In the research and development world, ideas are like schoolchildren. All new technologies must pass through a number of grades before they are declared ready for graduation. At NASA, as in the rest of the research community, these grades are called technology readiness levels, or TRLs. Each TRL represents the evolution of an idea from a thought, perhaps written on a cocktail napkin or the back of an envelope, to the full deployment of a product in the marketplace. "NASA acknowledges the system as a useful, commonly understood method for explaining to collaborators and stakeholders just how mature a particular technology is," said Tony Strazisar, senior technologist for NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate in Washington.
A NASA researcher, Stan Sadin, conceived the first scale in 1974. It had seven levels which were not formally defined until 1989. In the 1990s NASA adopted a scale with nine levels which gained widespread acceptance across industry and remains in use today. Industry and other government organizations, such as the U.S. Air Force, have tailored definitions for certain TRLs to suit their own needs, but their overall scales match NASA's traditional scale very closely, Strazisar said. Today's scale runs from TRL 1 through TRL 9. The lowest level, TRL 1, indicates that information already learned from basic scientific research is taking its first step from an idea to a practical application of a lesson learned. For example, after learning that hydrogen and oxygen can be combined to generate electricity, some would suggest an idea for building a machine to do just that.
A technology that has achieved TRL 9 is one that has been incorporated fully into a larger system. It has been proven to work smoothly and is considered operational. An example of an operational TRL 9 technology are the fuel cells which combine hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity for NASA's space shuttle. In this example, if an engineer were to suggest a major improvement to the fuel cell technology, the new idea would be considered to be at TRL 1. It would make its way through the development process, while the original fuel cell design remained at TRL 9. The distance between TRL 1 and TRL 9 often amounts to years of paper studies, prototype modeling, component building and testing, integration of tested components into other systems, and more tests in the laboratory and the real world.
A NASA researcher, Stan Sadin, conceived the first scale in 1974. It had seven levels which were not formally defined until 1989. In the 1990s NASA adopted a scale with nine levels which gained widespread acceptance across industry and remains in use today. Industry and other government organizations, such as the U.S. Air Force, have tailored definitions for certain TRLs to suit their own needs, but their overall scales match NASA's traditional scale very closely, Strazisar said. Today's scale runs from TRL 1 through TRL 9. The lowest level, TRL 1, indicates that information already learned from basic scientific research is taking its first step from an idea to a practical application of a lesson learned. For example, after learning that hydrogen and oxygen can be combined to generate electricity, some would suggest an idea for building a machine to do just that.
A technology that has achieved TRL 9 is one that has been incorporated fully into a larger system. It has been proven to work smoothly and is considered operational. An example of an operational TRL 9 technology are the fuel cells which combine hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity for NASA's space shuttle. In this example, if an engineer were to suggest a major improvement to the fuel cell technology, the new idea would be considered to be at TRL 1. It would make its way through the development process, while the original fuel cell design remained at TRL 9. The distance between TRL 1 and TRL 9 often amounts to years of paper studies, prototype modeling, component building and testing, integration of tested components into other systems, and more tests in the laboratory and the real world.
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