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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 199 records · Page 11

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NASA NTRS1994

A Software Architecture for Automating Operations Processes

The Operations Engineering Lab (OEL) at JPL has developed a software architecture based on an integrated toolkit approach for simplifying and automating mission operations tasks. The toolkit approach is based on building adaptable, reusable graphical tools that are integrated through a combination of libraries, scripts, and system-level user interface shells. The graphical interface shells are designed to integrate and visually guide a user through the complex steps in an operations process. They provide a user with an integrated system-level picture of an overall process, defining the required inputs and possible outputs through interactive on-screen graphics.

mission↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Comparing the Electrical Modeling and Thermal Analysis Toolbox Simulation Data to Electrified Aircraft Propulsion Test Hardware Data

The Electrical Modeling and Thermal Analysis Toolbox (EMTAT), a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-developed Simulink™ model block library of electrical components developed with the goal of facilitating system-level control design and analysis, has two levels of fidelity depending on the test needs. The Physics Based model blocks are designed to use physical component characteristics to more accurately model real hardware, including power losses, efficiency, thermal effects, electromagnetic losses, voltage drops and current requirements. These blocks model electrical dynamics that occur at the millisecond turbomachinery time scale which allows for faster-than-real-time electrified turbomachinery simulations. A model was developed to mirror the Hybrid Propulsion Emulation Rig (HyPER) hardware, a laboratory focused on Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) hardware tests. The present hardware setup supports Turbine Electrified Energy Management (TEEM) testing. The outputs of the model were compared to the results of several tests on the HyPER laboratory motor-generator setup with the goal of matching the steady state simulation data to steady state hardware data within 5% of full scale. The objective of this paper is to present the background, setup, testing and results of this comparison. It will describe some of the adjustments that were necessary to match the system hardware, as well as next steps in verification and validation.

Hyper↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Open Innovation for a NASA Architecture Library

NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) uses open innovation, or “crowdsourcing”, to access the global public to find ideas, concepts, designs, or solutions that meet a previously unmet need possibly resulting in significant advances in performance. The Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation was launched at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. This is both a non-traditional method of innovation and a non-traditional method of outreach to the public to involve them in space technologies and programs. It has been used often for software development and new hardware technology. In this case we applied it to innovate with systems engineering tools for creating space architectures. The challenge was sponsored by NASA Engineering and Safety Center Systems Engineering Technical Fellow as part of a program for NASA’s adoption of MBSE. It was a trial to see if there would be as much participation or quality submissions with this more specialized topic and skill. The challenge sought space architecture representations and decompositions to create a library of modeled parts in a system modeling language (SysML). Mission architects mostly start from scratch to build model elements representing the functional and physical architecture of a system in SysML. There are a few beginning libraries, but these are also local to a program or group. A common library will save system engineers a large amount of time, will allow project stakeholders to recognize common graphics and quickly understand the architecture options. The challenge was promoted internationally, especially through professional organizations and universities with a systems engineering focus. It was open for 4 months, purposefully over the winter holiday break time to allow participants extra time outside of work or school. The challenge was designed so that expertise in space hardware was not necessary but getting to play with models of space architecture could provide motivation to participate. We did not receive as many entries as other broader outreach challenges, but the ones we received were extremely thorough and high quality. Solutions came from individuals and teams, students and professional consultants from the United States and Europe. We learned a few lessons about how to engage with the public and what characteristics of a problem result in good crowdsourcing results. The outreach challenge produced several useful ideas and modeled space elements, and the group will be engaging the winners to learn more about their new approaches.

innovation↗

NASA NTRS1985

ENCOMPASS: A SAGA based environment for the compositon of programs and specifications, appendix A

ENCOMPASS is an example integrated software engineering environment being constructed by the SAGA project. ENCOMPASS supports the specification, design, construction and maintenance of efficient, validated, and verified programs in a modular programming language. The life cycle paradigm, schema of software configurations, and hierarchical library structure used by ENCOMPASS is presented. In ENCOMPASS, the software life cycle is viewed as a sequence of developments, each of which reuses components from the previous ones. Each development proceeds through the phases planning, requirements definition, validation, design, implementation, and system integration. The components in a software system are modeled as entities which have relationships between them. An entity may have different versions and different views of the same project are allowed. The simple entities supported by ENCOMPASS may be combined into modules which may be collected into projects. ENCOMPASS supports multiple programmers and projects using a hierarchical library system containing a workspace for each programmer; a project library for each project, and a global library common to all projects.

Terwilliger, Robert B.↗

NASA NTRS2011

Interplanetary Overlay Network Bundle Protocol Implementation

The Interplanetary Overlay Network (ION) system's BP package, an implementation of the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) Bundle Protocol (BP) and supporting services, has been specifically designed to be suitable for use on deep-space robotic vehicles. Although the ION BP implementation is unique in its use of zero-copy objects for high performance, and in its use of resource-sensitive rate control, it is fully interoperable with other implementations of the BP specification (Internet RFC 5050). The ION BP implementation is built using the same software infrastructure that underlies the implementation of the CCSDS (Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems) File Delivery Protocol (CFDP) built into the flight software of Deep Impact. It is designed to minimize resource consumption, while maximizing operational robustness. For example, no dynamic allocation of system memory is required. Like all the other ION packages, ION's BP implementation is designed to port readily between Linux and Solaris (for easy development and for ground system operations) and VxWorks (for flight systems operations). The exact same source code is exercised in both environments. Initially included in the ION BP implementations are the following: libraries of functions used in constructing bundle forwarders and convergence-layer (CL) input and output adapters; a simple prototype bundle forwarder and associated CL adapters designed to run over an IPbased local area network; administrative tools for managing a simple DTN infrastructure built from these components; a background daemon process that silently destroys bundles whose time-to-live intervals have expired; a library of functions exposed to applications, enabling them to issue and receive data encapsulated in DTN bundles; and some simple applications that can be used for system checkout and benchmarking.

Burleigh, Scott C.↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Lowering Barriers to Science and Space Weather Research at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC)

The Space Weather and Heliophysics research and modeling community has been pushing the limits of our ability to understand and predict space weather events. The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC, https://ccmc.gsfc.nasa.gov) supports the community by providing a convenient collaborative platform hosting space weather models, model simulation data, curated datasets of solar events, and associated value-added services. Using these services, researchers and other end-users may exercise, evaluate, and intercompare contributed models, triage designated R2O models, as well as collaborate on a continuously updated archive of model run results. We will focus on CCMC’s ongoing commitment to the principles and guidelines of the Open Science initiative. Particularly, we will discuss our work towards making our services more transparent and our library of model simulations more accessible, open, and reproducible. We will introduce our recent tools for data discovery and correlative analysis designed to further increase the value of the user-generated data and metadata. We will also present our recent work on making heliophysical models more accessible and open to the community, particularly through simplified user experience and expert domain support. We will report on our progress in establishing an inter-center infrastructure with the ESA Virtual Space Weather Modelling Centre (VSWMC), designed to cross organizational boundaries and provide streamlined access to a joint palette of the models.

space weather↗

NASA NTRS1981

Hardware synthesis from DDL

The details of the digital systems can be conveniently input into the design automation system by means of Hardware Description Languages (HDL). The Computer Aided Design and Test (CADAT) system at NASA MSFC is used for the LSI design. The Digital Design Language (DDL) has been selected as HDL for the CADAT System. DDL translator output can be used for the hardware implementation of the digital design. This paper addresses problems of selecting the standard cells from the CADAT standard cell library to realize the logic implied by the DDL description of the system.

Shah, A. M.↗

NASA NTRS1987

SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The Software Automation, Generation and Administration (SAGA) project is investigating the design and construction of practical software engineering environments for developing and maintaining aerospace systems and applications software. The research includes the practical organization of the software lifecycle, configuration management, software requirements specifications, executable specifications, design methodologies, programming, verification, validation and testing, version control, maintenance, the reuse of software, software libraries, documentation, and automated management.

Campbell, Roy H.↗

NASA NTRS2012

Mining the HST Treasury: The ASTRAL Reference Spectra for Evolved M Stars

The "Advanced Spectral Library (ASTRAL) Project: Cool Stars" (PI = T. Ayres) is an HST Cycle 18 Treasury Program designed to collect a definitive set of representative, high-resolution (R greater than 100,000) and high signal/noise (S/N greater than 100) UV spectra of eight F-M evolved cool stars. These extremely high-quality STIS UV echelle spectra are available from the HST archive and through the University of Colorado (http://casa.colorado.edu/~ayres/ASTRAL/) portal and will enable investigations of a broad range of problems -- stellar, interstellar. and beyond -- for many years. In this current paper, we concentrate on producing a roadrnap to the very rich spectra of the two evolved M stars in the sample, the M3.4 giant Gamma Crucis (GaCrux) and the M2Iab supergiant Alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse) and illustrate the huge increase in coverage and quality that these spectra provide over that previously available from IUE and earlier HST observations. These roadmaps will facilitate the study of the spectra, outer atmospheres, and winds of not only these stars. but also numerous other cool, low-gravity stars and make a very interesting comparison to the already-available atlases of the K2III giant Arcturus.

Carpenter, K. G.↗

NASA NTRS2015

A Modular Framework for Modeling Hardware Elements in Distributed Engine Control Systems

Progress toward the implementation of distributed engine control in an aerospace application may be accelerated through the development of a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system for testing new control architectures and hardware outside of a physical test cell environment. One component required in an HIL simulation system is a high-fidelity model of the control platform: sensors, actuators, and the control law. The control system developed for the Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation 40k (C-MAPSS40k) provides a verifiable baseline for development of a model for simulating a distributed control architecture. This distributed controller model will contain enhanced hardware models, capturing the dynamics of the transducer and the effects of data processing, and a model of the controller network. A multilevel framework is presented that establishes three sets of interfaces in the control platform: communication with the engine (through sensors and actuators), communication between hardware and controller (over a network), and the physical connections within individual pieces of hardware. This introduces modularity at each level of the model, encouraging collaboration in the development and testing of various control schemes or hardware designs. At the hardware level, this modularity is leveraged through the creation of a SimulinkR library containing blocks for constructing smart transducer models complying with the IEEE 1451 specification. These hardware models were incorporated in a distributed version of the baseline C-MAPSS40k controller and simulations were run to compare the performance of the two models. The overall tracking ability differed only due to quantization effects in the feedback measurements in the distributed controller. Additionally, it was also found that the added complexity of the smart transducer models did not prevent real-time operation of the distributed controller model, a requirement of an HIL system.

propulsion simulation↗

NASA NTRS2010

Waterhammer Testing and Modeling of the Ares I Upper Stage Reaction Control System

NASA's Ares I rocket is the agency's first step in completing the goals of the Constellation Program, which plans to deliver a new generation of space explorers into low earth orbit for future missions to the International Space Station, the moon, and other destinations within the solar system. Ares I is a two-stage rocket topped by the Orion crew capsule and its service module. The launch vehicle's First Stage is a single, five-segment reusable solid rocket booster (RSRB), derived from the Space Shuttle Program's four segment RSRB. The vehicle's Upper Stage, being designed at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), is propelled by a single J-2X Main Engine fueled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. During active Upper Stage flight of the Ares I launch vehicle, the Upper Stage Reaction Control System (US ReCS) will perform attitude control operations for the vehicle. The US ReCS will provide three-axis attitude control capability (roll, pitch, and yaw) for the Upper Stage while the J-2X is not firing and roll control capability while the engine is firing. Because of the requirements imposed upon the system, the design must accommodate rapid pulsing of multiple thrusters simultaneously to maintain attitude control. In support of these design activities and in preparation for Critical Design Review, analytical models of the US ReCS propellant feed system have been developed using the Thermal Hydraulic Library of MSC.EASY5 v.2008, herein referred to as EASY5. EASY5 is a commercially available fluid system modeling package with significant history of modeling space propulsion systems. In Fall 2009, a series of development tests were conducted at MSFC on a cold-flow test article for the US ReCS, herein referred to as System Development Test Article (SDTA). A subset of those tests performed were aimed at examining the effects of waterhammer on a flight-representative system and to ensure that those effects could be quantified with analytical models and incorporated into the design of the flight system. This paper presents an overview of the test article and the test approach, along with a discussion of the analytical modeling methodology. In addition, the results of that subset of development tests, along with analytical model pre-test predictions and post-test model correlations, will also be discussed in detail.

Williams, J. Hunter↗

NASA NTRS1977

Development of the engineering design integration (EDIN) system: A computer aided design development

The EDIN (Engineering Design Integration) System which provides a collection of hardware and software, enabling the engineer to perform man-in-the-loop interactive evaluation of aerospace vehicle concepts, was considered. Study efforts were concentrated in the following areas: (1) integration of hardware with the Univac Exec 8 System; (2) development of interactive software for the EDIN System; (3) upgrading of the EDIN technology module library to an interactive status; (4) verification of the soundness of the developing EDIN System; (5) support of NASA in design analysis studies using the EDIN System; (6) provide training and documentation in the use of the EDIN System; and (7) provide an implementation plan for the next phase of development and recommendations for meeting long range objectives.

Glatt, C. R.↗

NASA NTRS1999

Integrated Computational System for Aerodynamic Steering and Visualization

In February of 1994, an effort from the Fluid Dynamics and Information Sciences Divisions at NASA Ames Research Center with McDonnel Douglas Aerospace Company and Stanford University was initiated to develop, demonstrate, validate and disseminate automated software for numerical aerodynamic simulation. The goal of the initiative was to develop a tri-discipline approach encompassing CFD, Intelligent Systems, and Automated Flow Feature Recognition to improve the utility of CFD in the design cycle. This approach would then be represented through an intelligent computational system which could accept an engineer's definition of a problem and construct an optimal and reliable CFD solution. Stanford University's role focused on developing technologies that advance visualization capabilities for analysis of CFD data, extract specific flow features useful for the design process, and compare CFD data with experimental data. During the years 1995-1997, Stanford University focused on developing techniques in the area of tensor visualization and flow feature extraction. Software libraries were created enabling feature extraction and exploration of tensor fields. As a proof of concept, a prototype system called the Integrated Computational System (ICS) was developed to demonstrate CFD design cycle. The current research effort focuses on finding a quantitative comparison of general vector fields based on topological features. Since the method relies on topological information, grid matching and vector alignment is not needed in the comparison. This is often a problem with many data comparison techniques. In addition, since only topology based information is stored and compared for each field, there is a significant compression of information that enables large databases to be quickly searched. This report will (1) briefly review the technologies developed during 1995-1997 (2) describe current technologies in the area of comparison techniques, (4) describe the theory of our new method researched during the grant year (5) summarize a few of the results and finally (6) discuss work within the last 6 months that are direct extensions from the grant.

Hesselink, Lambertus↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Numerical Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS) Power Systems Library

This presentation covers the Numerical Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS) Power Systems Library being developed by NASA. This library is a set of components, models, and interfaces for the NPSS language to enable building electric power system models for electrified propulsion systems. The presentation is to be given at the 3rd annual RVLT Toolchain Workshop, where attendees from across the eVTOL industry will be informed of NASA’s tools for eVTOL conceptual design from the vehicle level down through subsystems including propulsion, noise, electrical power, and others. It covers where the NPSS Power System Library fits into NASA’s RVLT toolchain and RVLT work in general, and will inform the audience of how the tool can be useful in their own work.

Electric vertical takeoff and landing↗

NASA NTRS1993

NASA/DoD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project. Paper 31: The information-seeking behavior of engineers

Engineers are an extraordinarily diverse group of professionals, but an attribute common to all engineers is their use of information. Engineering can be conceptualized as an information processing system that must deal with work-related uncertainty through patterns of technical communications. Throughout the process, data, information, and tacit knowledge are being acquired, produced, transferred, and utilized. While acknowledging that other models exist, we have chosen to view the information-seeking behavior of engineers within a conceptual framework of the engineer as an information processor. This article uses the chosen framework to discuss information-seeking behavior of engineers, reviewing selected literature and empirical studies from library and information science, management, communications, and sociology. The article concludes by proposing a research agenda designed to extend our current, limited knowledge of the way engineers process information.

Pinelli, Thomas E.↗

NASA NTRS1999

Architectural Design for the Global Legal Information Network

In this report, we provide a summary of our activities regarding the goals, requirements analysis, design, and prototype implementation for the Global Legal Information Network, a joint effort between the Law Library of Congress and NASA.

Kalpakis, Konstantinos↗

NASA NTRS2008

Strategic Analysis Overview

NASA s Constellation Program employs a strategic analysis methodology in providing an integrated analysis capability of Lunar exploration scenarios and to support strategic decision-making regarding those scenarios. The strategic analysis methodology integrates the assessment of the major contributors to strategic objective satisfaction performance, affordability, and risk and captures the linkages and feedbacks between all three components. Strategic analysis supports strategic decision making by senior management through comparable analysis of alternative strategies, provision of a consistent set of high level value metrics, and the enabling of cost-benefit analysis. The tools developed to implement the strategic analysis methodology are not element design and sizing tools. Rather, these models evaluate strategic performance using predefined elements, imported into a library from expert-driven design/sizing tools or expert analysis. Specific components of the strategic analysis tool set include scenario definition, requirements generation, mission manifesting, scenario lifecycle costing, crew time analysis, objective satisfaction benefit, risk analysis, and probabilistic evaluation. Results from all components of strategic analysis are evaluated a set of pre-defined figures of merit (FOMs). These FOMs capture the high-level strategic characteristics of all scenarios and facilitate direct comparison of options. The strategic analysis methodology that is described in this paper has previously been applied to the Space Shuttle and International Space Station Programs and is now being used to support the development of the baseline Constellation Program lunar architecture. This paper will present an overview of the strategic analysis methodology and will present sample results from the application of the strategic analysis methodology to the Constellation Program lunar architecture.

Cirillo, William M.↗

NASA NTRS2009

Spreadsheets for Analyzing and Optimizing Space Missions

XCALIBR (XML Capability Analysis LIBRary) is a set of Extensible Markup Language (XML) database and spreadsheet- based analysis software tools designed to assist in technology-return-on-investment analysis and optimization of technology portfolios pertaining to outer-space missions. XCALIBR is also being examined for use in planning, tracking, and documentation of projects. An XCALIBR database contains information on mission requirements and technological capabilities, which are related by use of an XML taxonomy. XCALIBR incorporates a standardized interface for exporting data and analysis templates to an Excel spreadsheet. Unique features of XCALIBR include the following: It is inherently hierarchical by virtue of its XML basis. The XML taxonomy codifies a comprehensive data structure and data dictionary that includes performance metrics for spacecraft, sensors, and spacecraft systems other than sensors. The taxonomy contains >700 nodes representing all levels, from system through subsystem to individual parts. All entries are searchable and machine readable. There is an intuitive Web-based user interface. The software automatically matches technologies to mission requirements. The software automatically generates, and makes the required entries in, an Excel return-on-investment analysis software tool. The results of an analysis are presented in both tabular and graphical displays.

Some, Raphael R.↗