Direct to Phase II: What the Grapheno-1 Prototype Had to Prove

A Direct to Phase II award skips the feasibility phase, which means the prior work has to stand in for Phase I and the prototype has to carry the entire technical argument. On Grapheno-1, an electrochemical system for arresting fatigue cracks in metal structures, that meant designing for a maintenance depot on day one rather than for a bench.

Agencies run D2P2 differently and not every agency offers it, so read your solicitation rather than a summary. The structural point holds regardless: the risk you removed from the schedule reappears in the first months of the build.

Fatigue cracking is among the most persistent failure mechanisms in aerospace, defense, transportation and critical infrastructure. Under cyclic loading a small crack propagates, and the conventional responses are invasive: crack removal, stop-drilling, shot peening or replacing the component outright.

Each of those takes the asset out of service. What has been missing is a portable way to arrest crack growth in place, extending service life without removing material.

Grapheno had laboratory-validated electrochemical methods and a strong scientific foundation. What the proposal needed was a system-level product concept that reviewers could evaluate as executable. The full engagement is documented in the Grapheno-1 case study.

This is the part teams underestimate. Under D2P2 there is no funded feasibility phase in which to discover that the process needs a benchtop power supply and a chemist standing next to it. Those discoveries have to happen during proposal work, on your own budget, or they happen later on the program schedule.

Once the award was in place we became the primary design, engineering and prototyping partner, executing the concept defined during the proposal phase and turning it into a working system capable of supporting testing, demonstration and program milestones. Grapheno-1 was engineered as a self-contained electrochemical treatment platform against a short list of design priorities.

Every one of those priorities is an engineering constraint before it is a marketing claim, and each one costs weight, cost or complexity somewhere else. Our guide to engineering design constraints covers how those trade-offs get resolved in practice.

These are our typical bands for federally funded hardware work of moderate complexity, not Grapheno-1 invoices. They are useful for sizing a proposal budget before a scope exists.

Put the maintainer in the room earlier. On a D2P2 build the schedule pressure pushes teams toward proving the physics first and shaping the workflow later, but workflow decisions constrain packaging, and packaging is expensive to revisit once electronics are laid out. A single session with someone who actually performs the repair is worth more than a month of assumptions.

Solicitation language is written by people who know the operational problem, and it usually encodes hardware requirements without stating them as specifications. Translating those phrases into engineering constraints before you write the budget is most of the work of a credible D2P2 proposal.

With no Phase I behind it, a D2P2 program has to convert a proposal concept into a buildable design fast, before long-lead parts and test access become the schedule. This is roughly the sequence we run.

Because there is no funded Phase I, a Direct to Phase II proposal has to show that the feasibility question was already answered somewhere else. In practice the evidence comes from four places, and teams usually have more of it than they realise, sitting in lab notebooks and old test reports.

On Grapheno-1 the science was established; the unknowns were portability, power and whether a technician could run it. That is where the engineering work went. If you are assembling the same case, see our SBIR engineering support, concept design and prototype build services, and check the Direct to Phase II rules for your agency at Read more on Sbir or DoD SBIR/STTR.