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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 505 records · Page 28

EUPDF: Eulerian Monte Carlo Probability Density Function Solver for Applications With Parallel Computing, Unstructured Grids, and Sprays

The success of any solution methodology used in the study of gas-turbine combustor flows depends a great deal on how well it can model the various complex and rate controlling processes associated with the spray's turbulent transport, mixing, chemical kinetics, evaporation, and spreading rates, as well as convective and radiative heat transfer and other phenomena. The phenomena to be modeled, which are controlled by these processes, often strongly interact with each other at different times and locations. In particular, turbulence plays an important role in determining the rates of mass and heat transfer, chemical reactions, and evaporation in many practical combustion devices. The influence of turbulence in a diffusion flame manifests itself in several forms, ranging from the so-called wrinkled, or stretched, flamelets regime to the distributed combustion regime, depending upon how turbulence interacts with various flame scales. Conventional turbulence models have difficulty treating highly nonlinear reaction rates. A solution procedure based on the composition joint probability density function (PDF) approach holds the promise of modeling various important combustion phenomena relevant to practical combustion devices (such as extinction, blowoff limits, and emissions predictions) because it can account for nonlinear chemical reaction rates without making approximations. In an attempt to advance the state-of-the-art in multidimensional numerical methods, we at the NASA Lewis Research Center extended our previous work on the PDF method to unstructured grids, parallel computing, and sprays. EUPDF, which was developed by M.S. Raju of Nyma, Inc., was designed to be massively parallel and could easily be coupled with any existing gas-phase and/or spray solvers. EUPDF can use an unstructured mesh with mixed triangular, quadrilateral, and/or tetrahedral elements. The application of the PDF method showed favorable results when applied to several supersonic-diffusion flames and spray flames. The EUPDF source code will be available with the National Combustion Code (NCC) as a complete package.

Raju, M. S.↗

Software Considerations for Subscale Flight Testing of Experimental Control Laws

The NASA AirSTAR system has been designed to address the challenges associated with safe and efficient subscale flight testing of research control laws in adverse flight conditions. In this paper, software elements of this system are described, with an emphasis on components which allow for rapid prototyping and deployment of aircraft control laws. Through model-based design and automatic coding a common code-base is used for desktop analysis, piloted simulation and real-time flight control. The flight control system provides the ability to rapidly integrate and test multiple research control laws and to emulate component or sensor failures. Integrated integrity monitoring systems provide aircraft structural load protection, isolate the system from control algorithm failures, and monitor the health of telemetry streams. Finally, issues associated with software configuration management and code modularity are briefly discussed.

Murch, Austin M.↗

Design Optimization of a Variable-Speed Power Turbine

NASA's Rotary Wing Project is investigating technologies that will enable the development of revolutionary civil tilt rotor aircraft. Previous studies have shown that for large tilt rotor aircraft to be viable, the rotor speeds need to be slowed significantly during the cruise portion of the flight. This requirement to slow the rotors during cruise presents an interesting challenge to the propulsion system designer as efficient engine performance must be achieved at two drastically different operating conditions. One potential solution to this challenge is to use a transmission with multiple gear ratios and shift to the appropriate ratio during flight. This solution will require a large transmission that is likely to be maintenance intensive and will require a complex shifting procedure to maintain power to the rotors at all times. An alternative solution is to use a fixed gear ratio transmission and require the power turbine to operate efficiently over the entire speed range. This concept is referred to as a variable-speed power-turbine (VSPT) and is the focus of the current study. This paper explores the design of a variable speed power turbine for civil tilt rotor applications using design optimization techniques applied to NASA's new meanline tool, the Object-Oriented Turbomachinery Analysis Code (OTAC).

design optimization↗

Utilizing Code Generation from Models for Electric Aircraft Motor Controller Flight Software

The processes followed to develop and test safety-critical flight software significantly increase development effort and overhead in comparison to both non-safety-critical and non-flight software. Generating code from models can be used to reduce development effort; however, the processes for using code generation to develop flight software are relatively immature. This work presents an approach for developing safety-critical flight software utilizing code generation from models to reduce development time and effort. The presented use-case is of electric aircraft motor control software developed for NASA's X-57 Maxwell aircraft.

flight software↗

Accelerate M-TIP on GPUs and deploy to Summit and NERSC-9 (against simulated data) WBS 2.2.4.05 ExaFEL, Milestone ADSE13-199

We evaluated the orientation matching step in the M-TIP SPI workflow for potential offloading to accelerators. We ported the code to GPUs, benchmarked it, optimized and down-selected the best versions. The accelerated version of the orientation matching code that was developed at LANL (LANL GPU v3) is 34-55X faster than sequential, 2.4-4.9X faster than the fastest OpenMP open source version we found (FAISS OpenMP) and 1.5-4X faster than the fastest GPU open source version we found (FAISS GPU). Summit single-node GPU versions were somewhat faster than Cori GPU. Image size plays a role; mid-range image sizes take more time. The LANL CUDA multi-node, multi-GPU implementation shows mostly linear strong scaling. I/O also plays a large role; splitting data into parts improves read time and burst buffers dramatically improve read times. This work will be integrated into the M-TIP workflow as part of the next milestone ADSE13-193.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Initial Assessment of CTF for Time-at-Temperature Applications

The US nuclear industry is interested in improving the economics of their fleet of light-water reactors (LWRs) by uprating US plants. One option being considered is to regain lost margin from overly conservative fuel safety limits. The current limit requires avoidance of critical heat flux (CHF) and prevents further operation of fuel that experiences a dry-out in boiling water reactors (BWRs) or departure from nucleate boiling (DNB) in pressurized water reactors (PWRs); however, it has been shown that temporary, mild dry-out of the fuel does not necessarily increase the risk of fuel failure during its normal anticipated operating life. Such mild dry-out or DNB events may occur during a plant anticipated operational occurrence (AOO), such as a locked rotor in a PWR or a pump trip in a BWR. The time-at-temperature (TAT) approach to regulating fuel operation aims to demonstrate that the fuel rod’s integrity is not challenged during such a mild transient that leads to CHF in which the fuel operates at an elevated temperature for a brief period of time. However, implementing this approach will require extensive fuel material experimental data, as well as supporting modeling and simulation (M&S) predictions, to ensure that the predicted fuel response during AOOs, with all applicable uncertainty considered, will not threaten the safety of the fuel during the transient or the remainder of its anticipated lifecycle. To address this need, a comprehensive effort is being proposed that includes generating cladding material data under TAT conditions, assessment of available code capabilities for TAT conditions, development of new mechanistic models, and demonstration of the M&S capabilities for AOOs of interest. This will require a joint effort between the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) and Advanced Fuels Campaign (AFC) programs, as well as close collaboration with nuclear industry stakeholders. The outcome of this collaboration will result in development and assessment of capabilities that can be used by the nuclear industry to support qualification of a TAT-based fuel failure criteria safety limit. This report focuses on the thermal hydraulics (T/H) modeling capabilities and summarizes currently available data for validating the T/H subchannel code CTF for TAT conditions, as well as preliminary assessment results of the code. The initial assessment also resulted in implementation of an alternative post-CHF heat transfer package, which has been shown to significantly improve accuracy. This report is not a final assessment and does not consider all available validation data; it is intended that a future assessment will more fully validate the code for this application.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Data for "Which plant traits increase soil carbon sequestration? Empirical evidence from a long-term poplar genetic diversity trial"

This archive contains all data and code used by the following publication: Field, J. L., Sloan, B. P., Craig, M. E., Calloway, P., Ottinger, S. L., Mead, T., Abramoff, R. Z., Venegas, M. P., Chhetri, H. B., Haiby, K., Kalluri, U. C., Muchero, W., Schadt, C. W., & Mayes, M. A. (2025). Which plant traits increase soil carbon sequestration? Empirical evidence from a long-term poplar genetic diversity trial (p. 2025.02.17.638464). bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.02.17.638464 Our analysis combined several soil and root data sets collected by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researchers/collaborators from the Clatskanie Poplar Common Garden in Clatskanie, OR by from 2009-2024. The raw data data files are located */02-data/01-raw/* which we harmonized using the codes in */01-codes/01-harmonize-clatskanie-data-pub.qmd*. The final processed data set used in the paper is found at */02-data/02-processed/clatskanie-c-fit-data.csv* and its columns are described in the table below.

Sloan, Brandon [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000316304271)↗

The AGORA High-resolution Galaxy Simulations Comparison Project. III. Cosmological Zoom-in Simulation of a Milky Way–mass Halo

In this work, we present a suite of high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations to z = 4 of a 10 12 M⊙ halo at z = 0, obtained using seven contemporary astrophysical simulation codes (Art-I, Enzo, Ramses, Changa, Gadget-3, Gear, and Gizmo) widely used in the numerical galaxy formation community. The physics prescriptions for gas cooling and heating and star formation are the same as the ones used in our previous Assembling Galaxies of Resolved Anatomy (AGORA) disk comparison but now account for the effects of cosmological processes such as the expansion of the universe, intergalactic gas inflow, and the cosmic ultraviolet background radiation emitted by massive stars and quasars. In this work, we introduce the most careful comparison yet of galaxy formation simulations run by different code groups, together with a series of four calibration steps each of which is designed to reduce the number of tunable simulation parameters adopted in the final run. In the first two steps, we methodically calibrate the gas physics, such as cooling and heating, in simulations without star formation. In the third step, we seek agreement on the total stellar mass produced with the common star formation prescription used in the AGORA disk comparison, in stellar-feedback-free simulations. In the last calibration step, we activate stellar feedback, where each code group is asked to set the feedback prescription to as close to the most widely used one in its code community as possible, while aiming for convergence in the stellar mass at z = 4 to the values predicted by semiempirical models. After all the participating code groups successfully complete the calibration steps, we achieve a suite of cosmological simulations with similar mass assembly histories down to z = 4. With numerical accuracy that resolves the internal structure of a target halo (≲100 physical pc at z = 4), we find that the codes overall agree well with one another, e.g., in gas and stellar properties, but also show differences, e.g., in circumgalactic medium (CGM) properties. We argue that, if adequately tested in accordance with our proposed calibration steps and common parameters, high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations can have robust and reproducible results. New code groups are invited to join and enrich this comparison by generating equivalent models or to test the code's compatibility on their own, by adopting the common initial conditions, the common easy-to-implement physics package, and the proposed calibration steps. Further analyses of the zoom-in simulations presented here will be presented in forthcoming reports from the AGORA Collaboration, including studies of the CGM, simulations by additional codes, and results at lower redshift.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

A simplified algorithm for correcting both errors and erasures of R-S codes

Using the finite field transform and continued fractions, a simplified algorithm for decoding Reed-Solomon (R-S) codes is developed to correct erasures caused by other codes as well as errors over the finite field GF (q(m), where q is a prime and m is an integer. Such an R-S decoder can be faster and simpler than a decoder that uses more conventional methods.

Reed, I. S.↗

Theoretical studies of chromospheres and winds in cool stars

Propagation of pulsational waves through the atmosphere of the M supergiant alpha Ori was explored using a time dependent hydrodynamic code. Wind properties for three FU Orionis objects were determined using radiative transfer models based on optical line profiles. The effects of varying wind temperature while keeping the velocity steady were considered. Using the premise that FU Orionis eruptions result from massive accretions from a disk into a T Tauri star explains a variety of observational peculiarities of FU Orionis objects.

Hartmann, L.↗

The DESI N -body simulation project – I. Testing the robustness of simulations for the DESI dark time survey

ABSTRACT Analysis of large galaxy surveys requires confidence in the robustness of numerical simulation methods. The simulations are used to construct mock galaxy catalogues to validate data analysis pipelines and identify potential systematics. We compare three N-body simulation codes, abacus, gadget-2, and swift, to investigate the regimes in which their results agree. We run N-body simulations at three different mass resolutions, 6.25 × 108, 2.11 × 109, and 5.00 × 109 h−1 M⊙, matching phases to reduce the noise within the comparisons. We find systematic errors in the halo clustering between different codes are smaller than the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) statistical error for $s\ \gt\ 20\ h^{-1}$ Mpc in the correlation function in redshift space. Through the resolution comparison we find that simulations run with a mass resolution of 2.1 × 109 h−1 M⊙ are sufficiently converged for systematic effects in the halo clustering to be smaller than the DESI statistical error at scales larger than $20\ h^{-1}$ Mpc. These findings show that the simulations are robust for extracting cosmological information from large scales which is the key goal of the DESI survey. Comparing matter power spectra, we find the codes agree to within 1 per cent for k ≤ 10 h Mpc−1. We also run a comparison of three initial condition generation codes and find good agreement. In addition, we include a quasi-N-body code, FastPM, since we plan use it for certain DESI analyses. The impact of the halo definition and galaxy–halo relation will be presented in a follow-up study.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Large Ka-Band Slot Array for Digital Beam-Forming Applications

This work describes the development of a large Ka Band Slot Array for the Glacier and Land Ice Surface Topography Interferometer (GLISTIN), a proposed spaceborne interferometric synthetic aperture radar for topographic mapping of ice sheets and glaciers. GLISTIN will collect ice topography measurement data over a wide swath with sub-seasonal repeat intervals using a Ka-band digitally beamformed antenna. For technology demonstration purpose a receive array of size 1x1 m, consisting of 160x160 radiating elements, was developed. The array is divided into 16 sticks, each stick consisting of 160x10 radiating elements, whose outputs are combined to produce 16 digital beams. A transmit array stick was also developed. The antenna arrays were designed using Elliott's design equations with the use of an infinite-array mutual-coupling model. A Floquet wave model was used to account for external coupling between radiating slots. Because of the use of uniform amplitude and phase distribution, the infinite array model yielded identical values for all radiating elements but for alternating offsets, and identical coupling elements but for alternating positive and negative tilts. Waveguide-fed slot arrays are finding many applications in radar, remote sensing, and communications applications because of their desirable properties such as low mass, low volume, and ease of design, manufacture, and deployability. Although waveguide-fed slot arrays have been designed, built, and tested in the past, this work represents several advances to the state of the art. The use of the infinite array model for the radiating slots yielded a simple design process for radiating and coupling slots. Method of moments solution to the integral equations for alternating offset radiating slots in an infinite array environment was developed and validated using the commercial finite element code HFSS. For the analysis purpose, a method of moments code was developed for an infinite array of subarrays. Overall the 1x1 m array was found to be successful in meeting the objectives of the GLISTIN demonstration antenna, especially with respect to the 0.042deg, 1/10th of the beamwidth of each stick, relative beam alignment between sticks.

Rengarajan, Sembiam↗

Continued Astrometric Follow-up Of Near-Earth Objects

As the grant periods overlapped, some of this information below will also be present on the previous final report. During the period May 1 2004 to April 30 2005, approximately 100 NEOs fainter than V = 20 were observed on separate nights from the 1.2-m telescope at Mt. Hopkins. Additionally, a few comets were targeted, including astrometric support of the Deep Impact mission by observing comet P/Tempel 1. Kyle Smalley was again employed as an independent contractor, and he was trained in use of the telescope, performed several remote observing runs on his own, and has now begun critical software support of the observing program. Code to automatically operate the telescope, given a target list, is approximately 90% done. During the first observing run scheduled in late September or early October, this code will be tested at on the telescope. It is probable that the 1.2m telescope will be run automatically all night without any interruption from the observer for anything during this time. Additional work on selecting which NEO targets to observe is progressing, with a beta-release of a simple target selection web page. Additionally, two-night objects with the potential of being NEOs have been extracted on a routine basis during this last grant cycle. These will also be added to a web page to facilitate additional astrometric follow-up.

Spahr, Timothy↗