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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
DOE OSTI2022

Employing Technology to Enable Remote Research Charrettes as a Method for Engaging Industry and Uncovering Best Practices: A Novel Approach for a Post-COVID-19 World

Methods to collect data in construction engineering and management (CEM) research are evolving, informed by recent technological advancements. One such method is research charrettes that allow effective interactions and knowledge sharing between expert industry practitioners and academic researchers, all colocated in a single venue, enabling rich data collection and live communication. A pivot point in technological evolution occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing a global shift to remote work. Hence, planned in-person research charrettes had to shift to remote sessions, relying on virtual conferencing platforms and online data collection mechanisms. Technology-enabled charrettes have allowed the authors to collect significantly richer data sets and ensure a more diverse representation of participants, while saving tremendous amounts of time. With the continuing emergence of technological applications, the world might not go back to functioning fully in person. The authors believe remote research charrettes (RRCs) will still be used in a post-COVID-19 world because of their superior performance. This paper builds on a previous publication that described traditional research charrettes as a method to enhance CEM research a decade ago; it offers a significantly updated and improved RRC method based on the knowledge gained from transitioning a dozen in-person charrettes into RRCs. It also presents performance comparisons between RRCs and traditional charrettes by quantifying metrics indicating how RRCs are more time-efficient and cost-saving, harness more participants from more diverse locations, and enable the collection of richer data sets and four times more industry comments and expert feedback. This paper also provides guidance on the integration of technology with traditional research charrettes, hence contributing to the CEM body of knowledge.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

COVID-19 impacts on residential occupancy schedules and activities in U.S. Homes in 2020 using ATUS

Many aspects of the daily lives of those living in the United States were substantially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2020. A broad diversity of measures was implemented to curb the spread of the virus, many of which included adjustments to where and how people worked, went to school, and otherwise conducted their daily lives compared to pre-pandemic times. This has impacted how residential buildings are used, how much time people spend in their homes, and as a result, how much energy these buildings consume. The main objective of this study is to analyze, at a national scale, the differences in the occupancy schedules and activities conducted in homes in the U.S., as compared to pre-pandemic. 15 years of American Time Use Survey and Current Population Survey data, from 2006 to 2020, was used in this study to analyze the occupancy schedules for both pandemic (2020) and pre-pandemic (2006–2019) times. These impacts were also analyzed with respect to variables including, weekday/weekend, month of the year, age of the occupants, household income, and household size. The impact of the pandemic on occupant schedules were most substantial in the initial months, whereas as the months progressed, these occupancy profiles slowly changed. Across 2020, people spent, on average, 8 % more time (1.9 h) in their home on weekdays, and 3–6 % (1.2 h) on weekend days. The percentage of time spent for different activities and locations within homes were also studied. For 1-member households, their time spent at home decreased whereas for 2-, 3-, and 4- member households, they spent more time at home. Overall, people spent around 45% more time doing office- and work-related activities at home compared to pre-pandemic, which is likely due to increased remote working and schooling. This research helps to improve the understanding of the occupancy presence and absence profiles in U.S. residential buildings due to the pandemic and provides new insights as to modified profiles for researchers, building designers, and policy makers.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
NASA NTRS1996

Analysis of Data from the Energetic Gamma-ray Experiment on the Gamma Ray Observatory

The work under the Grant has involved participation with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) Team in the analysis of data obtained during instrument operations and the preparation of scientific papers and proposals for future observations. The Principal Investigator (PI) has been a co-author on a total of 90 papers published in refereed professional journals since the beginning of 1991, plus many other non-refereed publications, and contributed and invited papers at professional meetings and IAU telegrams. On seven of these papers he was the lead author. The EGRET team continues to submit IAU Astronomical telegrams and present many papers at scientific meetings. The effort by the PI has involved working remotely by internet connection on the Goddard Space Flight Center Computers where the EGRET data are archived. Students have monitored instrument performance, performed Viewing Period Analyses and analyzed data remotely. The PI has completed the detailed analysis of over 20 viewing periods to search for point sources and this work has been used in developing the first and second EGRET catalog of sources, published in Supplements to the Astrophysical Journal.

Kniffen, Donald A.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Analysis of data from the energetic gamma-ray experiment on the gamma ray observatory

The work under the Grant has involved continued participation with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) Team in the analysis of data obtained during instrument operations and the preparation of scientific papers and proposals for future observations. The EGRET team was also successful on many proposals for the Phase 3 portion of the mission, including long high galactic latitude studies of the diffuse extragalactic radiation. These studies will be used in a effort to establish whether this radiation is truly diffuse or the sum of radiation from unresolved discrete sources such as radio-loud quasars. The effort involved working remotely by internet connection on the Goddard Space Flight Center Computers where the EGRET data are archived. Students have monitored instrument performance and analyzed data remotely and will continue to do so. The PI has completed the detailed analysis of five viewing periods to search for point sources and this work has been used in developing the first EGRET catalog of sources, soon to be released.

Kniffen, Donald A.↗
DOE OSTI2023

Towards a More Effective Hybrid Workforce Culture in a Computationally Focused Research Center

It is essential to Sandia National Laboratory’s continued success in scientific and technological advances and mission delivery to embrace a hybrid workforce culture under which current and future employees can thrive. This report focuses on the findings of the Hybrid Work Team for the Center for Computing Research, which met weekly from March to June 2023 and conducted a survey across the Center at Sandia. Conclusions in this report are drawn from the 9 authors of this report, which comprises the Hybrid Work Team, and 15 responses to a center-wide survey, as well as numerous conversations with colleagues. A major finding was widespread dissatisfaction with the quantity, execution, and tooling surrounding formal meetings with remote participants. While there was consensus that remote work enables people to produce high quality individual and technical work, there was also consensus that there was widespread social disconnect, with particular concern about hires that were made after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. There were many concerns about tooling and policy to facilitate remote collaboration both within Sandia and with its external collaborators. This report includes recommendations for mitigating these problems. For problems for which obvious recommendations cannot be made, ideas of what a successful solution might look like are presented.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Investigating Tropical Versus Extratropical Influences on the Southern Hemisphere Tropical Edge in the Unified Model

Abstract Since the late 1970s, observations have shown a widening of the tropical Hadley cell (HC) circulation. State‐of‐the‐art climate models reproduce the general trend along with a projected continuous expansion. Discrepancies in expansion rates of observation‐ and model‐based studies have been attributed to differences in applied methods, natural variability and model shortcomings. Furthermore, the driving influence of tropical or extratropical processes on these changes is not well understood. All of this highlights the dynamical mechanisms and the region of origin controlling the tropical width are still insufficiently understood. Here we examine the influence of systematic model biases of the atmosphere‐only Unified Model (UM) onto the simulation of the Southern Hemisphere (SH) tropical edge. We utilize nudged experiments with prescribed sea surface temperatures, where potential temperature and horizontal winds are relaxed back to ERA‐Interim reanalysis for a 20‐year period in selected regions. Correcting model biases in the tropics and extratropics separately allows us to dissect the dominant remote impacts of present model errors onto the SH tropical edge simulation. The experiments are applied to established tropical width metrics ranging from near‐surface to upper‐level metrics capturing the poleward flank of the HC. We find both regions work remotely to reduce errors in the UM fields and location of the tropical edge. Surprisingly, correcting the extratropical biases, south of 45°S, more consistently improves the tropical width across the metrics and seasons than nudging the tropics (10°N–10°S). These findings demonstrate the substantial role of extratropical influences in locating the SH tropical edge.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Onboarding in a Virtual Environment

A need for a standardized Division 10000 onboarding program for virtual hires was identified by management to formalize the way employees and interns are onboarded and trained into Division 10000. This white paper provides effective short and long-term suggestions in the efforts of improving virtual onboarding. Data suggests that remote work is going to become the forefront of many industry practices, which indicates the need of a standardized virtual onboarding practices. With our research, gap assessments, benchmarking, and conducting interviews both internally and externally, we found that clarity, culture, and connection proved to be the strongest solutions in order to maintain Sandia’s competitive edge and sustain workers both remote and in-person.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Functional Volume Assessment of an Early Version of the Mars Transit Habitat

During the summer of 2020, the NASA Mars Architecture Team (MAT) conducted a functional volume assessment of the Transit Habitat (TH). The TH has evolved substantially since that time and the current TH does not share the same internal configuration, but the insights gained from the assessment remain relevant. In virtually all architectures involving chemical, electric, or nuclear propulsion, the majority of the crew mission is spent aboard the TH. The Earth to Mars transit durations may vary from architecture to architecture, but all are on the order of hundreds of days, regardless of whether an opposition or conjunction class trajectory is selected, and regardless of whether the propulsion system is chemical, electric, or nuclear. Thus, the TH must provide capabilities appropriate to a very long duration. So, despite significant changes in the current Mars architecture over the past few years, this evaluation still provides useful recommendations in the form of habitability guidance that can be applied to current and future TH concepts. This assessment had six primary objectives: provide a sanity check to the BOC-derived TH layout; understand if we can fit the hardware and functional tasks in the volume; provide a high-level assessment of how aggressive the layout is; generate a list of challenges or assumptions necessary to make it work; generate a list of future work to refine understanding; and identify proposed requirements. All of this information is critical to drive habitat sizing studies and key architecture decisions. It was clear that a human-in-the-loop (HITL) evaluation of some kind would be necessary, but several challenges were immediately identified. The most information could be gleaned from a Desert Research and Technology Studies (DRATS) type of mission operations test (MOT), but the TH concept was too low fidelity to construct the type of prototype necessary to conduct a MOT, nor were their financial resources to do so. The next best option – and really the one most appropriate for the BOC’s stage of maturity – is a Virtual Reality (VR) walk-through evaluation. However, NASA was in a shutdown state due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the VR labs were inaccessible. As a result, a tabletop evaluation was created, using .jpg imagery from the ECM CAD model along with Excel-based datasheets. High-level crew living and working functions within the habitat were identified for evaluation. Questionnaires using Likert scales assessed acceptability of habitat functions and sim quality – the degree to which the function was represented in CAD. This enabled the evaluation to be conducted by personnel working remotely. Each function was evaluated individually along with several overarching habitability parameters and vehicle subsystems. The results of this evaluation are discussed, including methodological challenges and rating challenges. Acceptability results are discussed for functions that the participants were able to rate and participant comments for functions that could not be related are also described. Final conclusions are described, including challenges or assumptions needed to make the TH design acceptable, future work needed to refine understanding of the TH, and proposed habitat requirements based on test data.

Transit Habitat↗
DOE OSTI2024

Western States Building Energy & Controls Apprenticeship (BECA) Program

How does this project help to understand the challenges of workforce development in the commercial building energy management industry? The purpose of this project was to create a replicable, scalable, and portable apprenticeship program for building energy management and controls. This paper will demonstrate how local processes can be more adaptable and inclusive than federal processes in achieving workforce development goals. Our work provides insights into the technical effectiveness of the program, enabling others to achieve greater success in their workforce development initiatives. The project required more time and financial resources than initially anticipated and spent a year in a no-cost extension working to accomplish the Statement of Project Objectives. The original goal was to create an Industry Related Apprenticeship Program (IRAP). The development of this apprenticeship presented challenges due to the lack of existing programs for reference and the absence of relevant industry classification codes by the Department of Labor (DOL). Notably, the role of a commercial building energy analyst is not recognized by the DOL. The SIC (industry codes) do not have a good description of this job. There are many that may fall into related categories, but none are the actual duties of an energy analyst. Discussions with the DOL indicated that substantial groundwork was necessary before a national apprenticeship program could be implemented, causing delays in the program’s commencement. As a result, students experienced longer wait times before starting their apprenticeship component. The apprenticeship program officially launched on September 14, 2021. The success of the State of Oregon’s apprenticeship program, the first of its kind in the state, underscored the flexibility and effectiveness of local initiatives compared to federal efforts. The COVID-19 pandemic also significantly impacted the project’s success. Beginning in March 2020, the pandemic led to widespread closures of schools and colleges by fall 2020. By September 2021, when the apprenticeship option became available, enrollment in colleges and universities nationwide had decreased, affecting student participation in the program. Moreover, as employers transitioned their employees to remote work, there was limited interaction with external personnel, influencing the willingness of training agents (employers) to integrate additional workers into their teams. This paper addresses several challenges encountered during the project, with the hope that future workforce development efforts will benefit from these experiences. We Final Technical Report 4 | Page encourage others to engage with state and federal agencies to enhance and update pathways for workforce development and apprenticeship programs.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Origami-based Composite Space Structures

The main objective of my internship was working on developing a new type of deployable composite for space structures and new method of deployment via use of origami, composites, UV curing resins, and shape memory polymers. My role in the project was to collect an initial literature survey on the subject including origami, the history of deployable space structures, previous issues and problems faced in the field, previous and current research being done on the structural aspect as well as the materials aspect of the subject. I presented this information to our team, where we discussed and determined our research focus and project design specs. We have been making or will make decisions on the project’s purpose, material, origami type, manufacturing method, and testing methods. I am now in charge of the protype design as we enter the design stage of our research. I am using PTC Creo software to design the structural aspects of the first protype so that we can begin small scale testing. I will perform data analysis in order to review the results with our team, so we can make the next design decisions regarding changes or iterations of the design. We hope to renew this project in the next fiscal year in order to increase the TRL of the project so that it can eventually be used in multiple functions in space such as the construction of lunar habitats. In just my brief time with NASA, I have gained so much personally and professionally. I developed my ability to search through and narrow down information when doing research. In the weekly meetings I practiced presenting information to my peers and superiors, and, just as importantly, discussing and adapting to what we were learning. I acquired experience in using technology to my advantage including remote work, new software like PTC Creo, NASA archives, and connecting with others beyond my team to gain help. I enjoyed the immense resource of knowledge that my mentors had to offer, and that they gave me a large amount of responsibility in this research. I truly felt like I was contributing to something bigger than myself and understood how directly I was involved in NASA’s work. This internship has further cemented my love for space and desire to continue in the field. I have a better understanding of the research and development process and am now considering joining a research lab with my university next year.

Composite↗
DOE OSTI2022

Quantifying Movement Motivations, Demand, and Inflow-Outflow Dynamics in Four Cities (New York, Chicago, Austin, and San Diego) During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted a wide range of human activities, from food delivery habits to major moving and travel decisions. Results indicate multiple pandemic-related factors have influenced millions of relocation decisions by Americans (e.g., health risk, financial pressures, more space, and employment), and there are various positive economic and social outcomes of this influence (e.g., remote work and education), enabling more affordable living and opportunity. This paper addresses COVID-19 impacts on mobility, especially involving permanent relocations. Survey design and data analysis with U-Haul targeted customers in Austin, New York, San Diego, and Chicago to understand mobility, new moving dynamics, and motivations.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

Evidence of Residential Demand Flexibility in a 46 Townhome Neighborhood

Demand response is an important emerging part of smart grids and it has been well researched from the theoretical and modeling perspectives. The empirical evidence on demand response is scarce, resulting in a limited understanding of many important aspects of demand response, including latency, cycling, and overrides - including acceptable impacts to customer comfort, convenience, and productivity in the new remote work era. We attempt to provide additional information to address this knowledge gap by sharing early results from the 46-townhome testbed located in Atlanta, GA. We report our findings from the first three months of experimental work. These focus on the delays associated with device status updates, characteristics of user overrides of control signals, and the share of devices available for demand response. We also provide some information about the duration of demand response events and a discussion of some properties of the testbed neighborhood.

Tsybina, Eve↗
DOE OSTI2025

Does class matter? Understanding differential pandemic recovery via a building typology

This study investigates the recovery of building-level footfall from the COVID-19 pandemic using privacy-preserving mobile devices-based footfall data within 60 downtown areas in the USA and Canada. Using clustering, we identify five distinct building typologies based on their characteristics, including rent, quality and recovery rates. The results reveal significant variation of recovery rates by building features. We find negative relationships with footfall recovery for both the percentage of office and remote work tenants and building quality. In contrast, buildings with traditional work tenants and retail functions achieve higher recovery rates. We also test the ‘flight to quality’ hypothesis via on our typology results. High-quality office buildings (Class A+) continue to have high rents but experience low physical footfall recovery, which suggests that this class is not as resilient as portrayed. The findings thus suggest the importance of considering both economic and footfall resilience in evaluating the performance of office buildings.

Covid-19↗
NASA NTRS1984

Generalized bilateral control of robot arms

This paper summarizes the theory of a new form of bilateral or force-reflecting manual control of remote robot (slave) arms. The mathematics of workspace representation, command structure, kinematic and dynamic control coordination required for implementing the new form of generalized bilateral control through computer programs is presented. The paper concludes with a brief description of implementation organization of the new system using a six-degree-of-freedom backdrivable hand controller, a PUMA 560 robot arm and a distributed net of microcomputers organized in two groups: one at the remote work site and one at the control station.

Bejczy, A. K.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Holographic enhanced remote sensing system

The Holographic Enhanced Remote Sensing System (HERSS) consists of three primary subsystems: (1) an Image Acquisition System (IAS); (2) a Digital Image Processing System (DIPS); and (3) a Holographic Generation System (HGS) which multiply exposes a thermoplastic recording medium with sequential 2-D depth slices that are displayed on a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM). Full-parallax holograms were successfully generated by superimposing SLM images onto the thermoplastic and photopolymer. An improved HGS configuration utilizes the phase conjugate recording configuration, the 3-SLM-stacking technique, and the photopolymer. The holographic volume size is currently limited to the physical size of the SLM. A larger-format SLM is necessary to meet the desired 6 inch holographic volume. A photopolymer with an increased photospeed is required to ultimately meet a display update rate of less than 30 seconds. It is projected that the latter two technology developments will occur in the near future. While the IAS and DIPS subsystems were unable to meet NASA goals, an alternative technology is now available to perform the IAS/DIPS functions. Specifically, a laser range scanner can be utilized to build the HGS numerical database of the objects at the remote work site.

Iavecchia, Helene P.↗
NASA NTRS1992

An IDL-based analysis package for COBE and other skycube-formatted astronomical data

UIMAGE is a data analysis package written in IDL for the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) project. COBE has extraordinarily stringent accuracy requirements: 1 percent mid-infrared absolute photometry, 0.01 percent submillimeter absolute spectrometry, and 0.0001 percent submillimeter relative photometry. Thus, many of the transformations and image enhancements common to analysis of large data sets must be done with special care. UIMAGE is unusual in this sense in that it performs as many of its operations as possible on the data in its native format and projection, which in the case of COBE is the quadrilateralized sphereical cube ('skycube'). That is, after reprojecting the data, e.g., onto an Aitoff map, the user who performs an operation such as taking a crosscut or extracting data from a pixel is transparently acting upon the skycube data from which the projection was made, thereby preserving the accuracy of the result. Current plans call for formatting external data bases such as CO maps into the skycube format with a high-accuracy transformation, thereby allowing Guest Investigators to use UIMAGE for direct comparison of the COBE maps with those at other wavelengths from other instruments. It is completely menu-driven so that its use requires no knowledge of IDL. Its functionality includes I/O from the COBE archives, FITS files, and IDL save sets as well as standard analysis operations such as smoothing, reprojection, zooming, statistics of areas, spectral analysis, etc. One of UIMAGE's more advanced and attractive features is its terminal independence. Most of the operations (e.g., menu-item selection or pixel selection) that are driven by the mouse on an X-windows terminal are also available using arrow keys and keyboard entry (e.g., pixel coordinates) on VT200 and Tektronix-class terminals. Even limited grey scales of images are available this way. Obviously, image processing is very limited on this type of terminal, but it is nonetheless surprising how much analysis can be done on that medium. Such flexibility has the virtue of expanding the user community to those who must work remotely on non-image terminals, e.g., via modem.

Ewing, J. A.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Master-slave system with force feedback based on dynamics of virtual model

A master-slave system can extend manipulating and sensing capabilities of a human operator to a remote environment. But the master-slave system has two serious problems: one is the mechanically large impedance of the system; the other is the mechanical complexity of the slave for complex remote tasks. These two problems reduce the efficiency of the system. If the slave has local intelligence, it can help the human operator by using its good points like fast calculation and large memory. The authors suggest that the slave is a dextrous hand with many degrees of freedom able to manipulate an object of known shape. It is further suggested that the dimensions of the remote work space be shared by the human operator and the slave. The effect of the large impedance of the system can be reduced in a virtual model, a physical model constructed in a computer with physical parameters as if it were in the real world. A method to determine the damping parameter dynamically for the virtual model is proposed. Experimental results show that this virtual model is better than the virtual model with fixed damping.

Nojima, Shuji↗