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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

Signal processing of anthropometric data

The Anthropometric Measurements Laboratory has accumulated a large body of data from a number of previous experiments. The data is very noisy, therefore it requires the application of some signal processing schemes. Moreover, it was not regarded as time series measurements but as positional information; hence, the data is stored as coordinate points as defined by the motion of the human body. The accumulated data defines two groups or classes. Some of the data was collected from an experiment designed to measure the flexibility of the limbs, referred to as radial movement. The remaining data was collected from experiments designed to determine the surface of the reach envelope. An interactive signal processing package was designed and implemented. Since the data does not include time this package does not include a time series element. Presently the results is restricted to processing data obtained from those experiments designed to measure flexibility.

Zimmermann, W. J.↗

Analysis of Variance in the Modern Design of Experiments

This paper is a tutorial introduction to the analysis of variance (ANOVA), intended as a reference for aerospace researchers who are being introduced to the analytical methods of the Modern Design of Experiments (MDOE), or who may have other opportunities to apply this method. One-way and two-way fixed-effects ANOVA, as well as random effects ANOVA, are illustrated in practical terms that will be familiar to most practicing aerospace researchers.

Deloach, Richard↗

Anisotropic Characterizations of Electrospun PAN Nanofiber Mats Using Design of Experiments

This paper deals with the dielectric and mechanical characterizations of polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-aligned electrospun nanofiber mats. A two factor three level full factorial experiment is conducted to understand the effect of various parameters on dielectric and mechanical responses. These responses are recorded against randomly oriented and aligned nanofiber mats. Improved properties of electrospun mats have applications in the field of energy storage and nanocomposite reinforcement. Dielectric and mechanical characterizations of PAN mats are vital, as the aligned electrospun mats were found to be useful in advanced energy and mechanical reinforcement applications. Therefore, it is paramount to understand the effects of system parameters to these properties. The design of experiment (DoE) includes two factors and three level full factorial experiments with concentrations of PAN solutions at 8 wt.%, 9 wt.%, and 10 wt.%, and speed of the rotating mandrel (collector) at 3 volt (V), 4 V, and 5 V inputs. The electric field intensity used in the experiment is 1 kV/cm. DoE is conducted to understand the nonlinear interactions of parameters to these responses. The dielectric and mechanical characterizations of 8 wt.%, 9 wt.%, and 10 wt.% with different speeds for the original and improved systems are discussed. It was observed that at 9 wt.% and at all mandrel speeds, the dielectric and tensile properties are optimum.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Design of Experiments for Both Experimental and Analytical Study of Exhaust Plume Effects on Sonic Boom

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis has been performed to study the plume effects on sonic boom signature for isolated nozzle configurations. The objectives of these analyses were to provide comparison to past work using modern CFD analysis tools, to investigate the differences of high aspect ratio nozzles to circular (axisymmetric) nozzles, and to report the effects of under expanded nozzle operation on boom signature. CFD analysis was used to address the plume effects on sonic boom signature from a baseline exhaust nozzle. Nearfield pressure signatures were collected for nozzle pressure ratios (NPRs) between 6 and 10. A computer code was used to extrapolate these signatures to a ground-observed sonic boom N-wave. Trends show that there is a reduction in sonic boom N-wave signature as NPR is increased from 6 to 10. As low boom designs are developed and improved, there will be a need for understanding the interaction between the aircraft boat tail shocks and the exhaust nozzle plume. These CFD analyses will provide a baseline study for future analysis efforts. For further study, a design of experiments has been conducted to develop a hybrid method where both CFD and small scale wind tunnel testing will validate the observed trends. The CFD and testing will be used to screen a number of factors which are important to low boom propulsion integration, including boat tail angle, nozzle geometry, and the effect of spacing and stagger on nozzle pairs. To design the wind tunnel experiment, CFD was instrumental in developing a model which would provide adequate space to observe the nozzle and boat tail shock structure without interference from the wind tunnel walls.

Castner, Raymond S.↗

Implementation of Model-Based Design of Experiments: Application of Computational Modeling to Support HRP Studies

This study illustrates the potential gains obtained by leveraging computational modeling to improve experimental efficiency in NASA research and counter measures studies through implementation of Model-Based Design of Experiments (MBDOE). MBDOE is a method to utilize analogous computational models to improve understanding of complex, multifactor, experimental responses and to determine experimental conditions and optimize information in the fewest number of experimental tests.

physiological response↗

Design-of-experiments to Reduce Life-cycle Costs in Combat Aircraft Inlets

It is the purpose of this study to demonstrate the viability and economy of Design- of-Experiments (DOE), to arrive at micro-secondary flow control installation designs that achieve optimal inlet performance for different mission strategies. These statistical design concepts were used to investigate the properties of "low unit strength" micro-effector installation. "Low unit strength" micro-effectors are micro-vanes, set a very low angle-of incidence, with very long chord lengths. They are designed to influence the neat wall inlet flow over an extended streamwise distance. In this study, however, the long chord lengths were replicated by a series of short chord length effectors arranged in series over multiple bands of effectors. In order to properly evaluate the performance differences between the single band extended chord length installation designs and the segmented multiband short chord length designs, both sets of installations must be optimal. Critical to achieving optimal micro-secondary flow control installation designs is the understanding of the factor interactions that occur between the multiple bands of micro-scale vane effectors. These factor interactions are best understood and brought together in an optimal manner through a structured DOE process, or more specifically Response Surface Methods (RSM).

Anderson, Bernhard H.↗

Advancing Insights into Electrochemical Pre‐Treatments of Supported Nanoparticle Electrocatalysts by Combining a Design of Experiments Strategy with In Situ Characterization

Activation, break-in, and/or pre-treatment protocols are generally applied to energy conversion devices before regular operation to reach stable performance. There remains much to understand about the relationships among physical properties, performance, and electrochemical pre-treatments. Here, a design-of-experiments (DoE) strategy is employed to address this gap by demonstrating the influence of five pre-treatment parameters for carbon-supported Pt-nanoparticle catalysts on the electrocatalytic oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). A subset of pre-treatments, developed using a central composite design, are tested in a flow cell combined with an inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometer (on-line ICP-MS). The DoE-based approach facilitates comprehensive insights from two orders of magnitude fewer experiments than a conventional grid search. The coupled on-line ICP-MS setup enables effective catalysis and real-time catalyst dissolution data. Leveraging insights from DoE for on-line ICP-MS and additional characterization, a model is built between the degradation of a multi-dimensional supported Pt surface, its performance, and applied electrochemical parameters. These investigations identify surface modifications, such as oxidation, and subsequent restructuring of Pt during pre-treatment as a primary cause of performance deterioration during ORR. By combining DoE with advanced characterization techniques, a powerful approach is demonstrated to gain a mechanistic understanding of pre-treatment protocols that can be broadly adapted to various reaction chemistries.

Platinum↗

Application of Sequential Design of Experiments (SDoE) to Large Pilot-Scale Solvent-Based CO2 Capture Process at Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM)

The United States Department of Energy’s Carbon Capture Simulation for Industry Impact (CCSI2) program has developed a framework for sequential design of experiments (SDoE) that aims to maximize knowledge gained from budget- and schedule-limited pilot scale testing. SDoE was applied to the planning and execution of campaigns for testing CO2 capture systems at pilot-scale in order to optimally allocate resources available for the testing. In this methodology, a stochastic process model is developed by quantifying the parametric uncertainty in submodels of interest; for a solvent-based CO2 capture system, these may include physical properties and equipment performance submodels (e.g., mass transfer, interfacial area). This uncertainty is propagated through the full process model, over variable operating conditions, for estimating the resulting uncertainty in key model outputs (e.g., percentage of CO2 capture, solvent regeneration energy requirement). In developing a data collection plan, the predicted output uncertainty is incorporated into an algorithm that seeks simultaneously to select process operating conditions for which the predicted uncertainty is relatively high and to ensure that the entire space of operation is well represented. This test plan is then used to guide operation of the pilot plant at varying steady-state conditions, with resulting process data incorporated into the existing model using Bayesian inference to refine parameter distributions. The updated stochastic model, with reduced parametric uncertainty from data collected, is then used to guide additional data collection, thus the sequential nature of the experimental design. The SDoE process was implemented at the pilot test unit (12 MWe in scale) at Norway’s Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM) in a summer 2018 test campaign with aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA). During the test campaign, the varied operating conditions included the flowrates of circulated solvent, flue gas, and reboiler steam and the CO2 concentration in the flue gas. The process data were used to update probability distributions of mass transfer and interfacial area parameters of a stochastic process model developed by the CCSI2 team. Two iterations of the SDoE process were executed, resulting in the uncertainty in model predicted CO2 capture percentage decreasing by an average of 58.0 ± 4.7% over the full input space of interest. This work demonstrates the potential of the SDoE process for model refinement through reduction in process model parametric uncertainty, and ultimately risk in scale-up, in CO2 capture technology performance.

carbon capture↗

Check-Standard Testing Across Multiple Transonic Wind Tunnels with the Modern Design of Experiments

This paper reports the result of an analysis of wind tunnel data acquired in support of the Facility Analysis Verification & Operational Reliability (FAVOR) project. The analysis uses methods referred to collectively at Langley Research Center as the Modern Design of Experiments (MDOE). These methods quantify the total variance in a sample of wind tunnel data and partition it into explained and unexplained components. The unexplained component is further partitioned in random and systematic components. This analysis was performed on data acquired in similar wind tunnel tests executed in four different U.S. transonic facilities. The measurement environment of each facility was quantified and compared.

Deloach, Richard↗

Applying Constrained Bayesian Optimization to the Design of Critical Experiments

Often when planning a criticality experiment, many design configurations are iteratively investigated with a Monte Carlo transport code. The goal is that the experiment will be optimal with respect to some variable, like the fraction of fissions occurring at a certain energy range, while simultaneously being critical. Unfortunately, the Monte Carlo transport simulations are expensive, which can ultimately limit the number of configurations that can be explored. In this work, we present how Gaussian processes (GPs) can be used as a reduced-order model in a constrained Bayesian optimization (CBO) algorithm to design a criticality experiment. The GPs replace the Monte Carlo transport simulations that explore the design space. The CBO algorithm efficiently identifies new points in the design space to run the Monte Carlo transport code while respecting the criticality constraint. It does so in a manner that both improves the accuracy of the GP and finds the approximate global optimum. We demonstrate the performance of CBO with the design of a Thermal Epithermal eXperiment (TEX) for the criticality safety validation of nuclear waste models of the Hanford Tank Farm.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Design of Experiments Involving Molybdenum in SNL SPRF/CX Facility

This report is part of the collaboration with the Nuclear Criticality Safety Program and constitutes the “CED-2 report” of the experiments proposed in the SPRF/CX facility of SANDIA National Laboratories to contribute to the validation of Molybdenum in thermal energy spectrum. It supplements the study carried out in the CED-1 report by providing a more precise design of the proposed experiments and presents a complete evaluation of the experimental uncertainties. In the CED-1 report, corresponding to the preliminary design of the experiments, IRSN identified several promising configurations that could be implemented in the SPRF/CX facility of SNL. They use metallic molybdenum either in the form of foils between the UO 2 pellets inside BUCCX rods, or in the form of sleeves surrounding 7uPCX rods. In this CED-2 report, a new design using molybdenum sleeves surrounding BUCCX rods is also analyzed and the experimental uncertainties of all the proposed configurations are estimated. Given the constraints to carry out the experiments and the costs associated with the manufacturing of the foils, the experiments using molybdenum foils are discarded. Similarly, the design using molybdenum sleeves around BUCCX rods leads to significant manufacturing costs which could certainly be partially offset by use of existing grids but which would lead to slightly lower values of the integral sensitivities to the cross sections of molybdenum. Consequently, the design using molybdenum sleeves around 7uPCX rods is favored insofar as it presents higher $k_{eff}$ sensitivities to the molybdenum cross sections and that there is still possibility to reduce the number of sleeves to reduce the cost of experiments. Regarding feedback on nuclear data in support of criticality safety assessment, one of the advantages of the work described here is that the proposed experiments are not correlated with the MIRTE and FP experiments using molybdenum. In addition, they lead to higher sensitivity values in the thermal energy range than the existing experiments and partly “cover” the first resonance of the 95 Mo, which is a real advantage for improving knowledge on molybdenum cross sections.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Accelerate Nuclear Research and Development by Reducing Time and Cost Spend in the Pre-conceptual Design Phase of Advanced Reactor Experiments

The design process of every new concept, such as advanced nuclear reactors or associated experiments, starts with the pre-conceptual design phase. In this phase, the viability of a wide range of design options needs to be assessed quickly, to understand the operating envelope and its feasibility. A variety of physics models (thermal-hydraulics, neutronics, mechanical design, etc.) has to be considered at this very first design stage and optimum component sizes and materials (e.g. heat exchangers, piping, turbomachinery, coolant type, etc.) have to be chosen for a given set of boundary conditions (e.g. heat source, heat sink, flow rate, etc.). Detailed solutions such as provided by high fidelity methods like computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Monte Carlo methods, etc. and even lower fidelity tools such as system or subchannel codes, etc. are usually not used during the pre-conceptual design due to the relatively long time needed to create input models, the computational time to obtain a solution and the lack of flexibility to quickly investigate different combinations of components, individual component sizes and material properties. High fidelity tools are usually only employed in the conceptual design and later phases once a base concept has been identified during the pre-conceptual design stage. The current practice during the pre-conceptual design stage is that analysts collect the needed equations, material properties, closure laws, etc. and create ad-hoc solutions form scratch for every new problem. There clearly is a lack of a flexible scoping tool that can be used during pre-conceptional design before higher fidelity tools (as described above) come into play. To reduce user errors in ad-hoc solutions and increase fidelity and efficiency, this project aims to investigate and develop a user-friendly scoping tool to address the thermal-hydraulic designing needs during preconceptual experiment design, i.e. Thermal-hydraulic Research Universal Scoping Tool (TRUST). The success of TRUST will provide the nuclear engineers with an easy-to-use and affordable calculator for early reactor system design and optimization.

42 ENGINEERING↗

The Modern Design of Experiments for Configuration Aerodynamics: A Case Study

The effects of slowly varying and persisting covariate effects on the accuracy and precision of experimental result is reviewed, as is the rationale for run-order randomization as a quality assurance tactic employed in the Modern Design of Experiments (MDOE) to defend against such effects. Considerable analytical complexity is introduced by restrictions on randomization in configuration aerodynamics tests because they involve hard-to-change configuration variables that cannot be randomized conveniently. Tradeoffs are examined between quality and productivity associated with varying degrees of rigor in accounting for such randomization restrictions. Certain characteristics of a configuration aerodynamics test are considered that may justify a relaxed accounting for randomization restrictions to achieve a significant reduction in analytical complexity with a comparably negligible adverse impact on the validity of the experimental results.

DeLoach, Richard↗

Consort 3 flight experiments

The third sounding rocket payload in the Consort program was launched from the White Sands Missile Range on May 16, 1990. It carried 12 experiments designed to investigate materials processes in low gravity. All of the experiments were reflights from the Consort 2 payload that was launched on November 1989 but failed to achieve microgravity because of a malfunction in the launch vehicle. Four national Centers for the Commercial Development of Space participated in the mission. The payload included five experiments and two accelerometer systems that flew on Consort 1 and seven new experiments, designed and developed since Consort 1. Experiments from Consort 1 incorporated hardware modifications and changes in experimental parameters based on mission results. The new experiments covered a variety of polymeric and biological investigations. A new power distribution and control system designed to provide discrete, computer-supervised, experiment power monitoring and control was flight qualified on Consort 3. Consort 3 featured very late access (3-5 h before launch vs 27-30 h for Consort 1) for installation of sensitive biological specimens. The integrated payload and mission sequence of events are described. Changes in the Consort 1 experiments are defined and the objectives, methods, and expectations for new experiments are discussed.

Wessling, Francis C.↗

Optimizing Batch Crystallization with Model-based Design of Experiments

Adaptive and self-optimizing intelligent systems such as digital twins are increasingly important in science and engineering. Digital twins utilize mathematical models to provide added precision to decision-making. However, physics-informed models are challenging to build, calibrate, and validate with existing data science methods. Model-based design of experiments (MBDoE) is a popular framework for optimizing data collection to maximize parameter precision in mathematical models and digital twins. In this work, we apply MBDoE, facilitated by the open-source package Pyomo.DoE, to train and validate mathematical models for batch crystallization. We quantitatively examined the estimability of the model parameters for experiments with different cooling rates. This analysis provides a quantitative explanation for the heuristic of using multiple experiments at different cooling rates.

Lynch, Hailey↗

Directed Design of Experiments for Validating Probability of Detection Capability of NDE Systems (DOEPOD)

The capability of an inspection system is established by applications of various methodologies to determine the probability of detection (POD). One accepted metric of an adequate inspection system is that there is 95% confidence that the POD is greater than 90% (90/95 POD). Directed design of experiments for probability of detection (DOEPOD) has been developed to provide an efficient and accurate methodology that yields observed POD and confidence bounds for both Hit- Miss or signal amplitude testing. Specifically, DOEPOD demands utilization of observance of occurrences. Directed DOEPOD does not assume prescribed POD logarithmic or similar functions with assumed adequacy over a wide range of flaw sizes and inspection system technologies, so that multi-parameter curve fitting or model optimization approaches to generate a POD curve are not required.

Generazio, Edward R.↗

Statistical Design of Experiments Enables Rapid Exploration of Perfluorobutane Sulfonate Degradation

The phase-out of long-chain PFAS has led to the proliferation of highly recalcitrant short-chain analogs, and mineralization technologies for these short-chain PFAS are needed to mitigate their deleterious effects on environmental and human health. In this study, we utilize a statistical design of experiments, specifically, response surface methodology, to rapidly evaluate the electrochemical degradation of the short-chain PFAS, perfluorobutane sulfonate (PFBS). We evaluate the impacts of the three primary electrochemical parameters (concentration of PFBS, concentration of supporting electrolyte, and applied current) over multiple orders of magnitude on the three primary reaction outcomes of electrochemical PFBS degradation (incomplete PFBS decomposition, complete PFBS mineralization as fluorine, and anodic energy consumption). Our results correspond with literature and clearly identify the well-known tradeoff between energy consumption and complete mineralization. Intriguingly, partial PFBS decomposition and energy consumption demonstrate nonlinear dependencies in the current/supporting electrolyte concentration space and the current/PFBS concentration space, respectively. These findings highlight the utility of the response surface methodology model to efficiently interrogate a large parameter space, identifying both common results and less-obvious interactions between electrochemical parameters and their influences on reaction outcomes.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Model-Based Sequential Design of Experiments for Pilot Testing of Novel Water-Lean CO2 Capture Solvent

Poster for the 2024 Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Meeting. It summarizes work done on process modeling and uncertainty quantification in preparation for the test campaign at the National Carbon Capture Center for a general audience. The poster includes sections detailing background on the EEMPA solvent, sequential design of experiments, process modeling (including results from the model), uncertainty quantification, and the goals of the test campaign.

Hedrick, Katherine↗