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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 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1999

Pin Load Control Applied to Retractable Pin Tool Technology and Its Characterization

Until the development of retractable pin tool (RPT) technology, friction stir welding (FSW) was limited to constant thickness joining of aluminum materials and the choices of keyhole elimination focused on traditional fusion and plug weld repair techniques. An invention, US Patent Number 5,893,507, "Auto-Adjustable Pin Tool for Friction Stir Welding" assigned to NASA, demonstrated an approach to resolve these serious drawbacks. This approach brings forth a technique that allows the crater, or keyhole, to be closed out automatically at the end of the weld joint without adding any additional equipment or material. Also the probe length can be varied automatically in the weld joint to compensate for material thickness changes, such as, in a tapered joint. This paper reports the effects of pin extension and retraction rates in the weld joint and its correlation to weld quality. The investigation utilized a pin load-detecting device that was integrated in the Phase IIA RPT designed by Boeing for NASA/MSFC. The RPT modification provided pin load data that was accessed and used to eliminate root side indications and determine pin manipulation rates necessary to produce consistence homogeneous joints.

Olegoetz, P.↗
NASA NTRS2000

Pin Load Control Applied to Retractable Pin Tool Technology and its Characterization

Until the development of retractable pin tool (RPT) technology, friction stir welding (FSW) was limited to constant thickness joining of aluminum materials and the choices of keyhole elimination focused on traditional fusion and plug weld repair techniques. An invention, US Patent Number 5,893,507, "Auto-Adjustable Pin Tool for Friction Stir Welding" assigned to NASA, demonstrated an approach to resolve these serious drawbacks. This approach brings forth a technique that allows the crater, or keyhole, to be closed out automatically at the end of the weld joint without adding any additional equipment or material. Also the probe length can be varied automatically in the weld joint to compensate for material thickness changes, such as, in a tapered joint. This paper reports the effects of pin extension and retraction rates in the weld joint and its correlation to weld quality. The investigation utilized a pin load-detecting device that was integrated in the Phase 2A RPT designed by Boeing for NASA/MSFC. The RPT modification provided pin load data that was accessed and used to eliminate root side indications and determine pin manipulation rates necessary to produce consistence homogeneous joints.

Oelgoetz, Peter A.↗
NASA NTRS2000

Pin Load Control Applied to Retractable Pin Tool Technology and its Characterization

Until the development of retractable pin tool (RPT) technology, friction stir welding (FSW) was limited to constant thickness joining of aluminum materials and the choices of keyhole elimination focused on traditional fusion and plug weld repair techniques. An invention, US Patent Number 5,893.507, "Auto-Adjustable Pin Tool for Friction Stir Welding" assigned to NASA, demonstrated an approach to resolve these serious drawbacks. This approach brings forth a technique that allows the crater, or keyhole, to be closed out automatically at the end of the weld joint without adding any additional equipment or material. Also the probe length can be varied automatically in the weld joint to compensate for material thickness changes, such as, in a tapered joint. This paper reports the effects of pin extension and retraction rates in the weld joint and its correlation to weld quality. The investigation utilized a pin load-detecting device that was integrated in the Phase 2A RPT designed by Boeing for NASA/MSFC. The RPT modification provided pin load data that was accessed and used to eliminate root side indications and determine pin manipulation rates necessary to produce consistence homogeneous joints.

Oelgoetz, Peter↗
DOE OSTI2016

Application of NEM-based Pin-by-Pin HCMFD Algorithm to 3-D Core Analysis

A pin-wise reactor analysis is expected to provide a more accurate solution than the conventional nodal methods. However, a pin-wise approach is still computationally very costly though the computational performances have been enormously improved for decades. To overcome such limitation of a pin-by-pin core analysis, the HCMFD (Hybrid Course-Mesh Finite Difference) algorithm has been recently introduced. By adopting the HCMFD algorithm, a parallel computing can be applied very effectively. In the HCMFD algorithm, an iterative local-global strategy is adopted with a combination of two CMFD acceleration methods for the pin-wise core analysis. The global eigenvalue problem is solved by one-node CMFD, while the local fixed-source problems are solved by two-node CMFD based on the NEM (nodal expansion method). In the HCMFD computational scheme, a parallel computing can effectively be applied since most of the computational efforts are consumed to solve the local problems, and they can be solved in parallel. Previously, only a 2-D HCMFD algorithm was developed and its numerical efficiency was evaluated. In this paper, a 3D HCMFD scheme is introduced and some 3-D problems were analyzed to verify its applicability to 3D pin-wise core analysis. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Self-regulation of charged defect compensation and formation energy pinning in semiconductors

Current theoretical analyses of defect properties without solving the detailed balance equations often estimate Fermi-level pinning position by omitting free carriers and assume defect concentrations can be always tuned by atomic chemical potentials. This could be misleading in some circumstance. Here we clarify that: (1) Because the Fermi-level pinning is determined not only by defect states but also by free carriers from band-edge states, band-edge states should be treated explicitly in the same footing as the defect states in practice; (2) defect formation energy, thus defect density, could be pinned and independent on atomic chemical potentials due to the entanglement of atomic chemical potentials and Fermi energy, in contrast to the usual expectation that defect formation energy can always be tuned by varying the atomic chemical potentials; and (3) the charged defect compensation behavior, i.e., most of donors are compensated by acceptors or vice versa, is self-regulated when defect formation energies are pinned. The last two phenomena are more dominant in wide-gap semiconductors or when the defect formation energies are small. Using NaCl and CH 3 NH 3 PbI 3 as examples, we illustrate these unexpected behaviors. Our analysis thus provides new insights that enrich the understanding of the defect physics in semiconductors and insulators.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Mitigation and Diagnosis of Pin-Hole Formation in Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cells

In this work, we implement a calendering technique to flatten stray fibers within the gas diffusion media, thereby mitigating pin-hole formation in the hot-pressed MEAs. We have investigated the influence of calendering on the long-term durability for several types of gas diffusion electrodes (GDEs) using a combined chemical and mechanical accelerated stress test (AST). The calendered MEAs demonstrate an average AST lifetime improvement of 77% relative to the as-fabricated MEAs.

AMR↗
DOE OSTI2016

Temperature dependent simulation of diamond depleted Schottky PIN diodes

Diamond is considered as an ideal material for high field and high power devices due to its high breakdown field, high lightly doped carrier mobility, and high thermal conductivity. The modeling and simulation of diamond devices are therefore important to predict the performances of diamond based devices. In this context, we use Silvaco{sup ®} Atlas, a drift-diffusion based commercial software, to model diamond based power devices. The models used in Atlas were modified to account for both variable range and nearest neighbor hopping transport in the impurity bands associated with high activation energies for boron doped and phosphorus doped diamond. The models were fit to experimentally reported resistivity data over a wide range of doping concentrations and temperatures. We compare to recent data on depleted diamond Schottky PIN diodes demonstrating low turn-on voltages and high reverse breakdown voltages, which could be useful for high power rectifying applications due to the low turn-on voltage enabling high forward current densities. Three dimensional simulations of the depleted Schottky PIN diamond devices were performed and the results are verified with experimental data at different operating temperatures.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
NASA NTRS1991

Heat transfer and pressure drop in a compact pin-fin heat exchanger with pin orientation at 18 deg to the flow direction

The heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics of a novel, compact heat exchanger in helium gas were measured at 3.5 MPa and Reynolds numbers of 450 to 12,000. The pin-fin specimen consisted of pins, 0.51 mm high and spaced 2.03 mm on centers, spanning a channel through which the helium flows; the angle of the row of pins to the flow direction was 18 deg. The specimen was radiatively heated on the top side at heat fluxes up to 74 W/sq cm and insulated on the back side. Correlations were developed for the friction factor and Nusselt number. The Nusselt number compares favorably to those of past studies of staggered pin-fins, when the measured temperatures are extrapolated to the temperature of the wall-fluid interface.

Olson, D. A.↗
DOE OSTI2014

Magnetic pinning in a superconducting film by a ferromagnetic layer with stripe domains

A magnetic study of superconductor/ferromagnet bilayers was performed by hysteresis loops and temperature-dependent magnetization measurements. The superconductor/ferromagnet bilayers consist of a Nb film deposited on a Py film with weak perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. By comparing the temperature-dependent magnetization data obtained on samples with different ferromagnetic layer thickness, a decrease of the magnetic pinning with increasing thickness of the ferromagnetic layer has been found. This is confirmed by the reduction of the Nb film critical current density at low fields extracted by using the magnetic irreversibility of the hysteresis loops. Here, the reduction of the pinning can be related to the increase of the stripe width in the ferromagnetic layer observed by magnetic force microscopy (MFM) measurements.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
NASA NTRS1968

Dc pin-to-pin testing of integrated circuits

External pin-to-pin nondestructive testing procedure measures the electrical characteristics of each element in an integrated circuit. The procedure involves choosing specific pairs of pins and applying appropriate test voltages to them.

Thomas, E. F.↗
DOE OSTI2016

Comparison of subchannel and averaged channel thermal-hydraulic descriptions on coupled pin-by-pin neutronic calculations

Best-estimate transient analysis of Light Water Reactors (LWRs) requires high accuracy code systems solving neutronics (NK), thermal-hydraulics (TH) and thermal-mechanics to model the core behavior. For long time, nodal diffusion methods for solution of the transport equation using assembly size computational meshes have been applied neglecting the details within the fuel assembly, or using 'pin power reconstruction' techniques to predict those details. Moreover, the multiphysics analysis has been commonly performed coupling those neutronic diffusion methods to thermal-hydraulic system codes using a nodalization of several fuel assemblies per computational node without taking into account the effects that this type of averaging can have on the results obtained. This paper presents the work accomplished with the coupled system COBAYA4/CTF for a preliminary analysis of the effect of the different accuracy levels in the NK and TH domain. COBAYA4 is a neutronic code able to solve the diffusion equation at two resolution levels, nodal and pin by pin (PbP). CTF is a thermo-hydraulic code able to solve the coolant conservation equations also at two levels, channel (fuel assembly averaged solution) and sub-channel (real cooling channel) level. The coupled system COBAYA4/CTF is used through SALOME platform, i.e. SALOME is the software able to map conveniently the NK and TH meshes. This coupling allows combining different resolution levels for NK and TH problems. Therefore, the study of the effect of using different resolutions for the NK and TH nodalizations has been performed applying the system to a fuel assembly with selected boundary conditions. (authors)

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2016

Engineered pinning landscapes for enhanced 2G coil wire

We demonstrate a twofold increase in the in-field critical current of AMSC's standard 2G coil wire by irradiation with 18-MeV Au ions. The optimum pinning enhancement is achieved with a dose of 6 × 10 11 Au ions/cm 2 . Although the 77 K, self-field critical current is reduced by about 35%, the in-field critical current (H//c) shows a significant enhancement between 4 and 50 K in fields > 1 T. The process was used for the roll-to-roll irradiation of AMSC's standard 46-mm-wide production coated conductor strips, which were further processed into standard copper laminated coil wire. The long-length wires show the same enhancement as attained with short static irradiated samples. The roll-to-roll irradiation process can be incorporated in the standard 2G wire manufacturing, with no modifications to the current process. In conclusion, the enhanced performance of the wire will benefit rotating machine and magnet applications.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2015

Reduction of Fermi level pinning and recombination at polycrystalline CdTe surfaces by laser irradiation

Laser processing of polycrystalline CdTe is a promising approach that could potentially increase module manufacturing throughput while reducing capital expenditure costs. For these benefits to be realized, the basic effects of laser irradiation on CdTe must be ascertained. In this study, we utilize surface photovoltage spectroscopy (SPS) to investigate the changes to the electronic properties of the surface of polycrystalline CdTe solar cell stacks induced by continuous-wave laser annealing. The experimental data explained within a model consisting of two space charge regions, one at the CdTe/air interface and one at the CdTe/CdS junction, are used to interpret our SPS results. The frequency dependence and phase spectra of the SPS signal are also discussed. To support the SPS findings, low-temperature spectrally-resolved photoluminescence and time-resolved photoluminescence were also measured. The data show that a modest laser treatment of 250 W/cm{sup 2} with a dwell time of 20 s is sufficient to reduce the effects of Fermi level pinning at the surface due to surface defects.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2021

Combined microwave and laser Rayleigh scattering diagnostics for pin-to-pin nanosecond discharges

In this work, the temporal decay of electrons produced by an atmospheric pin-to-pin nanosecond discharge operating in the spark regime was measured via a combination of microwave Rayleigh scattering (MRS) and laser Rayleigh scattering (LRS). Due to the initial energy deposition of the nanosecond pulse, a variation in the local gas density occurs on the timescale of electron decay. Thus, the assumption of a constant collisional frequency is no longer applicable when electron number data are extracted from MRS measurements. Furthermore, to recalibrate MRS measurements throughout the electron decay period, temporally resolved LRS measurements of the local gas density were performed over the event duration. The local gas density was calculated to be 30% of the ambient level during the later stages of electron decay, and it recovers at about 1 ms after discharge. A shock front traveling approximately 500 m/s was additionally observed. Coupled with plasma volume calibration via temporally resolved intensified charge-coupled device imaging, the corrected decay curves of the electron number and electron number density are presented with a measured peak electron number density of 4.5 × 1015 cm -3 and a decay rate of ~(0.1–0.35) × 10 7 s -1 . A hybrid MRS and LRS diagnostic technique can be applied for a broad spectrum of atmospheric-pressure microplasmas where a variation in the gas number density is expected due to energy deposition in the discharge.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2021

Experimental study of atmospheric pressure single-pulse nanosecond discharge in pin-to-pin configuration

We present an experimental study of nanosecond high-voltage discharges in a pin-to-pin electrode configuration at atmospheric conditions operating in single-pulse mode (no memory effects). Discharge parameters were measured using microwave Rayleigh scattering, laser Rayleigh scattering, optical emission spectroscopy enhanced with a nanosecond probing pulse, and fast photography. Spark and corona discharge regimes were studied for electrode gap sizes 2-10 mm and discharge pulse duration of 90 ns. The spark regime was observed for gaps < 6 mm using discharge pulse energies of 0.6-1 mJ per mm of the gap length. Higher electron number densities, total electron number per gap length, discharge currents, and gas temperatures were observed for smaller electrode gaps and larger pulse energies, reaching maximal values of about 7.5 x 10 15 cm -3 , 3.5 x 10 11 electrons per mm, 22 A, and 4,000 K (at 10 microseconds after the discharge), respectively, for a 2 mm gap and 1 mJ/mm discharge pulse energy. Initial breakdown was followed by a secondary breakdown occurring about 30-70 ns later and was associated with ignition of a cathode spot and transition to cathodic arc. Here, a majority of the discharge pulse energy was deposited into the gas before the secondary breakdown (85-89%). The electron number density after the ns-discharge pulse decayed with a characteristic time scale of 150 ns governed by dissociative recombination and electron attachment to oxygen mechanisms. For the corona regime, substantially lower pulse energies (~0.1 mJ/mm), peak conduction current (1-2 A), and electron numbers (3-5 x 10 10 electrons per mm), and gas temperatures (360 K) were observed.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Initial transient stage of pin-to-pin nanosecond repetitively pulsed discharges in air

In this work, evolution of parameters of nanosecond repetitively pulsed (NRP) discharges in pin-to-pin configuration in air was studied during the transient stage of initial 20 discharge pulses. Gas and plasma parameters in the discharge gap were measured using coherent microwave scattering, optical emission spectroscopy, and laser Rayleigh scattering for NRP discharges at repetition frequencies of 1, 10, and 100 kHz. Memory effects (when perturbations induced by the previous discharge pulse would not decay fully until the subsequent pulse) were detected for the repetition frequencies of 10 and 100 kHz. For 10 kHz NRP discharge, the discharge parameters experienced significant change after the first pulse and continued to substantially fluctuate between subsequent pulses due to rapid evolution of gas density and temperature during the 100 μs inter-pulse time caused by intense redistribution of the flow field in the gap on that time scale. For 100 kHz NRP discharge, the discharge pulse parameters reached a new steady-state at about five pulses after initiation. Further, this new steady-state was associated with well-reproducible parameters between the discharge pulses and substantial reduction in breakdown voltage, discharge pulse energy, and electron number density in comparison to the first discharge pulse. For repetition frequencies 1–100 kHz considered in this work, the memory effects can be likely attributed to the reduction in gas number density and increase in the gas temperature that cannot fully recover to ambient conditions before subsequent discharge pulses.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Experimental study of high-energy single-pulse nanosecond discharges in pin-to-pin configuration

Single-pulse pin-to-pin nanosecond pulsed discharges in ambient air (gap distances of 3–7 mm) were investigated at high pulse energies (∼20–30 mJ deposited energy per 11 ns full width at half maximum pulse). A Michelson interferometry setup (532 nm continuous-wave laser) was employed to record time-resolved interferograms of the discharge, enabling spatially resolved calculation of the electron number density. An intensified charge-coupled device camera was used to capture the spatiotemporal evolution of the discharge (streamer formation and spark channel development), and Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Spectroscopy (CARS) was used to measure post-discharge N 2 vibrational temperatures. Discharge current and voltage were monitored with a back-current shunt. The discharge was initiated with simultaneous cathode-directed and anode-directed streamers that bridge the gap within ∼1 ns and form a luminous, filamentary plasma channel immediately after breakdown. Laser interferometry measurements showed peak electron number densities of the order of 10 1 7–10 18 cm −3 , occurring about 15–20 ns after pulse arrival at the discharge gap. Shorter gap discharges yielded higher peak electron densities, consistent with the higher energy density in the smaller gaps. Spatially, the electron density was highest near the electrodes and decreased toward the midgap region, with 5 and 7 mm gaps exhibiting a pronounced drop in the central channel. CARS indicated initial vibrational temperatures of approximately 4000–6000 K in the spark core of ∼50 ns after the discharge onset, decaying on a ∼500 ns timescale as the plasma cooled and recombined.

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy↗