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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 289 records · Page 16
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2004

Hybrid Piezoelectric/Fiber-Optic Sensor Sheets

Hybrid piezoelectric/fiber-optic (HyPFO) sensor sheets are undergoing development. They are intended for use in nondestructive evaluation and long-term monitoring of the integrity of diverse structures, including aerospace, aeronautical, automotive, and large stationary ones. It is anticipated that the further development and subsequent commercialization of the HyPFO sensor systems will lead to economic benefits in the form of increased safety, reduction of life-cycle costs through real-time structural monitoring, increased structural reliability, reduction of maintenance costs, and increased readiness for service. The concept of a HyPFO sensor sheet is a generalization of the concept of a SMART Layer(TradeMark), which is a patented device that comprises a thin dielectric film containing an embedded network of distributed piezoelectric actuator/sensors. Such a device can be mounted on the surface of a metallic structure or embedded inside a composite-material structure during fabrication of the structure. There is has been substantial interest in incorporating sensors other than piezoelectric ones into SMART Layer(TradeMark) networks: in particular, because of the popularity of the use of fiber-optic sensors for monitoring the "health" of structures in recent years, it was decided to incorporate fiber-optic sensors, giving rise to the concept of HyPFO devices.

Lin, Mark↗
NASA NTRS2026

Smart Process Planning for Automated Fiber Placement

Many industries, including aerospace, automotive, wind energy, maritime, and sporting goods, rely on strong, lightweight materials called composites. These materials are made by layering fibers, which can come in the form of narrow strips or wider sheets, and setting them in a polymer matrix. One of the most advanced ways to make these parts is through automated fiber placement, where a machine lays down the fibers in precise patterns. This method can create very efficient and strong designs, but it is complex, expensive, and often depends heavily on the experience of skilled engineers. Today, the design, manufacturing, and inspection stages of composite production are usually handled separately. This separation means that important information, such as how a part will be built or what defects might occur, is not always shared between stages. As a result, parts may not be as lightweight, strong, or defect-free as possible, and the process can take longer and cost more. This research develops a smart process planning system that connects design, manufacturing, and inspection into one continuous process. Built as software that works with existing tools, the system can automatically plan how the fibers are placed, predicting and reducing defects while improving both manufacturability and strength. The system optimizes not only individual layers but also how defects are distributed across all layers, preventing them from stacking up in ways that weaken the final part. It also uses inspection results from completed parts to improve future designs, creating a feedback loop where each stage informs the others. The system was tested by designing a composite panel using this new approach and comparing it to a panel made with state-of-the-art manual planning methods. The results showed that the system could intentionally control where defects appeared and increase the efficiency of the planning process. By unifying design, manufacturing, and inspection, this research shows a way to make advanced composite manufacturing more efficient, consistent, and cost-effective. This approach lowers the barrier to using automated fiber placement and opens the door for its wider adoption not only in aerospace but also in industries such as automotive, wind energy, maritime, and sporting goods, where strong and lightweight structures are essential.

Computer-Aided Process Planning↗
DOE OSTI2024

High energy density picoliter-scale zinc-air microbatteries for colloidal robotics

The recent interest in microscopic autonomous systems, including microrobots, colloidal state machines, and smart dust, has created a need for microscale energy storage and harvesting. However, macroscopic materials for energy storage have noted incompatibilities with microfabrication techniques, creating substantial challenges to realizing microscale energy systems. Here, we photolithographically patterned a microscale zinc/platinum/SU-8 system to generate the highest energy density microbattery at the picoliter (10 −12 liter) scale. The device scavenges ambient or solution-dissolved oxygen for a zinc oxidation reaction, achieving an energy density ranging from 760 to 1070 watt-hours per liter at scales below 100 micrometers lateral and 2 micrometers thickness in size. The parallel nature of photolithography processes allows 10,000 devices per wafer to be released into solution as colloids with energy stored on board. Within a volume of only 2 picoliters each, these primary microbatteries can deliver open circuit voltages of 1.05 ± 0.12 volts, with total energies ranging from 5.5 ± 0.3 to 7.7 ± 1.0 microjoules and a maximum power near 2.7 nanowatts. We demonstrated that such systems can reliably power a micrometer-sized memristor circuit, providing access to nonvolatile memory. We also cycled power to drive the reversible bending of microscale bimorph actuators at 0.05 hertz for mechanical functions of colloidal robots. Additional capabilities, such as powering two distinct nanosensor types and a clock circuit, were also demonstrated. The high energy density, low volume, and simple configuration promise the mass fabrication and adoption of such picoliter zinc-air batteries for micrometer-scale, colloidal robotics with autonomous functions.

Robotics↗
NASA NTRS1996

Analysis of Sensory/Active Piezoelectric Composite Structures in Thermal Environments

Although there has been extensive development of analytical methods for modeling the behavior of piezoelectric structures, only a limited amount of research has been performed concerning the implications of thermal effects on both the active and sensory response of smart structures. Thermal effects become important when the piezoelectric structure has to operate in either extremely hot or cold temperature environments. Consequently, the purpose of this paper is to extend the previously developed discrete layer formulation of Saravanos and Heyliger to account for the coupled mechanical, electrical, and thermal response in modern smart composite beams. The mechanics accounts for thermal effects which may arise in the elastic and piezoelectric media at the material level through the constitutive equations. The displacements, electric potentials, and temperatures are introduced as state variables, allowing them to be modeled as variable fields through the laminate thickness. This unified representation leads to an inherent capability to model both the active compensation of thermal distortions in smart structures and the resultant sensory voltage when thermal loads are applied. The corresponding finite element formulation is developed and numerical results demonstrate the ability to model both the active and sensory modes of composite beams with heterogeneous plies with attached piezoelectric layers under thermal loadings.

Lee, Ho-Jun↗
DOE OSTI2020

Smart Scattering Scanning Near-Field Optical Microscopy

Scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) provides spectroscopic imaging from molecular to quantum materials with few nanometer deep subdiffraction limited spatial resolution. However, in its conventional implementation s-SNOM is slow to effectively acquire a series of spatio-spectral images, especially with large fields of view. This problem is further exacerbated for weak resonance contrast or when using light sources with limited spectral irradiance. Indeed, the generally limited signal-to-noise ratio prevents sampling a weak signal at the Nyquist sampling rate. Here, we demonstrate how acquisition time and sampling rate can be significantly reduced by using compressed sampling, matrix completion, and adaptive random sampling, while maintaining or even enhancing the physical or chemical image content. We use fully sampled real data sets of molecular, biological, and quantum materials as ground-truth physical data and show how deep under-sampling with a corresponding reduction of acquisition time by 1 order of magnitude or more retains the core s-SNOM image information. We demonstrate that a sampling rate of up to 6× smaller than the Nyquist criterion can be applied, which would provide a 30-fold reduction in the data required under typical experimental conditions. Furthermore, our smart s-SNOM approach is generally applicable and provides systematic full spatio-spectral s-SNOM imaging with a large field of view at high spectral resolution and reduced acquisition time.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
NASA NTRS2009

An Assessment of GEO Orbital Debris Photometric Properties Derived from Laboratory-Based Measurements

Optical observations of orbital debris offer insights that differ from radar measurements (specifically the size parameter and wavelength regime). For example, time-dependent photometric data yield lightcurves in multiple bandpasses that aid in material identification and possible periodic orientations. This data can also be used to help identify shapes and optical properties at multiple phase angles. Capitalizing on optical data products and applying them to generate a more complete understanding of orbital space objects, is a key objective of NASA s Optical Measurement Program, and a primary driver for creation of the Optical Measurements Center (OMC). The OMC attempts to emulate space-based illumination conditions using equipment and techniques that parallel telescopic observations and source-target-sensor orientations. The OMC uses a 300 Watt Xenon arc lamp as a solar simulator, a CCD camera with Johnson/Bessel colored filters, and a robotic arm to orientate/rotate objects to simulate an object's orbit/rotational period. A high-resolution, high bandwidth (350nm-2500nm) Analytical Spectral Devices (ASD) spectrometer is also employed to baseline various material types. Since observation of GEO targets are generally restricted to the optical regime (due to radar range limitations), analysis of their properties is tailored to those revealed by optical data products. In this connection, much attention has been directed towards understanding the lightcurves of orbital debris with high area-to-mass (A/m) ratios (greater than 0.9 square meters per kilogram). A small population of GEO debris was recently identified, which exhibits the properties of high A/m objects, such as variable eccentricities and inclinations a dynamical characteristic generally resulting from varying solar radiation pressure on high A/m objects. Materials such as multi-layered insulation (MLI) and solar panels are two examples of materials with high area-to mass ratios. Lightcurves for such objects can vary greatly (even for the same object under different illumination conditions). For example, specular reflections from multiple facets of the target surface (e.g. Mylar or Aluminized Kapton) can lead to erratic, orientation-dependent light curves. This paper will investigate published color photometric data for a series of orbital debris targets and compare it to the empirical photometric measurements generated in the OMC. The specific materials investigated (known to exist in GEO) are: an intact piece of MLI, separated layers of MLI, and multiple solar cells materials. Using the data acquired over specific rotational angles through different filters (B, V, R, I), a color index is acquired (B-R, R-I). As a secondary check, the spectrometer is used to define color indexes for the same material. Using these values and their associated lightcurves, this laboratory data is compared to observational data obtained on the 1m telescope of the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (AUIB) and the 0.9 m Small and Moderate Aperture Research Telescope System (SMARTS) telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). We will present laboratory generated lightcurves with color indexes of the high A/m materials alongside telescopic data of targets with high A/m values. We will discuss the relationship of laboratory to telescope data in the context of classification of GEO debris objects.

Rodriquez-Cowardin, H.↗
DOE OSTI2024

INSTRUMENTATION FOR IN-CORE REAL-TIME MECHANICAL TESTING OF STRUCTURAL MATERIALS (INCREASE) PROJECT

Idaho National Laboratory (INL), in collaboration with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Nuclear Regulatory Commission, French Atomic and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA), Joint Research Centre, Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group, and Research Center Rez, is the operating agent of the In-Core Real-Time Mechanical Testing of Structural Materials (INCREASE) joint experimental program (JEEP) project that operates within the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA)’s Framework for Irradiation Experiments (FIDES-II) program. The first objective of the INCREASE project is to design a shared capsule that can house a variety of in-core mechanical testing instrumentation for enabling smart irradiation experiments. The second objective is to collect in core stress relaxation data pertaining to high priority stainless steel (SS) materials under light water reactor conditions with target temperature of 340°C +/-20°C and a minimum neutron damage of 2 displacement per atom (dpa). The INCREASE project will be demonstrated in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nuclear Research Reactor (MITR).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Coal-derived conductive pavement for winter de-icing: prototype, modeling, and simulation

Existing pavement de-icing methods result in high installation and maintenance costs, traffic delays, excessive weariness and corrosion, and negative environmental and safety impacts. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents an innovative pathway to designing and constructing smart self-heating pavements using a low-cost coal-char bearing asphalt material. The conductive asphalt incorporates coal char, i.e., a key byproduct of the coal pyrolysis process, into the Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) mixture. This asphalt containing coal-derived solid carbon exhibits highly tailorable electrical conductivity, satisfactory mechanical and thermophysical properties, and superior cost-efficiency as compared to other conductive pavement materials. The de-icing performance was also demonstrated by laboratory experiments on a bench-scale prototype. Furthermore, an efficient thermal network model was developed and validated by experiments to investigate the transient thermal behavior and energy performance of the Ohmic heating pavement system. Furthermore, the whole-year energy simulation case studies were conducted on a bridge pavement with an annual energy use of 24.6–1444.8 kWh/m 2 , showcasing its potential in field applications across cool humid, cold humid, and subarctic/arctic climate zones.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Challenges and Opportunities in Decarbonizing the U.S. Energy System

The United States has pledged to develop a 100% carbon-free electric power system by 2035 and a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050. While important advancements have been made in the scale, performance, and economics of clean energy technologies, meeting the nation's ambitious goals will not only require their deployment at scale, but also additional innovation and effective integration of different solutions. Technological developments across the broad suite of low-carbon energy solutions are advancing rapidly, with ongoing innovations in renewable electricity generation, industrial processes, and energy-saving technologies and services, including LED lighting, induction heating, electric vehicles, energy storage solutions, and mobility as a service, plus smart devices, controls, and more efficient and smart buildings. Combining renewable electricity with biotic and abiotic pathways to produce chemicals, fuels, and materials promises to deliver new solutions. Grid-interactive buildings and communities, integrating transportation infrastructure and vehicles, are likely to be significant components of any zero-carbon energy strategy. Low-carbon industrial manufacturing will also make strong contributions to a net-zero economy. While the technical prospects appear promising, variations in the state of infrastructure, jurisdictional and social equity, pollution, economic and socio-cultural constraints, energy resource availability, and supply chain dynamics found in different locations present a range of challenges and demand customized solutions. This paper provides a critical review and offers new insights into the technical, infrastructure, analytic, political, and economic challenges faced in translating the nation's ambitious net-zero-emissions goals into feasible and reliable implementation action plans.

circular economy↗
DOE OSTI2022

Environmental trade-offs of direct air capture technologies in climate change mitigation toward 2100

Abstract Direct air capture (DAC) is critical for achieving stringent climate targets, yet the environmental implications of its large-scale deployment have not been evaluated in this context. Performing a prospective life cycle assessment for two promising technologies in a series of climate change mitigation scenarios, we find that electricity sector decarbonization and DAC technology improvements are both indispensable to avoid environmental problem-shifting. Decarbonizing the electricity sector improves the sequestration efficiency, but also increases the terrestrial ecotoxicity and metal depletion levels per tonne of CO 2 sequestered via DAC. These increases can be reduced by improvements in DAC material and energy use efficiencies. DAC exhibits regional environmental impact variations, highlighting the importance of smart siting related to energy system planning and integration. DAC deployment aids the achievement of long-term climate targets, its environmental and climate performance however depend on sectoral mitigation actions, and thus should not suggest a relaxation of sectoral decarbonization targets.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Smart Packaging for Critical Energy Shipment (SPaCES)

Recent technical advances have brought forth revolutionary Smart Packaging (SP) technology. SP incorporates multiple electronics, chemical, and mechanical sensing technologies into packaging materials, and utilizes them to monitor and display package content status. SP can also employ embedded micro actuators to react to undesirable package conditions such as moisture/temperature anomalies or harmful chemical reactions and neutralize it. When further integrated with wireless sensing and secure networking, SP provides wholistic system-wide remote situation awareness capability for real-time crisis management. Finally, we also see that SP can be further integrated with 3D printing technology to offer form-factor customization and application specific solutions suitable for DOE (Department of Energy) NNSA’s (National Nuclear Security Administration) R/N (radiological/nuclear) material shipment and management needs; this has the potential to improve safety, security, and overall operation process quality. This report surveys SP technology as the state of the art (SOTA) and analyzes how it can integrate with cybersecurity and 3D printing to address NNSA’s critical R/N material shipment and storage requirements. This report further presents our FY23/24 investigation plan describing project background, goal, motivation, proposed work, and statement of work and cost.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
NASA NTRS1995

A Probabilistic Design Method Applied to Smart Composite Structures

A probabilistic design method is described and demonstrated using a smart composite wing. Probabilistic structural design incorporates naturally occurring uncertainties including those in constituent (fiber/matrix) material properties, fabrication variables, structure geometry and control-related parameters. Probabilistic sensitivity factors are computed to identify those parameters that have a great influence on a specific structural reliability. Two performance criteria are used to demonstrate this design methodology. The first criterion requires that the actuated angle at the wing tip be bounded by upper and lower limits at a specified reliability. The second criterion requires that the probability of ply damage due to random impact load be smaller than an assigned value. When the relationship between reliability improvement and the sensitivity factors is assessed, the results show that a reduction in the scatter of the random variable with the largest sensitivity factor (absolute value) provides the lowest failure probability. An increase in the mean of the random variable with a negative sensitivity factor will reduce the failure probability. Therefore, the design can be improved by controlling or selecting distribution parameters associated with random variables. This can be implemented during the manufacturing process to obtain maximum benefit with minimum alterations.

Shiao, Michael C.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Optical pattern recognition III; Proceedings of the Meeting, Orlando, FL, Apr. 21, 22, 1992

Consideration is given to transitioning of optical processing into systems (TOPS), optical correlator hardware, phase-only optical correlation filters, optical distortion-invariant correlation filters, and optical neural networks. Particular attention is given to a test target for optical correlators, a TOPS electronic warfare channelizer program, a portable video-rate optical correlator, a joint transform correlator employing electron trapping materials, a novelty filtered optical correlator using a photorefractive crystal, a comparison of correlation performance of smart ternary phase-amplitude filters with gray-scale and binary input scenes, real-time distortion-tolerant composite filters for automatic target identification, landscaping the correlation surface, fast designing of a circular harmonic filter using simulated annealing, feature-based correlation filters for distortion invariance, automatic target recognition using a feature-based optical neural network, and a holographic inner-product processor for pattern recognition.

Casasent, David P.↗
NASA NTRS1996

Intraply Hybrid Composites Would Contain Control Strips

"Smart" structural components with sensors and/or actuators distributed throughout their volumes made of intraply hybrid composite materials, according to proposal. Strips of hybrid control material interspersed with strips of ordinary (passive) composite material in some layers, providing distributed control capability. For example, near and far edges of plate bent upward by commanding bottom control strips to expand and simultaneously commanding upper control strips to contract.

Chamis, Christos C.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Biomaterials and Magnetic fields for Cancer Therapy

The field of biomaterials has emerged as an important topic in the purview of NASA s new vision of research activities in the Microgravity Research Division. Although this area has an extensive track record in the medical field as borne out by the routine use of polymeric sutures, implant devices, and prosthetics, novel applications such as tissue engineering, artificial heart valves and controlled drug delivery are beginning to be developed. Besides the medical field, biomaterials and bio-inspired technologies are finding use in a host of emerging interdisciplinary fields such as self-healing and self-assembling structures, biosensors, fuel systems etc. The field of magnetic fluid technology has several potential applications in medicine. One of the emerging fields is the area of controlled drug delivery, which has seen its evolution from the basic oral delivery system to pulmonary to transdermal to direct inoculations. In cancer treatment by chemotherapy for example, targeted and controlled drug delivery has received vast scrutiny and substantial research and development effort, due to the high potency of the drugs involved and the resulting requirement to keep the exposure of the drugs to surrounding healthy tissue to a minimum. The use of magnetic particles in conjunction with a static magnetic field allows smart targeting and retention of the particles at a desired site within the body with the material transport provided by blood perfusion. Once so located, the therapeutical aspect (radiation, chemotherapy, hyperthermia, etc.) of the treatment, now highly localized, can be implemented.

Ramachandran, Narayanan↗
DOE OSTI2022

Self-Sensing, Stretchable, Active Circuit Arrays: Liquid Metal Paste as a Combination Interconnect and Strain Sensor

Stretchable electrical interconnects and substrate materials are increasingly used to create flexible and con-formable electronic systems for soft robotics, smart textiles, and wearable devices. Wires fabricated using composite or liquid conductive inks encapsulated in silicone enable high strain and are mechanically robust. The resistance of these inter-connects increases with strain, which can present challenges for power delivery and signaling among electronic components. However, this effect can be used directly to estimate strain within a stretchable circuit without the need for additional sensor components. In this work, we present an approach for fabricating fully-stretchable, multi-layer active circuit arrays in silicone using liquid metal paste interconnects, in which power and data wires are re-purposed as strain sensors to estimate substrate deformation. As a proof-of-principle, we demonstrate a 3×3 active circuit array that self-senses relative voltage supply at each node to estimate deformation and consumes less than 10 mA per node. Each node is digitally addressable and performs both analog measurement and digital conversion. All interconnects are fabricated using liquid metal paste, and power, data, and sensing are performed over a shared, four-wire interface in this multi-layer stretchable printed circuit board.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
NASA NTRS1989

Automation of materials processing

Sensors, instruments, and components which will be involved in automation of off-planet resource processing are discussed. The role of smart components in these activities is addressed. Process-specific control issues are briefly considered.

Suitor, Jerry↗