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TEM Video Compressive Sensing

One of the main limitations of imaging at high spatial and temporal resolution during in-situ TEM experiments is the frame rate of the camera being used to image the dynamic process. While the recent development of direct detectors has provided the hardware to achieve frame rates approaching 0.1ms, the cameras are expensive and must replace existing detectors. In this paper, we examine the use of coded aperture compressive sensing methods [1, 2, 3, 4] to increase the framerate of any camera with simple, low-cost hardware modifications. The coded aperture approach allows multiple sub-frames to be coded and integrated into a single camera frame during the acquisition process, and then extracted upon readout using statistical compressive sensing inversion. Our simulations show that it should be possible to increase the speed of any camera by at least an order of magnitude. Compressive Sensing (CS) combines sensing and compression in one operation, and thus provides an approach that could further improve the temporal resolution while correspondingly reducing the electron dose rate. Because the signal is measured in a compressive manner, fewer total measurements are required. When applied to TEM video capture, compressive imaging couled improve acquisition speed and reduce the electron dose rate. CS is a recent concept, and has come to the forefront due the seminal work of Candès [5]. Since the publication of Candès, there has been enormous growth in the application of CS and development of CS variants. For electron microscopy applications, the concept of CS has also been recently applied to electron tomography [6], and reduction of electron dose in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) imaging [7]. To demonstrate the applicability of coded aperture CS video reconstruction for atomic level imaging, we simulate compressive sensing on observations of Pd nanoparticles and Ag nanoparticles during exposure to high temperatures and other environmental conditions. Figure 1 highlights the results from the Pd nanoparticle experiment. On the left, 10 frames are reconstructed from a single coded frame—the original frames are shown for comparison. On the right a selection of three frames are shown from reconstructions at compression levels 10,20,30. The reconstructions, which are not post-processed, are true to the original and degrade in a straightforward manner. The final choice of compression level will obviously depend on both the temporal and spatial resolution required for a specific imaging task, but the results indicate that an increase in speed of better than an order of magnitude should be possible for all experiments. References: [1] P Llull, X Liao, X Yuan et al. Optics express 21(9), (2013), p. 10526. [2] J Yang, X Yuan, X Liao et al. Image Processing, IEEE Trans 23(11), (2014), p. 4863. [3] X Yuan, J Yang, P Llull et al. In ICIP 2013 (IEEE), p. 14. [4] X Yuan, P Llull, X Liao et al. In CVPR 2014. p. 3318. [5] EJ Candès, J Romberg and T Tao. Information Theory, IEEE Trans 52(2), (2006), p. 489. [6] P Binev, W Dahmen, R DeVore et al. In Modeling Nanoscale Imaging in Electron Microscopy, eds. T Vogt, W Dahmen and P Binev (Springer US), Nanostructure Science and Technology (2012). p. 73. [7] A Stevens, H Yang, L Carin et al. Microscopy 63(1), (2014), pp. 41.

Stevens, Andrew↗

Viscous dissipation in two-dimensional compression of turbulence

Nonradial hydrodynamic flow can be generated or amplified during plasma compression by various mechanisms, including the compression itself. In certain circumstances, the plasma may reach a viscous state; for example, in compression experiments seeking fusion, the fuel plasma may reach a viscous state late in the compression due in part to the rising fuel temperature. Here, we consider viscous dissipation of nonradial flow in the case of initially isotropic, three-dimensional (3D), turbulent flow fields compressed at constant velocity in two dimensions. Prior work in the case of 3D compressions has shown the possibility of effective viscous dissipation of nonradial flow under compression. We show that, theoretically, complete viscous dissipation of the nonradial flow should still occur in the 2D case when the plasma heating is adiabatic and the viscosity has the (strong) Braginskii temperature dependence (μ~ T 5/2 ). Futhermore, in the general case, the amount of compression required is very large even for modest initial Reynolds numbers, with the compression reaching an intermediate state dominated by variations only in the noncompressed direction. We show that both the nonlinearity and boundary conditions can play important roles in setting the characteristics and ease of the viscous dissipation.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A mechanism for reduced compression in indirectly driven layered capsule implosions

High-yield implosions on the National Ignition Facility rely on maintaining low entropy in the deuterium–tritium fuel, quantified by its adiabat, in order to efficiently couple energy to the hot spot through high compression of the fuel layer. We present very-high-resolution xRAGE simulation results that study the impacts of interfacial mixing and the jetting of materials due to surface defects, defects on internal interfaces, voids, and engineering features on fuel layer compression. Defects and voids are typically neglected in implosion simulations due to their small size and three-dimensional geometry. Our results showed that supersonic jets of material arise through weak spots in the shell at peak implosion velocity that prevent uniform compression of the fuel layer even when they do not introduce contaminant into the hot spot. This occurs despite maintaining low fuel entropy, since the formation of the weak spots involves nonradial displacement of fuel mass. In contrast, simulations show that fuel–ablator mixing due to interfacial instabilities has a much smaller impact on compression. We show that defects on interior interfaces of plastic capsules decrease compression by 15% to 25% and interfacial mixing between the ablator and fuel decreases compression by less than 1% for implosions with plastic or high-density carbon (HDC) ablators. For low adiabat implosions, the impact of jetting seeded by the support tent can also decrease the compression by 25%. We demonstrate that the inclusion of interior defects in simulations can explain the inferred compression in two fielded plastic capsule implosions and that the inclusion of voids, for which available characterization has large uncertainties, in simulations of HDC capsule implosions has a qualitatively consistent impact. This mechanism offers a potential explanation for persistently overestimated fuel compression in design simulations of layered implosions on the National Ignition Facility.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Efficient DNA sequence compression with neural networks

Abstract Background The increasing production of genomic data has led to an intensified need for models that can cope efficiently with the lossless compression of DNA sequences. Important applications include long-term storage and compression-based data analysis. In the literature, only a few recent articles propose the use of neural networks for DNA sequence compression. However, they fall short when compared with specific DNA compression tools, such as GeCo2. This limitation is due to the absence of models specifically designed for DNA sequences. In this work, we combine the power of neural networks with specific DNA models. For this purpose, we created GeCo3, a new genomic sequence compressor that uses neural networks for mixing multiple context and substitution-tolerant context models. Findings We benchmark GeCo3 as a reference-free DNA compressor in 5 datasets, including a balanced and comprehensive dataset of DNA sequences, the Y-chromosome and human mitogenome, 2 compilations of archaeal and virus genomes, 4 whole genomes, and 2 collections of FASTQ data of a human virome and ancient DNA. GeCo3 achieves a solid improvement in compression over the previous version (GeCo2) of $2.4\%$, $7.1\%$, $6.1\%$, $5.8\%$, and $6.0\%$, respectively. To test its performance as a reference-based DNA compressor, we benchmark GeCo3 in 4 datasets constituted by the pairwise compression of the chromosomes of the genomes of several primates. GeCo3 improves the compression in $12.4\%$, $11.7\%$, $10.8\%$, and $10.1\%$ over the state of the art. The cost of this compression improvement is some additional computational time (1.7–3 times slower than GeCo2). The RAM use is constant, and the tool scales efficiently, independently of the sequence size. Overall, these values outperform the state of the art. Conclusions GeCo3 is a genomic sequence compressor with a neural network mixing approach that provides additional gains over top specific genomic compressors. The proposed mixing method is portable, requiring only the probabilities of the models as inputs, providing easy adaptation to other data compressors or compression-based data analysis tools. GeCo3 is released under GPLv3 and is available for free download at https://github.com/cobilab/geco3.

Silva, Milton↗

Unbalanced Parallel I/O: An Often-Neglected Side Effect of Lossy Scientific Data Compression

Lossy compression techniques have demonstrated promising results in significantly reducing the scientific data size while guaranteeing the compression error bounds. However, one important yet often neglected side effect of lossy scientific data compression is its impact on the performance of parallel I/O. Our key observation is that the compressed data size is often highly skewed across processes in lossy scientific compression. To understand this behavior, we conduct extensive experiments where we apply three lossy compressors MGARD, ZFP, and SZ, which are specifically designed and optimized for scientific data, to three real-world scientific applications Gray-Scott simulation, WarpX, and XGC. Our analysis result demonstrates that the size of the compressed data is always skewed even if the original data is evenly decomposed among processes. Such skewness widely exists in different scientific applications using different compressors as long as the information density of the data varies across processes. We then systematically study how this side effect of lossy scientific data compression impacts the performance of parallel I/O. We observe that the skewness in the sizes of the compressed data often leads to I/O imbalance, which can significantly reduce the efficiency of I/O bandwidth utilization if not properly handled. In addition, writing data concurrently to a single shared file through MPI-IO library is more sensitive to the unbalanced I/O loads. Therefore, we believe our research community should pay more attention to the unbalanced parallel I/O caused by lossy scientific data compression.

Wang, Xinying↗

FRaZ: A Generic High-Fidelity Fixed-Ratio Lossy Compression Framework for Scientific Floating-point Data

With ever-increasing volumes of scientific floating-point data being produced by high-performance computing applications, significantly reducing scientific floating-point data size is critical, and error-controlled lossy compressors have been developed for years. None of the existing scientific floating-point lossy data compressors, however, support effective fixed-ratio lossy compression. Yet fixed-ratio lossy compression for scientific floating-point data not only compresses to the requested ratio but also respects a user-specified error bound with higher fidelity. In this paper, we present FRaZ: a generic fixed-ratio lossy compression framework respecting user-specified error constraints. The contribution is twofold. (1) We develop an efficient iterative approach to accurately determine the appropriate error settings for different lossy compressors based on target compression ratios. (2) We perform a thorough performance and accuracy evaluation for our proposed fixed-ratio compression framework with multiple state-of-the-art error-controlled lossy compressors, using several real-world scientific floating-point datasets from different domains. Experiments show that FRaZ effectively identifies the optimum error setting in the entire error setting space of any given lossy compressor. While fixed-ratio lossy compression is slower than fixed-error compression, it provides an important new lossy compression technique for users of very large scientific floating-point datasets.

Underwood, Robert↗

Ultrafast Error-bounded Lossy Compression for Scientific Datasets

Today's scientific high-performance computing applications and advanced instruments are producing vast volumes of data across a wide range of domains, which impose a serious burden on data transfer and storage. Error-bounded lossy compression has been developed and widely used in the scientific community because it not only can significantly reduce the data volumes but also can strictly control the data distortion based on the user-specified error bound. Existing lossy compressors, however, cannot offer ultrafast compression speed, which is highly demanded by numerous applications or use cases (such as in-memory compression and online instrument data compression). In this paper, we propose a novel ultrafast error-bounded lossy compressor that can obtain fairly high compression performance on both CPUs and GPUs and with reasonably high compression ratios. The key contributions are threefold. (1) We propose a generic error-bounded lossy compression framework---called SZx---that achieves ultrafast performance through its novel design comprising only lightweight operations such as bitwise and addition/subtraction operations, while still keeping a high compression ratio. (2) We implement SZx on both CPUs and GPUs and optimize the performance according to their architectures. (3) We perform a comprehensive evaluation with six real-world production-level scientific datasets on both CPUs and GPUs. Experiments show that SZx is 2~16x faster than the second-fastest existing error-bounded lossy compressor (either SZ or ZFP) on CPUs and GPUs, with respect to both compression and decompression.

Yu, Xiaodong↗

Progress Summary: 12-Month Compression Set and Load Retention of Thermally Accelerated Aged Siloxane Specimens (Additively Manufactured by the Direct-Ink-Write (DIW) 3D Printing Technique) Was Measured

Motivation: Accelerated aging of polymeric materials is needed to predict their long-term mechanical functionality. Two key metrics used to evaluate their performance are compression set and load retention. A baseline(time=0)mechanical assessment was done prior to initiating the accelerated aging process to acquire initial thickness and load values for future calculation of compression set and load retention.Specimens are beingaged under compressive strain (13%for the current studies) at four different temperatures (25, 40, 55, and 70°C) for at least 1 year; compression set and load retention will be measured at various timepoints. Time-temperature superposition (TTS) will be applied to the isothermal data to obtain long-term predictions. Significance: Compression set is increasing with time and temperature, as expected. The increasing compression set is accompanied by decreasing load retention.The relativelylow compression set indicates the material is performing well.In a previous aging study, the legacy S5370 RTV foam exhibited 40% relative compression set after 12 months at 70°C, which is more than twice that of the DIW material. Progress:Data has been acquired out to the 12-month timepoint. Relative compression set and load retention versus time are shown in Fig. 1.A technical issue with the method of measuring load retention was discovered and previously reported load retention values have been adjusted; the current load retention values are estimates. TTS predictions are shown in Fig. 2.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Final TCF Report for Earth Battery: Storing Energy with Compressed Air and Heated Brine in Porous Rock

Cost-effective reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are best achieved when all low-carbon energy resources are fully utilized. This includes base-load power: nuclear energy (NE) and fossil energy (FE), integrated with CO 2 capture, use, and storage (CCUS), and variable renewable energy (VRE) (wind and solar); but, current CCUS options don’t justify CO 2 -capture costs and existing energy-storage approaches lack the capacity and storage duration needed to fully utilize all forms of low-carbon energy without curtailment. The Earth Battery is designed to meet these challenges by synergistically integrating conventional- and renewable-energy resources, allowing each to contribute more efficiently to the grid than if operated independently. The Earth Battery stores energy underground as pressure and heat, using compressed air and/or CO 2 , together with heated brine. These fluids are stored in either saline aquifers used for CO 2 or natural gas (NG) storage or in oil and gas reservoirs, making deployment possible over much of the U.S. We can provide enormous energy-storage capacity and duration. The main goal of this study was to assess the techno-economic feasibility of the versions of the Earth Battery that use compressed air energy storage (CAES). Current CAES systems use NG turbines and store air in salt caverns, which limits geographic deployment. Conventional CAES wastes much of the heat of air compression, comprising half of the compression energy. Our technology addresses these deficiencies by using permeable sedimentary rock to store air and the heat of compression as heated brine. When electricity is needed, air and hot brine are produced, with hot brine used to pre-heat air before it is fed into the expanders. Key factors affecting round-trip efficiency are (1) pressure loss in the air-storage reservoir, which depends on permeability (> 100 mD being needed for efficient operations) and (2) temperature loss in the hot-brine storage reservoir, which decreases with time as the storage formation heats up. The original scope of this project was to conduct a techno-economic assessment of diurnal storage with the CAES Earth Battery, including (1) Adiabatic CAES, which requires no fossil fuel and (2) NG/CAES, where one or more of the expansion stages are NG fueled. During its assessment, we found NG/CAES, generates excess heat of compression that can be put into long-term (seasonal) storage and be utilized in a combined-cycle fashion with the addition of steam turbines. This resulted in our developing a new Earth Battery technology, which we call the Thermal Earth Battery. We conducted energy-system analyses for the Thermal Earth Battery for various combinations of heat sources: (1) heat of FE combustion, (2) excess heat of compression from NG/CAES, and (3) solar thermal energy (STE). The other Earth Battery class we developed compresses CO 2 , rather than air; hence, it is called Compressed CO 2 Energy Storage (CCES). Finally, we developed an improved, more efficient, more versatile version of the Allam cycle, which uses pressurized CO 2 , and developed various options for integrating renewable energy and energy storage. Our improved Allam-cycle technology minimizes cooling-water consumption, while enabling reliable, dispatchable renewable energy. Although not anticipated in our original scope of work, our Topic 1 project evolved into a highly productive discovery process wherein we developed a portfolio of Earth Battery configuration options and use cases. Our ultimate objective was to evaluate those options and use cases and determine the most optimal first best use options for our Earth Battery technology. That process resulted in identifying seasonal energy storage as a niche where no other energy storage technology could compete with us. As a result, we have identified the Thermal Earth Battery, which uses conventional steam-turbine components, and our improved Allam-cycle integrated with renewable energy and energy storage as the most promising technologies to commercialize in our Topic 2 proposal. Finally, our scope included finding a commercialization team for a Topic 2 continuation of this project, which we have successfully completed.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Compressible degree of freedom (CDOF): A potential strategy for improving wave energy capture

The addition of a compressible degree of freedom (CDOF) has been shown to significantly increase the power absorption compared to a traditional rigid WEC of the same shape and mass for a variety of architectures. The present study demonstrates that a compressible point absorber, with a passive power-take-off (PTO) and optimized damping, can also achieve at the same performance levels or better than an optimally controlled rigid point absorber using reactive power from the PTO. Eliminating the need for a reactive PTO would substantially reduce costs by reducing PTO design complexity. In addition, it would negate the documented problems of reactive PTO efficiencies on absorbed power. Improvements to performance were quantified in the present study by comparing a compressible point absorber to a conventional rigid one with the same shape and mass. Wave energy is converted to mechanical energy in both cases using a linear damper PTO, with the PTO coefficient optimized for each resonance frequency and compressible volume. The large compressible volumes required to tune the compressible point absorber to the desired frequency are a practical limitation that needs to be addressed with further research; especially for low frequencies. If fact, all compressible volumes exceed the submerged volume of the point absorber by significant amounts; requiring auxiliary compressible volume storage units that are connected to the air chamber in the submerged portion of the point absorber. While realistic, these auxiliary units would increase the Cap Ex and Op Ex costs, potentially reducing the aforementioned benefits gained by CDOF. However, alternative approaches can be developed to implement CDOF without the large compressible volume requirements, including the development of flexible surface panels tuned with mechanical springs.

42 ENGINEERING↗

The compression–error trade-off for large gridded data sets

The netCDF-4 format is widely used for large gridded scientific data sets and includes several compression methods: lossy linear scaling and the non-lossy deflate and shuffle algorithms. Many multidimensional geoscientific data sets exhibit considerable variation over one or several spatial dimensions (e.g., vertically) with less variation in the remaining dimensions (e.g., horizontally). On such data sets, linear scaling with a single pair of scale and offset parameters often entails considerable loss of precision. We introduce an alternative compression method called "layer-packing" that simultaneously exploits lossy linear scaling and lossless compression. Layer-packing stores arrays (instead of a scalar pair) of scale and offset parameters. An implementation of this method is compared with lossless compression, storing data at fixed relative precision (bit-grooming) and scalar linear packing in terms of compression ratio, accuracy and speed. When viewed as a trade-off between compression and error, layer-packing yields similar results to bit-grooming (storing between 3 and 4 significant figures). Bit-grooming and layer-packing offer significantly better control of precision than scalar linear packing. Relative performance, in terms of compression and errors, of bit-groomed and layer-packed data were strongly predicted by the entropy of the exponent array, and lossless compression was well predicted by entropy of the original data array. Layer-packed data files must be "unpacked" to be readily usable. The compression and precision characteristics make layer-packing a competitive archive format for many scientific data sets.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

The effect of impact damage and circular holes on the compressive strength of a graphite-epoxy laminate

Specimens were impacted by 1.27-cm-diameter aluminum spheres with speeds ranging from 52 to 101 m/s. Some specimens were impacted without any applied compressive load and then loaded to failure to determine their residual strength. Other specimens were loaded to a prescribed axial compressive strain and impacted while at that applied load. Loaded specimens that did not fail catastrophically on impact were subsequently loaded to failure to determine their residual strength. Low-velocity impact damage was found to degrade seriously the laminate static compressive strength. Low-strain compression-compression cyclic loading was found to degrade further the compressive strength of impact-damaged specimens. Specimens with circular holes having diameters up to a third of the specimen width were loaded to failure in compression. It was found that circular holes can also degrade the static compressive strength of the laminate. The effects of circular holes and impact damage on the compressive strength of the laminate are compared.

Starnes, J. H., Jr.↗

The analysis and modeling of dilatational terms in compressible turbulence

It is shown that the dilatational terms that need to be modeled in compressible turbulence include not only the pressure-dilatation term but also another term - the compressible dissipation. The nature of these dilatational terms in homogeneous turbulence is explored by asymptotic analysis of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. A non-dimensional parameter which characterizes some compressible effects in moderate Mach number, homogeneous turbulence is identified. Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of isotropic, compressible turbulence are performed, and their results are found to be in agreement with the theoretical analysis. A model for the compressible dissipation is proposed; the model is based on the asymptotic analysis and the direct numerical simulations. This model is calibrated with reference to the DNS results regarding the influence of compressibility on the decay rate of isotropic turbulence. An application of the proposed model to the compressible mixing layer has shown that the model is able to predict the dramatically reduced growth rate of the compressible mixing layer.

Sarkar, S.↗

The analysis and modelling of dilatational terms in compressible turbulence

It is shown that the dilatational terms that need to be modeled in compressible turbulence include not only the pressure-dilatation term but also another term - the compressible dissipation. The nature of these dilatational terms in homogeneous turbulence is explored by asymptotic analysis of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations. A non-dimensional parameter which characterizes some compressible effects in moderate Mach number, homogeneous turbulence is identified. Direct numerical simulations (DNS) of isotropic, compressible turbulence are performed, and their results are found to be in agreement with the theoretical analysis. A model for the compressible dissipation is proposed; the model is based on the asymptotic analysis and the direct numerical simulations. This model is calibrated with reference to the DNS results regarding the influence of compressibility on the decay rate of isotropic turbulence. An application of the proposed model to the compressible mixing layer has shown that the model is able to predict the dramatically reduced growth rate of the compressible mixing layer.

Sarkar, S.↗

Energy Transfer and Triadic Interactions in Compressible Turbulence

Using a two-point closure theory, the Eddy-Damped-Quasi-Normal-Markovian (EDQNM) approximation, we have investigated the energy transfer process and triadic interactions of compressible turbulence. In order to analyze the compressible mode directly, the Helmholtz decomposition is used. The following issues were addressed: (1) What is the mechanism of energy exchange between the solenoidal and compressible modes, and (2) Is there an energy cascade in the compressible energy transfer process? It is concluded that the compressible energy is transferred locally from the solenoidal part to the compressible part. It is also found that there is an energy cascade of the compressible mode for high turbulent Mach number (M(sub t) greater than or equal to 0.5). Since we assume that the compressibility is weak, the magnitude of the compressible (radiative or cascade) transfer is much smaller than that of solenoidal cascade. These results are further confirmed by studying the triadic energy transfer function, the most fundamental building block of the energy transfer.

Bataille, F.↗

Compressibility Effects on the Growth and Structure of Homogeneous Turbulent Shear Flow

Compressibility effects within decaying isotropic turbulence and homogeneous turbulent shear flow have been studied using direct numerical simulation. The objective of this work is to increase our understanding of compressible turbulence and to aid the development of turbulence models for compressible flows. The numerical simulations of compressible isotropic turbulence show that compressibility effects are highly dependent on the initial conditions. The shear flow simulations, on the other hand, show that measures of compressibility evolve to become independent of their initial values and are parameterized by the root mean square Mach number. The growth rate of the turbulence in compressible homogeneous shear flow is reduced compared to that in the incompressible case. The reduced growth rate is the result of an increase in the dissipation rate and energy transfer to internal energy by the pressure-dilatation correlation. Examination of the structure of compressible homogeneous shear flow reveals the presence of eddy shocklets, which are important for the increased dissipation rate of compressible turbulence.

Blaisdell, G. A.↗

Knock-Limited Performance of Triptane and Xylidines Blended with 28-R Aviation Fuel at High Compression Ratios and Maximum-Economy Spark Setting

An investigation was conducted to evaluate the possibilities of utilizing the high-performance characteristics of triptane and xylidines blended with 28-R fuel in order to increase fuel economy by the use of high compression ratios and maximum-economy spark setting. Full-scale single-cylinder knock tests were run with 20 deg B.T.C. and maximum-economy spark settings at compression ratios of 6.9, 8.0, and 10.0, and with two inlet-air temperatures. The fuels tested consisted of triptane, four triptane and one xylidines blend with 28-R, and 28-R fuel alone. Indicated specific fuel consumption at lean mixtures was decreased approximately 17 percent at a compression ratio of 10.0 and maximum-economy spark setting, as compared to that obtained with a compression ratio of 6.9 and normal spark setting. When compression ratio was increased from 6.9 to 10.0 at an inlet-air temperature of 150 F, normal spark setting, and a fuel-air ratio of 0.065, 55-percent triptane was required with 28-R fuel to maintain the knock-limited brake power level obtained with 28-R fuel at a compression ratio of 6.9. Brake specific fuel consumption was decreased 17.5 percent at a compression ratio of 10.0 relative to that obtained at a compression ratio of 6.9. Approximately similar results were noted at an inlet-air temperature of 250 F. For concentrations up through at least 20 percent, triptane can be more efficiently used at normal than at maximum-economy spark setting to maintain a constant knock-limited power output over the range of compression ratios tested.

Held, Louis F.↗

Influence of Compression and Shear on the Strength of Composite Laminates With Z-Pinned Reinforcement

The influence of compression and shear loads on the strength of composite laminates with z-pins is evaluated parametrically using a 2D Finite Element Code (FLASH) based on Cosserat couple stress theory. Meshes were generated for three unique combinations of z-pin diameter and density. A laminated plate theory analysis was performed on several layups to determine the bi-axial stresses in the zero degree plies. These stresses, in turn, were used to determine the magnitude of the relative load steps prescribed in the FLASH analyses. Results indicated that increasing pin density was more detrimental to in-plane compression strength than increasing pin diameter. Compression strengths of lamina without z-pins agreed well with a closed form expression derived by Budiansky and Fleck. FLASH results for lamina with z-pins were consistent with the closed form results, and FLASH results without z-pins, if the initial fiber waviness due to z-pin insertion was added to the fiber waviness in the material to yield a total misalignment. Addition of 10% shear to the compression loading significantly reduced the lamina strength compared to pure compression loading. Addition of 50% shear to the compression indicated shear yielding rather than kink band formation as the likely failure mode. Two different stiffener reinforced skin configurations with z-pins, one quasi-isotropic and one orthotropic, were also analyzed. Six unique loading cases ranging from pure compression to compression plus 50% shear were analyzed assuming material fiber waviness misalignment angles of 0, 1, and 2 degrees. Compression strength decreased with increased shear loading for both configurations, with the quasi-isotropic configuration yielding lower strengths than the orthotropic configuration.

OBrien, T. Kevin↗