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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

A Java-Enabled Interactive Graphical Gas Turbine Propulsion System Simulator

This paper describes a gas turbine simulation system which utilizes the newly developed Java language environment software system. The system provides an interactive graphical environment which allows the quick and efficient construction and analysis of arbitrary gas turbine propulsion systems. The simulation system couples a graphical user interface, developed using the Java Abstract Window Toolkit, and a transient, space- averaged, aero-thermodynamic gas turbine analysis method, both entirely coded in the Java language. The combined package provides analytical, graphical and data management tools which allow the user to construct and control engine simulations by manipulating graphical objects on the computer display screen. Distributed simulations, including parallel processing and distributed database access across the Internet and World-Wide Web (WWW), are made possible through services provided by the Java environment.

Reed, John A.↗

Simulation of Rotary-Wing Near-Wake Vortex Structures Using Navier-Stokes CFD Methods

This paper will use high-resolution Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to model the near-wake vortex roll-up behind rotor blades. The locations and strengths of the trailing vortices will be determined from newly-developed visualization and analysis software tools applied to the CFD solutions. Computational results for rotor nearwake vortices will be used to study the near-wake vortex roll up for highly-twisted tiltrotor blades. These rotor blades typically have combinations of positive and negative spanwise loading and complex vortex wake interactions. Results of the computational studies will be compared to vortex-lattice wake models that are frequently used in rotorcraft comprehensive codes. Information from these comparisons will be used to improve the rotor wake models in the Tilt-Rotor Acoustic Code (TRAC) portion of NASA's Short Haul Civil Transport program (SHCT). Accurate modeling of the rotor wake is an important part of this program and crucial to the successful design of future civil tiltrotor aircraft. The rotor wake system plays an important role in blade-vortex interaction noise, a major problem for all rotorcraft including tiltrotors.

Kenwright, David↗

TEAMER: Drifting Hydrophone System - Block Diagram and Pre-Amplifier Calibrations

This data release is part of TEAMER RFTS 2, where the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies (CIMRS) at Oregon State University is performing hardware and software development and integration of four newly designed drifting hydrophone systems for underwater noise measurements at marine renewable energy projects. These new acoustic systems will provide advanced technology support available for use at both tidal and wave energy deployments adding additional resources to the limited amount of drifting hydrophone technologies that are available to the marine energy community The submission data contains 2 files plus a Post-Access Report: One file containing the calibration parameters for four (4) pre-amplifier boards used on the drifting hydrophones. Pre-amplifier boards are model "WB PREAMP REV6," with serial numbers; 28, 29, 30, and 31. One image file illustrating the system functional block diagram of the drifting hydrophone system configuration.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

Investigating techniques in the generation of support software

The performance of the Meta assembler processor software package previously provided for the Space Ultrareliable Modular Computer (SUMC) at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) was verified. A number of adjustments were made to the processor following the rehosting of the SUMC software development facility (S4) on a newly acquired IBM 360/65. The assembler was configured to provide cross assembly capability for various target computers.

Edwards, A. J.↗

Prioritizing Scientific Data for Transmission

A software system has been developed for prioritizing newly acquired geological data onboard a planetary rover. The system has been designed to enable efficient use of limited communication resources by transmitting the data likely to have the most scientific value. This software operates onboard a rover by analyzing collected data, identifying potential scientific targets, and then using that information to prioritize data for transmission to Earth. Currently, the system is focused on the analysis of acquired images, although the general techniques are applicable to a wide range of data modalities. Image prioritization is performed using two main steps. In the first step, the software detects features of interest from each image. In its current application, the system is focused on visual properties of rocks. Thus, rocks are located in each image and rock properties, such as shape, texture, and albedo, are extracted from the identified rocks. In the second step, the features extracted from a group of images are used to prioritize the images using three different methods: (1) identification of key target signature (finding specific rock features the scientist has identified as important), (2) novelty detection (finding rocks we haven t seen before), and (3) representative rock sampling (finding the most average sample of each rock type). These methods use techniques such as K-means unsupervised clustering and a discrimination-based kernel classifier to rank images based on their interest level.

Castano, Rebecca↗

Software for Start-Ups: Introducing the NASA in Silicon Valley

Ames is in the unique position to cater to tech companies and start-ups in California's Silicon Valley. The majority of Ames' technology transfer is software, which is very attractive to newly developing companies in the Valley as they create their business plans and develop their technology portfolio structures. Ames is collaborating with several "accelerators", "incubators" and academic technology transfer programs to connect start-ups with the space agency's technologies and software. The ultimate goal is to enable successful businesses by harnessing the unique resources of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem, AND beyond! Note: All info is in the public domain.

Williams, Kimberly↗

Building confidence in models for complex barrier systems for radionuclides

The modeling and simulation of the Cement-clay Interaction-Diffusion field (CI-D) experiment at the Mont Terri site in Switzerland presented here demonstrates that it is possible to capture the multiscale physical and chemical features of natural and engineered barrier systems for radionuclides. The simulations are successfully carried out with the newly developed CrunchODiTi high-performance computing software that accounts for multiple continua, including a continuum representing the electrical double layer (EDL) developed along negatively charged clay particles in clay rock. The simulation also accounts for both the complex three-dimensional (3D) geometry, expected as the norm in a geological waste repository, and the anisotropy of the geological formation. In addition, the high resolution of the model makes it possible to include "skin effects" developed at the interface between highly reactive materials, in this case between the high pH cement and the circumneutral but electrostatic Opalinus Clay. The successful history matching with the field experiment demonstrates that the distinct geochemical and physical properties of the cement and the Opalinus Clay in the CI-D experiment can be accounted for. Such analyses are essential for developing a defensible safety case for the underground storage of radioactive waste.

Sarsenbayev, Dauren↗

The TSO Logic and G2 Software Product

This internship assignment for spring 2014 was at John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC), in NASAs Engineering and Technology (NE) group in support of the Control and Data Systems Division (NE-C) within the Systems Hardware Engineering Branch. (NEC-4) The primary focus was in system integration and benchmarking utilizing two separate computer software products. The first half of this 2014 internship is spent in assisting NE-C4s Electronics and Embedded Systems Engineer, Kelvin Ruiz and fellow intern Scott Ditto with the evaluation of a newly piece of software, called G2. Its developed by the Gensym Corporation and introduced to the group as a tool used in monitoring launch environments. All fellow interns and employees of the G2 group have been working together in order to better understand the significance of the G2 application and how KSC can benefit from its capabilities. The second stage of this Spring project is to assist with an ongoing integration of a benchmarking tool, developed by a group of engineers from a Canadian based organization known as TSO Logic. Guided by NE-C4s Computer Engineer, Allen Villorin, NASA 2014 interns put forth great effort in helping to integrate TSOs software into the Spaceport Processing Systems Development Laboratory (SPSDL) for further testing and evaluating. The TSO Logic group claims that their software is designed for, monitoring and reducing energy consumption at in-house server farms and large data centers, allows data centers to control the power state of servers, without impacting availability or performance and without changes to infrastructure and the focus of the assignment is to test this theory. TSOs Aaron Rallo Founder and CEO, and Chris Tivel CTO, both came to KSC to assist with the installation of their software in the SPSDL laboratory. TSOs software is installed onto 24 individual workstations running three different operating systems. The workstations were divided into three groups of 8 with each group having its own operating system. The first group is comprised of Ubuntus Debian -based Linux the second group is windows 7 Professional and the third group ran Red Hat Linux. The highlight of this portion of the assignment is to compose documentation expressing the overall impression of the software and its capabilities.

TSO Logic↗

Empirically based analysis of failures in software systems

An empirical analysis of software-system failures is used to study several specific issues in software testing, reliability analysis, and reuse. Failure data from a large software manufacturer and a NASA production environment were collected and analyzed. The systems ranged in size from 30,000 to over 100,000 lines. The results show that (1) the first 15 percent of the test cases detected 67 percent of the high-severity failures and 50 percent of all failures; (2) multiple fault-detection and testing phases may result in a significant increase in reliability or none at all; (3) composite measures of system reliability did not adequately reflect reliability at the function or component level; (4) developers were biased toward portions of systems that would be heavily tested; (5) fault-proneness of reused or modified components was 74 percent less than that of newly developed components; and (6) systems with more reused software had lower component development effort, but not lower component fault-proneness.

Selby, Richard W.↗

Autonomous Navigation, Guidance, and Control Software in a Low SWaP Box

Onboard autonomy is a necessity for responsive space operations. Autonomous navigation, guidance, and control (NGC) enables space missions to reduce their dependence on high demand ground assets and costly ground personnel. It also allows for in-situ decision making and higher return on mission data. A flight software and hardware system providing this capability, called “autoNGC,” is currently being developed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for infusion into multiple future missions. The autoNGC flight software is built on the plug-and-play architecture of the core Flight System (cFS) consisting of the standard cFS apps and newly developed autoNGC interface apps and libraries. The various apps cooperate through communication over the message-based software bus. With the plug-and-play architecture of autoNGC, cFS apps can easily be added and replaced to meet the needs of different missions, even after launch. The first flight software release of autoNGC is targeted for Summer 2024 to provide autonomous navigation at the Moon and beyond. It can perform sensor fusion of multiple measurement types including pseudo-range from a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver (including weak signal), 1-way and 2-way range and Doppler from ground stations (i.e., direct to Earth (DTE)), bearing and range from optical camera images, and accelerometer data. Accurate onboard navigation and timing is obtained through the Goddard Enhanced Onboard Navigation System (GEONS) software library which fuses different measurement types through an extended Kalman filter (EKF) framework. Optical measurements that are ingested in GEONS are first extracted from optical images by the cFS Goddard Image Analysis and Navigation Tool (cGIANT) app. If the imaged body is far enough away that it appears as a pixel or cluster of pixels, then bearing angles to the body centroid can be provided. If the body is close enough and the shape is known coarsely, then bearing angles and range to the body centroid can be derived from the limb. Bearing angles to individual surface features can also be extracted (i.e., terrain relative navigation (TRN)). Onboard guidance and control capabilities are being developed for a future release to perform autonomous station-keeping and trajectory correction maneuvers in multiple orbital regimes. Capabilities to enable distributed systems missions and constellations, such as crosslink measurements, and onboard time management are being developed as well. The first hardware implementation of autoNGC is a minimal size, weight, and power (SWaP) design allowing for inclusion into CubeSats and SmallSat-size buses. Advancements in miniaturized space processors, such as the SpaceCube 3.0 Mini and the SpaceCube Mini-Z are utilized for low SWaP while maintaining a high level of performance. The current enclosure design is 12 cm x 17 cm x 13.5 cm. The box mass is expected to be less than 2 kg, and the nominal power is 21 W. In order to accommodate a wide range of missions, the hardware interfaces are designed for flexibility with a variety of sensor inputs. Through comprehensive testing in the software-in-the-loop, processor-in-the-loop, and hardware-in-the-loop test beds that are concurrently being developed, autoNGC is expected to achieve TRL 6 by late 2024.

Sun Hur-Diaz↗

Experimental Ignition Delay Time Measurements and Chemical Kinetics Modeling of Hydrogen/Ammonia/Natural Gas Fuels

In recent years, hydrogen-carrying compounds have accrued interest as an alternative to traditional fossil fuels due to their function as zero-emission fuels. As such, there is interest in investigating hydrogen-carrying compounds to improve understanding of the fuels' characteristics for use in high pressure systems. In the current study, the oxidation of ammonia/natural gas/hydrogen mixtures was carried out to study carbon monoxide (CO) formation profiles as well as the ignition delay times (IDTs) behind reflected shock waves in order to refine chemical kinetic models. Experiments were carried out in the University of Central Florida's shock tube facility by utilizing chemiluminescence to obtain OH* emission and laser absorption spectroscopy to obtain CO profiles over a temperature range between 1200 K and 1800 K with an average pressure of 2.2 atm. Experimental mixtures included both neat and combination natural gas/hydrogen with ammonia addition, with all mixtures except one having an equivalence ratio of 1. Results were then compared with the GRI 3.0 mechanism, as well as the newly developed UCF 2022 mechanism utilizing chemkin-pro software. In general, both models were able to capture the trend in auto-ignition delay times and CO time histories for natural gas and ammonia mixtures. However, for ammonia–hydrogen mixtures, GRI 3.0 failed to predict ignition delay times, whereas the UCF 2022 mechanism was able to capture the IDTs within the uncertainty limits of the experiments. A sensitivity analysis was conducted for different mixtures to understand the important reactions at the experimental conditions. Lastly, a reaction pathway analysis was carried out to understand important ammonia decomposition pathways in the presence of hydrogen and natural gas.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Prototype Test Results for the Single Photon Detection SLR2000 Satellite Laser Ranging System

NASA's aging Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) network is scheduled to be replaced over the next few years with a fully automated single photon detection system. A prototype of this new system, called SLR2000, is currently undergoing field trials at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland to evaluate photon counting techniques and determine system hardware, software, and control algorithm performance levels and limitations. Newly developed diode pumped microchip lasers and quadrant microchannel plate-based photomultiplier tubes have enabled the development of this high repetition rate single photon detection SLR system. The SLR2000 receiver threshold is set at the single photoelectron (pe) level but tracks satellites with an average signal level typically much less than 1 pe. The 2 kHz laser fire rate aids in satellite acquisition and tracking and will enable closed loop tracking by accumulating single photon count statistics in a quadrant detector and using this information to correct for pointing errors. Laser transmitter beamwidths of 10 arcseconds (FWHM) or less are currently being used to maintain an adequate signal level for tracking while the receiver field of view (FOV) has been opened to 40 arcseconds to accommodate point ahead/look behind angular offsets. In the near future, the laser transmitter point ahead will be controlled by a pair of Risley prisms. This will allow the telescope to point behind and enable closure of the receiver FOV to roughly match the transmitter beam divergence. Bandpass filters (BPF) are removed for night tracking operations while 0.2 nm or 1 nm filters are used during daylight operation. Both day and night laser tracking of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites has been achieved with a laser transmitter energy of only 65 microjoules per pulse. Satellite tracking is presently limited to LEO satellites until the brassboard laser transmitter can be upgraded or replaced. Simultaneous tracks have also been observed with NASA s SLR standard, MOBLAS 7, for the purposes of data comparison and identification of biases. Work continues to optimize the receive optics; upgrade or replace the laser transmitter; calibrate the quadrant detector, the point ahead Risley prisms, and event timer verniers; and test normal point generation with SLR2000 data. This paper will report on the satellite tracking results to date, issues yet to be resolved, and future plans for the SLR2000 system.

Zagwodzki, Thomas W.↗

Containerization of Phase-2 Tracker Data Acquisition and Control Framework

The CMS Experiment has started an extensive upgrade program in the context of the High-Luminosity phase of the LHC (Phase-2). In order to cope with the highly demanding High-Luminosity conditions, CMS will need a completely new inner and outer tracking detectors. On top of R&D development, a Data AcQuisition (DAQ) software is being developed along with different applications to control, monitor and validate the newly produced modules of the future tracker. As more and more developers are getting involved to maintain all those codes, an environment where software and applications can work independently of the host machine operating system is crucial. The Phase-2 Tracker group decided to make use of Docker as containerization solution for its framework. This poster describes the containerization of DAQ software/applications utilized to test and validate the Tracker modules. This includes continuous integration and continuous deployment (so-called CI/CD) and running GUI applications inside containers.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Opportunities for enhancing MLCommons efforts while leveraging insights from educational MLCommons earthquake benchmarks efforts

MLCommons is an effort to develop and improve the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem through benchmarks, public data sets, and research. It consists of members from start-ups, leading companies, academics, and non-profits from around the world. The goal is to make machine learning better for everyone. In order to increase participation by others, educational institutions provide valuable opportunities for engagement. In this article, we identify numerous insights obtained from different viewpoints as part of efforts to utilize high-performance computing (HPC) big data systems in existing education while developing and conducting science benchmarks for earthquake prediction. As this activity was conducted across multiple educational efforts, we project if and how it is possible to make such efforts available on a wider scale. This includes the integration of sophisticated benchmarks into courses and research activities at universities, exposing the students and researchers to topics that are otherwise typically not sufficiently covered in current course curricula as we witnessed from our practical experience across multiple organizations. As such, we have outlined the many lessons we learned throughout these efforts, culminating in the need for benchmark carpentry for scientists using advanced computational resources. The article also presents the analysis of an earthquake prediction code benchmark while focusing on the accuracy of the results and not only on the runtime; notedly, this benchmark was created as a result of our lessons learned. Energy traces were produced throughout these benchmarks, which are vital to analyzing the power expenditure within HPC environments. Additionally, one of the insights is that in the short time of the project with limited student availability, the activity was only possible by utilizing a benchmark runtime pipeline while developing and using software to generate jobs from the permutation of hyperparameters automatically. It integrates a templated job management framework for executing tasks and experiments based on hyperparameters while leveraging hybrid compute resources available at different institutions. The software is part of a collection called cloudmesh with its newly developed components, cloudmesh-ee (experiment executor) and cloudmesh-cc (compute coordinator).

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Windfarm Operations and Maintenance cost-Benefit Analysis Tool (WOMBAT)

This report provides technical documentation and background on the newly-developed Wind Operations and Maintenance cost-Benefit Analysis Tool (WOMBAT) software. WOMBAT is an open-source model that can be used to obtain cost estimates for operations and maintenance of land-based or offshore wind power plants. The software was designed to be flexible and modular to allow for implementation of new strategies and technological innovations for wind plant maintenance. WOMBAT uses a process-based simulation approach to model day-to-day operations, repairs, and weather conditions. High-level outputs from WOMBAT, including time-based availability and annual operating costs, are found to agree with published results from other models.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Automatic Inspection During Machining

In experimental manufacturing process, numerically-controlled machine tool temporarily converts into inspection machine by installing electronic touch probes and specially-developed numerical-control software. Software drives probes in paths to and on newly machined parts and collects data on dimensions of parts.

Ransom, Clyde L.↗

Development of an e-VLBI Data Transport Software Suite with VDIF

We have developed a software library (KVTP-lib) for VLBI data transmission over the network with the VDIF (VLBI Data Interchange Format), which is the newly proposed standard VLBI data format designed for electronic data transfer over the network. The software package keeps the application layer (VDIF frame) and the transmission layer separate, so that each layer can be developed efficiently. The real-time VLBI data transmission tool sudp-send is an application tool based on the KVTP-lib library. sudp-send captures the VLBI data stream from the VSI-H interface with the K5/VSI PC-board and writes the data to file in standard Linux file format or transmits it to the network using the simple- UDP (SUDP) protocol. Another tool, sudp-recv , receives the data stream from the network and writes the data to file in a specific VLBI format (K5/VSSP, VDIF, or Mark 5B). This software system has been implemented on the Wettzell Tsukuba baseline; evaluation before operational employment is under way.

Sekido, Mamoru↗