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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Expanding the Field of Climate Finance

Over the past twenty-one years, the Financial Innovations Roundtable (FIR), located at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire, has worked to address problems related to access to capital for low- and moderate-income consumers and communities. Since 2014, the event has been co-hosted by the Federal Reserve Board. The FIR works with a range of financial institutions, government agencies, foundations, and trade associations to access their expertise for problem-solving discussions. The 2020 FIR focused on the expanding field of climate finance and was co-hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and The Climate Safe Lending Network. The event was originally slated to be in-person in San Francisco in May 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic and shifted to an online event hosted November 16‒17, 2020. A significant amount has happened in 2020 on climate finance, racial justice, the economy, and COVID-19. The shocks and stresses of climate change are creating risks in low- and moderate-income communities as well as in the financial sector broadly. The 2020 FIR offered an opportunity to discuss the challenges and opportunities banks and Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) face as they address these risks and how these institutions can help increase individual, institutional, and community-wide resilience. The program explored new and modified products that address climate risk in communities and how those products can be scaled. Conversations focused around: • The progress that has been made in the climate finance field and the challenges that lie ahead for financial institutions’ climate impact and climate-related risk. • Promising opportunities to decarbonize investments and finance low-carbon technology and infrastructure. • How lenders, insurers, housing organizations, and the public sector can work together to reduce housing instability due to climate-related factors and increase the climate-resilience of homes and neighborhoods. • Solutions to help communities address a wide range of related issues, including home weatherization and disaster preparation, home insurance loss, and climate gentrification and displacement. • Discussing lessons learned from other sectors such as renewable energy in order to design both people-based and place-based finance solutions that promote racial and economic inclusion. 1 • The need for all financial institutions to acknowledge that climate risks and racial inequity are systemic risks affecting their bottom line. • The role that bank regulators can play in promoting collaboration across the financial sector and in leading by example with regard to climate finance. • Mapping out concrete action-item initiatives including policy and industry pathways to climate safe lending as well as building a financing platform to provide clean energy to low-income communities. • More broadly, in order to systemically address climate risks, we will need to work together as a range of stakeholders across sectors and collaborate on shared goals and projects.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Building Collaborative Proving Grounds for R2O2R – NASA/CCMC - NOAA/Space Weather Prediction Testbed (SWPT) Partnership

In 2016 and 2019, Executive Orders were signed by the President to prepare the Nation for Space Weather Events. At the forefront of being able to achieve this goal is the necessity to accelerate and enhance R2O2R. To drive this initiative, the Space Weather R2O2R Framework, initially led by NOAA and NASA, was developed. At the very center of the framework is the Space Weather Proving Grounds effort that will allow various institutions to collaborate, share, and advance their space weather modeling and simulation capabilities. The first of these Proving Grounds is the Architecture for Collaborative Evaluation (ACE) environment shared between the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at NASA and the Space Weather Prediction Testbed (SWPT) at NOAA. Since 2019, the ACE environment has been set up on the AWS cloud where it utilizes AWS cloud services and Docker containerization technology.

T. Tsui↗
NASA NTRS2002

Continuing Development of a Collaborative Plan to Further Engage South Dakota in NASA's Earth Science Enterprise

An ongoing set of research planning activities have occurred in South Dakota as a consequence of the past two years of NASA-EPSCoR Preparation Grants. During this time a group of approximately 60 scientists, engineers, and university administrators in South Dakota have been directly involved as "theme team" members in a series of five all-day meetings to identify the research and technological priorities that are consistent both with NASA-ESE's interests and the State's expertise. Institutions represented within the group's membership include: South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, South Dakota State University, Augustana College, University of South Dakota, USGS EROS Data Center, Si ranks College, Santa Gleska University, Sisseton Wahpeton Community College, USGS Water Resources Division, US National Weather Service, and the SD Department of Environment & Natural Resources. Many of these organizations are also members and affiliates of the SD Space Grant Consortium. The evolving plan has been guided by the following desirable actions: 1. To establish new contacts and strengthen existing linkages with NASA Centers, relevant NASA researchers, and key personnel at the USGS EROS Data Center. 2. To promote participation from the State's major research institutions, State agencies, and relevant businesses in South Dakota that are interested in strengthening our scientific and technological enterprises. 3. To develop the State's scientific talent and infrastructure for enhanced competitiveness in research, development, and technology-based economic development. 4. To encourage greater participation by under represented groups, especially Native Americans, in scientific education and research. 5. To build greater public and political support in South Dakota for the overall science, engineering, and technology enterprise. 6. To communicate the benefits of current and future NASA programs to the progress and development of South Dakota, the Northern Great Plains Region, and the Nation.

Farwell, Sherry O.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Advocacy and Allyship by Men for Women in Engineering-Related Fields at the College Level

Diversity enables better and more creative problem solving, with greater financial impact on organizations, according to multiple studies in the past 10 years. One long-standing limitation on diversity in technology fields is the persistently-low representation of females. This is often seen in the collegiate environment more than in the professional world, and greater efforts need to be made in college classrooms and labs to address it. Most succinctly, more men need to directly involve themselves as advocates for and allies of women. This panel engages with professionals of both binary gender identities who currently ally and advocate for women in engineering, computing, and technology fields. The goals of the panel are to identify common reasons why men should advocate for women, create support around the simple actions that can be taken in advocacy, and encourage greater allyship for women in the academic world and beyond. The panelists include both men and women from across multiple intersectional identities. The questions include (1) for what reasons are you an ally or advocate for women in engineering-related fields, (2) what experiences have you had in which you have had to take immediate action as an advocate or ally, (3) what do you recommend for easy-to-implement actions to advocate, and (4) how can advocates and allies help implement change at their own institutions. For the paper, each panelist would be asked these questions and their answers would be provided unedited, followed by a summary discussion of actionable items. For the panel presentation session, each panelist will have the opportunity to highlight aspects of their answers bring life to their thoughts to each question and together with other members of the panel can build for an in-depth discussion.

Brian Kirkmeyer↗
DOE OSTI2022

“I Would Purposely Try to Keep them Separated”: Language Ideologies, Language Policy, and Beliefs about Emergent Bilinguals in Career and Technical Education

Abstract In the policy context of college and career readiness, career and technical education (CTE) is growing in popularity, especially for students who are underserved in academic high school programs. While CTE has shown promise for some students, very little research exists on its potential for emergent bilingual students (EBs). Thus, building on research of deficit perceptions of EBs and language ideologies (LIs), this study examines how LIs and deficit perspectives are reproduced in CTE contexts across Pennsylvania. Using a sequential mixed‐methods design, we found that, while CTE educators held generally positive attitudes toward EBs, they were influenced by monoglossic language ideology and standard language ideology. These LIs, along with other institutional factors, led educators to implement restrictive language policies within their classrooms. These implications serve to inform how, with a lack of clear language policy within CTE programs, teachers relied on their personal beliefs and reproduced deficit ideologies in the creation of classroom‐level policies.

Emerick, Mark R.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Robust nonlinear control of vectored thrust aircraft

An interdisciplinary program in robust control for nonlinear systems with applications to a variety of engineering problems is outlined. Major emphasis will be placed on flight control, with both experimental and analytical studies. This program builds on recent new results in control theory for stability, stabilization, robust stability, robust performance, synthesis, and model reduction in a unified framework using Linear Fractional Transformations (LFT's), Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI's), and the structured singular value micron. Most of these new advances have been accomplished by the Caltech controls group independently or in collaboration with researchers in other institutions. These recent results offer a new and remarkably unified framework for all aspects of robust control, but what is particularly important for this program is that they also have important implications for system identification and control of nonlinear systems. This combines well with Caltech's expertise in nonlinear control theory, both in geometric methods and methods for systems with constraints and saturations.

Doyle, John C.↗
DOE OSTI2022

Community Energy Planning: Best Practices and Lessons Learned in NREL's Work with Communities

The clean energy transition is accelerating due to local, state, and national actions combined with external market forces. Regardless of where goals are set and decisions are made, clean energy deployment occurs on the ground in communities. As a result, communities increasingly need technical expertise and assistance with planning for and managing the energy transition. Building on decades of work with state, local, and tribal jurisdictions, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) increasingly provides community-driven modeling, analysis, and technical assistance to enable more data-driven and equitable community energy planning. To inform and enhance NREL's capabilities in community energy planning and provide a resource for others working in this space, the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) Sustainable Communities Catalyzer supported this best-practices presentation based on interviews with seasoned NREL practitioners and a literature review on equitable community energy planning. Findings include five best practices for community energy planning that NREL practitioners and others can apply to strengthen their impact: 1) do your homework in preparation for community interactions; 2) be humble, authentic, and honest in your interactions with community members; 3) respect community agency in every step of the process; 4) meet the community where they are; 5) democratize participation.

best practices↗
DOE OSTI2026

A collective trigger for widespread planetesimal formation revealed by accretion ages

The formation of planetesimals was an integral part of the cascading series of processes that built the terrestrial planets. To illuminate planetesimal formation, here we develop a refined thermal evolution model to calculate the formation ages of meteorite parent planetesimals. This model includes chemical reactions and phase changes during heating, as well as natural variations in the proportions of the constituent phases of these planetesimals. We find that the parent bodies of non-carbonaceous (NC) and carbonaceous (CC) iron meteorites start forming at very similar times ( ∼ 0.95 Myr after calcium-aluminium-rich inclusion [CAI] formation) and occupy overlapping time windows. NC and CC chondrite parent bodies formed later during non-overlapping periods. We combine these ages with proportions of isotopic end-members we recover from mixing models to construct records of motion throughout the protoplanetary disk. These records argue that NC and CC material traversed the barrier in the disk after ∼ 0.95 Myr after CAI formation. The onset of this motion coincided with planetesimal formation, indicating that the phenomenon that drove motion also triggered planetesimal formation. We argue that this feature also served as the semi-permeable barrier in the disk. Although its identity is uncertain, the effects this phenomenon had on the timing of planetesimal formation and motion through the disk can now serve as constraints on models of disk evolution. Models that reproduce these effects would elucidate the nature and implications of this phenomenon, which is key to unlocking a holistic model of terrestrial planet building.

Astronomy and AstroPhysics↗
NASA NTRS1978

Application of solar energy; Proceedings of the Third Southeastern Conference, Huntsville, Ala., April 17-19, 1978

Demonstration projects, systems-subsystems simulation programs, applications (heating, cooling, agricultural, industrial), and climatic data testing (standards, economics, institutional) are the topics of the book. Economics of preheating water for commercial use and collecting, processing, and dissemination of data for the national demonstration program are discussed. Computer simulation of a solar energy system and graphical representation of solar collector performance are considered. Attention is given to solar driven heat pumps, solar cooling equipment, hybrid passive/active solar systems, and solar farm buildings. Evaluation of a thermographic scanning device for solar energy and conservation applications, use of meteorological data in system evaluation, and biomass conversion potential are presented.

Wu, S. T.↗
NASA NTRS2004

To Boldly Go: America's Next Era in Space. Machine Consciousness and the Exploration of Space

Dr. France Cordova, NASA's Chief Scientist, chaired this meeting, another part of the NASA Administrator's Seminar Series. She introduced Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, who welcomed the attendees, and noted that the two speakers have a running feud regarding the possibility of creating robots that can 'think'. Dr. Cordova then introduced the first speaker, Dr. Roger Penrose of the Mathematical Institute at Oxford in the U.K. His primary interests are in mathematics, physics, information systems technology, and artificial intelligence. He thinks that robots cannot be made to 'think' and that consciousness is not computable. Dr. Hans Moravec, who spoke next, has opinions and activities that are related to, but substantially different from those of Dr. Penrose. Dr. Moravec believes that he can build a robot that can act based on the deductions that it will make. To mimic human thinking capabilities, he figures that a robot ultimately will need to be able to handle ten trillion computations per second. He predicts that his goal of building a 'thinking' robot will be met in the 2030-2040 time period. He pointed out that he already has built a car that successfully drove itself from Washington, DC to San Diego, CA. He commented that a human being, was ready to take over driving the car, if necessary, but there was no need. The robots envisioned by Dr. Moravec would not only be able to 'think', but also would have human-like emotions, and ultimately would be able to reproduce. The discussion that followed raised questions about the morality of sending human-like robots into outer space. Also a concern was expressed that human-like robots might perceive humans as a threat and become dangerous to people.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2021

Strategies for the Design and Operation of Resilient Extraterrestrial Habitats

An Earth-independent permanent extraterrestrial habitat system must function as intended under continuous disruptive conditions, and with significantly limited Earth support and extended uncrewed periods. Designing for the demands that extreme environments such as wild temperature fluctuations, galactic cosmic rays, destructive dust, meteoroid impacts (direct or indirect), vibrations, and solar particle events, will place on long-term deep space habitats represents one of the greatest challenges in this endeavor. This context necessitates that we establish the know-how and technologies to build habitat systems that are resilient. Resilience is not simply robustness or redundancy: it is a system property that accounts for both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions via the design choices and maintenance processes and adapts to them in operation. We currently lack the frameworks and technologies needed to achieve a high level of resilience in a habitat system. The Resilient ExtraTerrestrial Habitats Institute (RETHi) has the mission of leveraging existing novel technologies to provide situational awareness and autonomy to enable the design of habitats that are able to adapt, absorb and rapidly recover from expected and unexpected disruptions. We are establishing both fully virtual and coupled physical-virtual simulation capabilities that will enable us to explore a wide range of potential deep space SmartHab configurations and operating modes.

Space habitats↗
NASA NTRS2018

Risk Tolerance and Safety Culture: Minimizing the Risk of Catastrophe by Bringing the Lessons of Space Home

The Johnson Space Center has pursued integrating risk management practices and techniques throughout a large organization with an extraordinarily diverse mission. Past mission and institutional failures have been used to inform NASA's safety culture and a implement a uniform risk management environment. Basics from the loss prevention industry have influenced NASA's approach to sustaining its unique, yet aging, infrastructure. Lessons learned at NASA can augment and enhance occupational safety, health and risk management capabilities within hazardous industries. By focusing on risk informed decision-making, building a pervasive safety culture, and accommodating human factors, NASA's safety capabilities have been specifically developed to minimize the risk of loss of life and loss of mission.

Loyd, David↗
NASA NTRS2018

Risk Tolerance and Safety Culture: Minimizing the Risk of Catastrophe by Bringing the Lessons of Space Home

The Johnson Space Center has pursued integrating safety culture and risk management practices and techniques throughout a large organization with an extraordinarily diverse mission. Past mission and institutional failures have been used to inform NASA's safety culture and a implement a uniform risk management environment. Basics from the loss prevention industry have influenced NASA's approach to sustaining its unique, yet aging, infrastructure. Lessons learned at NASA can augment and enhance occupational safety, health and risk management capabilities within hazardous industries. By focusing on risk informed decision-making, building a pervasive safety culture, and accommodating human factors, NASA's safety capabilities have been specifically developed to minimize the risk of loss of life and loss of mission.

Mishap↗
NASA NTRS2019

Surface Emissivity Impacts on GOES-R Series Multi-Spectral Imagery Applications

Value-added imagery products from the GOES-R series Advanced Baseline Imager are used to identify features of interest for operational forecasters, including: blowing dust, smoke, volcanic ash, cloud cover, atmospheric moisture, biomass fires and snow cover. These features each have a specific spectral signal that algorithms are designed to detect, but those signals are not always unique to just a single feature. Sometimes, the surface can mimic the spectral signal associated with an atmospheric feature of interest, creating a false alarm in a value-added product which negatively impacts interpretation of that product. This case study focuses on one such situation where areas of desert in the southwestern United States mimic the positive value associated with low clouds in the Brightness Temperature Difference (BTD) between the 10.35 μm and 3.9 μm channels, producing a false alarm. In order to characterize these “false alarm” areas, this study uses the cloud-cleared background product from the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) to create a dataset of the cloud-free surface. Previous results have shown that cloud-cleared backgrounds of the 10.35 μm-3.9 μm BTD have successfully identified areas of positive BTDs in the cloud-free environment, proving that it is a property of the surface emissivity and a true “false alarm”. This study builds on that previous research to further characterize the seasonality of the “false-alarm” regions and to catalogue how they impact interpretation of multi-spectral imagery products from the GOES-R series ABI, especially the Nighttime Microphysics RGB created by NASA Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center.

Burke, Angela↗
NASA NTRS2021

Strategies for the Design and Operation of Resilient Extraterrestrial Habitats

An Earth-independent permanent extraterrestrial habitat system must function as intended under continuous disruptive conditions, and with significantly limited Earth support and extended uncrewed periods. Designing for the demands that extreme environments such as wild temperature fluctuations, galactic cosmic rays, destructive dust, meteoroid impacts (direct or indirect), vibrations, and solar particle events, will place on long-term deep space habitats represents one of the greatest challenges in this endeavor. This context necessitates that we establish the know-how and technologies to build habitat systems that are resilient. Resilience is not simply robustness or redundancy: it is a system property that accounts for both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions via the design choices and maintenance processes, and adapts to them in operation. We currently lack the frameworks and technologies needed to achieve a high level of resilience in a habitat system. The Resilient Extra Terrestrial Habitats Institute (RETHi) has the mission of leveraging existing novel technologies to provide situational awareness and autonomy to enable the design of habitats that are able to adapt, absorb and rapidly recover from expected and unexpected disruptions. We are establishing both fully virtual and coupled physical-virtual simulation capabilities that will enable us to explore a wide range of potential deep space Smart Hab configurations and operating modes.

Space habitats↗
DOE OSTI2022

Enabling Predictive Scale-Bridging Simulations through Active Learning (Institutional Computing Annual Report (Project w21_alscalebridging)) [Slides]

The goal of this project was to develop, demonstrate, and provide a new capability to achieve greater physical fidelity in large-scale simulations, rather than the usual brute-force increases in the number of mesh elements or particles. Transport in nanoporous media, critical to hydrocarbon extraction from tight shale formations, is affected by molecular-level interactions. Several coarse-scale Lattice Boltzmann model (LBM) parameters cannot be directly computed, so instead we calibrate them to molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, by building emulators that mimic MD and LBM behavior and then training an upscaler. The resulting machine learning (ML)-based scale-bridging framework is up to 7 orders of magnitude faster than direct MD.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗
NASA NTRS1962

Mechanical Design of Spacecraft

In the spring of 1962, engineers from the Engineering Mechanics Division of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory gave a series of lectures on spacecraft design at the Engineering Design seminars conducted at the California Institute of Technology. Several of these lectures were subsequently given at Stanford University as part of the Space Technology seminar series sponsored by the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Presented here are notes taken from these lectures. The lectures were conceived with the intent of providing the audience with a glimpse of the activities of a few mechanical engineers who are involved in designing, building, and testing spacecraft. Engineering courses generally consist of heavily idealized problems in order to allow the more efficient teaching of mathematical technique. Students, therefore, receive a somewhat limited exposure to actual engineering problems, which are typified by more unknowns than equations. For this reason it was considered valuable to demonstrate some of the problems faced by spacecraft designers, the processes used to arrive at solutions, and the interactions between the engineer and the remainder of the organization in which he is constrained to operate. These lecture notes are not so much a compilation of sophisticated techniques of analysis as they are a collection of examples of spacecraft hardware and associated problems. They will be of interest not so much to the experienced spacecraft designer as to those who wonder what part the mechanical engineer plays in an effort such as the exploration of space.

STRUCTURAL MATERIAL↗
NASA NTRS2004

Parametric Studies of Flow Separation using Air Injection

Boundary Layer separation causes the airfoil to stall and therefore imposes dramatic performance degradation on the airfoil. In recent years, flow separation control has been one of the active research areas in the field of aerodynamics due to its promising performance improvements on the lifting device. These active flow separation control techniques include steady and unsteady air injection as well as suction on the airfoil surface etc. This paper will be focusing on the steady and unsteady air injection on the airfoil. Although wind tunnel experiments revealed that the performance improvements on the airfoil using injection techniques, the details of how the key variables such as air injection slot geometry and air injection angle etc impact the effectiveness of flow separation control via air injection has not been studied. A parametric study of both steady and unsteady air injection active flow control will be the main objective for this summer. For steady injection, the key variables include the slot geometry, orientation, spacing, air injection velocity as well as the injection angle. For unsteady injection, the injection frequency will also be investigated. Key metrics such as lift coefficient, drag coefficient, total pressure loss and total injection mass will be used to measure the effectiveness of the control technique. A design of experiments using the Box-Behnken Design is set up in order to determine how each of the variables affects each of the key metrics. Design of experiment is used so that the number of experimental runs will be at minimum and still be able to predict which variables are the key contributors to the responses. The experiments will then be conducted in the 1ft by 1ft wind tunnel according to the design of experiment settings. The data obtained from the experiments will be imported into JMP, statistical software, to generate sets of response surface equations which represent the statistical empirical model for each of the metrics as a function of the key variables. Next, the variables such as the slot geometry can be optimized using the build-in optimizer within JMP. Finally, a wind tunnel testing will be conducted using the optimized slot geometry and other key variables to verify the empirical statistical model. The long term goal for this effort is to assess the impacts of active flow control using air injection at system level as one of the task plan included in the NASAs URETI program with Georgia Institute of Technology.

Zhang, Wei↗