana to provide innovative signature control solutions for submarines and ships and to develop data systems that support spectral exploitation for a variety of purposes.  

Core Competencies

We have world-renowned experts in the improvement of ship efficiency to reduce signature and energy consumption.  The supporting technologies include shaping, appendage configuration and location, polymer and microbubble additives, and compliant coatings.  This gives Cortana unique insights into ship hydrodynamics that has resulted in over forty patents.  Our strong corporate leadership and willingness to team with strategic partners has resulted in the first at-sea demonstration of economically viable active boundary layer control.  

In addition, over the past 20 years, Cortana has developed a material signature exploitation system that provides specific parameters for broadband radiometric exploitation via the integration of data, models, and algorithms.

Future Developments

We have recently demonstrated technologies that can significantly improve the benefit of a drag reduction system.  A compliant coating combined with the drag additives of the current drag reduction system could significantly reduce expenditure of the additives while providing the same or an improved benefit.  Additionally, there are some applications wherein entraining air into the ejectant can further reduce the expenditure rates of additive.  One such application is for surface ships.  Work is continuing on the development of additives, such as polymers, that have improved performance and are more cost-effective. These developments have the potential to make drag reduction even more attractive as energy conservation and efficiency become business imperatives.

Customers:

Cortana Corporation’s government clients have included the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, German, Dutch, Italian, British, and Israeli submarine design authorities, and a number of shipbuilders and U.S. Defense contractors.

Partners:

In the recent past, our strategic partners have included: Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Pacific Marine & Supply Co Ltd, Dow Chemical, RD Rubber, Prime Photonics, Clearwater Separations Systems, and Pennsylvania State University ’s Applied Research Laboratory.