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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 55 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1972

Environmental application of remote sensing methods to coastal zone land use and marine resource management, appendices G to J

Important data were compiled for use with the Richmond-Cape Henry Environmental Laboratory (RICHEL) remote sensing project in coastal zone land use and marine resources management, and include analyses and projections of population characteristics, formulation of soil loss prediction techniques, and sources and quantity analyses of air and water effluents.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1980

NASA service experience with composite components

NASA Langley has been active in sponsoring flight service programs with advanced composites during the past decade. A broad data base and confidence in the durability of composite structures are being developed. Flight service experience is reported for more than 140 composite aircraft components with up to 8 years service and almost two million successful component flight hours. Composite components are being evaluated on Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed transport aircraft. Components are currently under development for service evaluation on Bell and Sikorsky helicopters. Design concepts and inspection and maintenance results are reported for components currently in service. Components under development in the NASA Aircraft Energy Efficiency (ACEE) program are discussed. Results of flight, outdoor ground, and controlled laboratory environmental tests on composite materials used in the flight service programs are also presented.

Dexter, H. B.↗
NASA NTRS1982

Durability of commercial aircraft and helicopter composite structures

The development of advanced composite technology during the past decade is discussed. Both secondary and primary components fabricated with boron, graphite, and Kevlar composites are evaluated. Included are spoilers, rudders, and fairings on commercial transports, boron/epoxy reinforced wing structure on C-130 military transports, and doors, fairings, tail rotors, vertical fins, and horizontal stabilizers on commercial helicopters. The development of composite structures resulted in advances in design and manufacturing technology for secondary and primary composite structures for commercial transports. Design concepts and inspection and maintenance results for the components in service are reported. The flight, outdoor ground, and controlled laboratory environmental effects on composites were also determined. Effects of moisture absorption, ultraviolet radiation, aircraft fuels and fluids, and sustained tensile stress are included. Critical parameters affecting the long term durability of composite materials are identified.

Dexter, H. B.↗
NASA NTRS1986

Electrochemical aging effects in photovoltaic modules

Leakage currents were experimentally measured in PV modules undergoing natural aging outdoors, and in PV modules undergoing accelerated aging in laboratory environmental chambers. The significant contributors to module leakage current were identified with a long range goal to develop techniques to reduce or stop module leakage currents. For outdoor aging in general, module leakage current is relatively insensitive to temperature fluctuations, but is very sensitive to moisture effects such as dew, precipitation, and fluctuations in relative humidity. Comparing ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) and polyvinyl butyral (PVB), module leakage currents are much higher in PVB as compared to EVA for all environmental conditions investigated. Leakage currents proceed in series along two paths, bulk conduction followed by interfacial (surfaces) conduction.

Mon, G. R.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Using a Web Browser for Environmental and Climate Change Studies

A new web browser for viewing and manipulating meteorological data sets is located on a web server at NASA, Langley Research Center. The browser uses a live access server (LAS) developed by the Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. LAS allows researchers to interact directly with the data to view, select, and subset the data in terms of location (latitude, longitude) and time such as day, month, or year. In addition, LAS can compare two data sets and can perform averages and variances, LAS is used here to show how it functions as an internet/web browser for use by the scientific and educational community. In particular its versatility in displaying and manipulating data sets of atmospheric measurements in the earth's radiation budget (ERB) or energy balance, which includes measurements of absorbed solar radiation, reflected shortwave radiation (RSW), thermal outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), and net radiation is demonstrated. These measurements are from the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) experiment and the surface radiation budget (SRB) experiment.

Bess, T. Dale↗
NASA NTRS2002

Using a Web Browser for Environmental and Climate Change Studies

A new web browser for viewing and manipulating meteorological data sets is located on a web server at NASA, Langley Research Center. The browser uses a live access server (LAS) developed by the Thermal Modeling and Analysis Project at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. LAS allows researchers to interact directly with the data to view, select, and subset the data in terms of location (latitude, longitude) and time such as day, month, or year. In addition, LAS can compare two data sets and can perform averages and variances, LAS is used here to show how it functions as an internet/web browser for use by the scientific and educational community. In particular its versatility in displaying and manipulating data sets of atmospheric measurements in the earth s radiation budget (ERB) or energy balance, which includes measurements of absorbed solar radiation, reflected shortwave radiation (RSW), thermal outgoing longwave radiation (OLR), and net radiation is demonstrated. These measurements are from the Clouds and the Earth s Radiant Energy System (CERES) experiment and the surface radiation budget (SRB) experiment.

Bess, T. Dale↗
NASA NTRS2006

Space-Based Ornithology: On the Wings of Migration and Biophysics

Understanding bird migration and avian biodiversity is one of the most compelling and challenging problems of modern biology with major implications for human health and conservation biology. Migration and conservation efforts cross national boundaries and are subject to numerous international agreements and treaties. Public interest is high with concerns about avian flu, Katrina and its impacts, and the recent sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Space based technology gives us new opportunities to shed light on the distribution and movement of organisms on the planet and their sensitivity to human disturbances and environmental changes. Together with the USGS and other agencies, we are creating ecological forecasting tools for science and application users to address the consequences of loss of wetlands, flooding, drought or other natural disasters such as hurricanes on avian biodiversity and bird migration. In our work, we use individual organism biophysical models of energy and water balance and drive these models with satellite measurements of spatio-temporal gradients in climate and habitat. Dynamic state variable modeling provides an additional tool for studying bird migration across multiple scales and can be linked to our mechanistic models describing the time and energy budget states of migrating birds. Such models yield an understanding of how a migratory flyway and its component habitats function as a whole and link stop-over ecology with biological conservation and management. We also build upon the canopy done by the Environmental Laboratory over the past few years.

Smith, James A.↗
NASA NTRS2009

Quantifying the Dependencies of Rooftop Temperatures on Albedo

The thermal properties of building materials directly effect the conditions inside of buildings Heat transfer is not a primary design driver in building design. Rooftop modifications lower heat transfer, which lowers energy consumption and costs. The living environmental laboratory attitude at UCSD makes it the perfect place to test the success of these modifications.

Dominquez, Anthony↗
NASA NTRS2006

"One-Stop Shopping" for Ocean Remote-Sensing and Model Data

OurOcean Portal 2.0 (http:// ourocean.jpl.nasa.gov) is a software system designed to enable users to easily gain access to ocean observation data, both remote-sensing and in-situ, configure and run an Ocean Model with observation data assimilated on a remote computer, and visualize both the observation data and the model outputs. At present, the observation data and models focus on the California coastal regions and Prince William Sound in Alaska. This system can be used to perform both real-time and retrospective analyses of remote-sensing data and model outputs. OurOcean Portal 2.0 incorporates state-of-the-art information technologies (IT) such as MySQL database, Java Web Server (Apache/Tomcat), Live Access Server (LAS), interactive graphics with Java Applet at the Client site and MatLab/GMT at the server site, and distributed computing. OurOcean currently serves over 20 real-time or historical ocean data products. The data are served in pre-generated plots or their native data format. For some of the datasets, users can choose different plotting parameters and produce customized graphics. OurOcean also serves 3D Ocean Model outputs generated by ROMS (Regional Ocean Model System) using LAS. The Live Access Server (LAS) software, developed by the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is a configurable Web-server program designed to provide flexible access to geo-referenced scientific data. The model output can be views as plots in horizontal slices, depth profiles or time sequences, or can be downloaded as raw data in different data formats, such as NetCDF, ASCII, Binary, etc. The interactive visualization is provided by graphic software, Ferret, also developed by PMEL. In addition, OurOcean allows users with minimal computing resources to configure and run an Ocean Model with data assimilation on a remote computer. Users may select the forcing input, the data to be assimilated, the simulation period, and the output variables and submit the model to run on a backend parallel computer. When the run is complete, the output will be added to the LAS server for

Li, P. Peggy↗
NASA NTRS2016

Transient Thermal Analysis of the 12.5 KW HERMeS Hall Thruster

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres on March 6, 2015 thereby becoming the first mission to orbit two celestial bodies outside of the Earth-moon system. This feat was made possible due to the use of electric propulsion (EP) to provide the 11 km/s of delta-V that was necessary. This type of propulsion is also enabling for many of NASA’s future missions, such as the proposed Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission (ARRM). Specifically, the Hall Effect Rocket with Magnetic Shielding (HERMeS) is the propulsive design baseline due to its long operational lifetime and high specific impulse. Extensive modeling is required to verify the thruster's predicted thermal performance and survival during the bounding mission phases. Since the thruster would constrain plasma on the order of tens of thousands of hours, components in the thruster must be able to accommodate much higher sustained temperatures than typical spacecraft hardware. Furthermore, the high temperatures necessitate care in analyzing thermal gradients within the thruster. In this paper, we describe a thermal model of the HERMeS thruster and focus upon the thruster's transient performance under different initial firing conditions. The thruster's transient thermal response is critical to verify margin in the thermal stresses inherent in the thruster and to determine safe start-up procedures to protect the thruster's critical components. This model is used to perform transient thermal analysis of the thruster during startup and shutdown, provide temperature maps for structural analysis, and plan for thermal cycle testing conducted at JPL. The thermal cycle testing includes thruster starts at the cold temperature limits and operation at maximum expected external heat flux. This work will support laboratory environmental testing of the HERMeS thruster, which is being conducted at JPL in 2016.

Reilly, Sean↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Toward an Integrated Product of Higher Accuracy and Longer Time Span: Improvement of the Upcoming NASA GEWEX SRB Data Release 4 over Release 3 Based on Validation Against Surface-Based Measurements

The NASA Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) is moving toward its next generation, the Release 4 Integrated Product (Rel. 4-IP), and its shortwave algorithm preliminary results as of this writing span 34 years continuously from July 1983 to June 2017 on a quasi-equal-area grid system with 44,016 gridboxes ranging from 1 longitude times 1 latitude around the Equator to 120 longitude times 1 latitude. The data are in the form of 3-hourly, 3-hourly-monthly, daily and monthly means. The Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) is a project of the Data and Assessments Panel from the GEWEX under the umbrella of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). Currently in the archive there are data from 67 sites located in all seven continents spanning from 1992 to the very present. The original BSRN records are at 1-, 2-, 3- or 5-minute intervals, and sophisticated quality-control procedures have been developed to eliminate erroneous records before hourly, daily and monthly means are computed. The Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) arrays of buoys in the tropical oceans, TAO/TRITON (Pacific Ocean), RAMA (Indian Ocean) and PITARA (Atlantic Ocean), measure shortwave downward fluxes using pyranometers. These buoys transmit measured data to shore in real-time via the Argos satellite system. And these buoys are major components of the CLIVAR climate analysis project and the GOOS, GCOS, and GEOSS observing systems. So far there are data from 64 buoys and the earliest data start from 2000. We have extensively validated the Rel. 4-IP preliminary results against the BSRN and PMEL 3-hourly, daily and monthly means. In this paper, we will show that the new results not only temporally span 10 years longer than its predecessor, Release 3, but agree significantly better with the BSRN data over the land and PMEL data over the ocean.

Taiping Zhang↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA/GEWEX SRB Surface Radiation Budget Fluxes Through the Prism of Weather States

The NASA/GEWEX Surface Radiation Budget Version 4 (SRB Rel4) product is now publicly available, covering the period from July 1983 through June 2017. This supersedes the SRB Rel3 (Stackhouse et al., 2011) product which has been used in the community for a wide variety of applications, including climate model validation, agriculture, solar energy, and architecture. SRB Rel4 uses the newly recalibrated and processed ISCCP HXS product as its primary input for cloud and radiance data, replacing ISCCP DX with a ninefold increase in pixel count (10km instead of 30km). This version retains a 1°x1° resolution but benefits from a much larger number of samples per grid box than the SRB Rel3. ISCCP also provides an atmospheric temperature and moisture dataset known as nnHIRS which we use here, along with Seaflux and Landflux surface and near-surface meteorological parameters. Rel4 incorporates several important algorithm improvements. These include recalculated shortwave (SW) atmospheric transmissivities and reflectivities yielding a somewhat less transmissive atmosphere. Both shortwave and longwave (LW) now also include variable aerosol composition and radiative properties, allowing for the use of a detailed aerosol history from the Max Planck Institute Aerosol Climatology (MACv1). LW and SW algorithms now produce pristine sky fluxes, allowing the aerosol flux effects to be quantified. For SW, ocean albedo and snow/ice albedo are improved from Release 3. Total solar irradiance is now variable, and reduced to an average of 1361 Wm-2. The radiative treatment of ice cloud is improved. For the LW, a climatological monthly varying spectral surface emissivity is added. Here we evaluate the SRB Rel4 top of atmosphere (TOA) and surface fluxes in the context of weather states and oceanic regions. Weather states (Tselioudis et al., 2013, Tselioudis et al., 2021) are defined by K-means clustering 2-D histograms of satellite-retrieved cloud optical depths and cloud top pressures. The most recent (Tselioudis et al., 2021) weather states derived from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) H-series data results in eight cloud weather states and one clear sky weather state, for a total of nine weather states. We examine the statistics of SRB Rel4 fluxes for each weather state and a variety of relevant land and ocean regions. We compare to similar analyses performed on CERES EBAF and SYN1Deg flux products, and validate against Baseline Surface Radiometer Network (BSRN) land stations and Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) ocean buoy data. It is demonstrated that the weather state concept is valuable when examining the comparative strengths and weaknesses of satellite radiative flux algorithms.

Atmospheric Radiation↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The Surface Longwave Downward Fluxes of the NASA GEWEX SRB Release 4.0 IP Products: Validation Against the Surface-Based BSRN and PMEL Observed Data

Since the NASA Global Energy Water Exchanges (GEWEX) Surface Radiation Budget (SRB) project released its 3rd version of products in 2010, the GEWEX Data Assessments Panel (GDAP) has been working on integrating various data products to address issues in the closing of the global energy and water cycles. The 4th version of the SRB products, Rel. 4.0-IP, has integrated data products from the cloud, aerosol, atmosphere, ocean surface, and land surface projects, coordinating within GDAP, to produce a long-term time series of TOA and surface radiative estimates. The Rel. 4-IP shortwave products span 34 years continuously from July 1983 to June 2017 on a quasi-equal-area 1degree longitude by 1degree latitude grid system. The longwave products are for land only from 1983-07 to 1987-12; for both land and ocean from 1988-01 to 2009-12; and ocean only from 2010-01 to 2017-06. The data are provided at 3 hourly, 3-hourly-monthly, daily and monthly means. The ISCCP HXS clouds and radiances are the key cloud input of the current GEWEX SRB algorithms. In addition, the longwave algorithm has also made changes in cloud microphysical property, surface skin temperature input, surface emissivity, atmospheric profile, adding longwave aerosol optical properties, revising cloud overlap procedure, and so on. Details of changes in both inputs and algorithms are documented in a NASA Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document (ATBD). We have validated the surface longwave downward fluxes against the surface-based Baseline Surface Radiation Network (BSRN) and the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) buoy data. As of 2020, the BSRN archive has 12,116 site-months of observed records from 73 stations on all seven continents, and as of 2017, PMEL archive has 4389 buoy months of observed records from 64 buoys deployed in the tropics of Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This paper presents how the SRB Rel. 4.0-IP surface longwave downward fluxes compare with these surface-based measurements and how the comparison statistics differ from that of Rel. 3.0.

GEWEX SRB↗
DOE OSTI2024

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Annual Site Environmental Report for Calendar Year 2023

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), one of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s 10 national laboratories, provides innovative science and technology development in the areas of energy and the environment, fundamental and computational science, and national security. There are three DOE offices within the Richland area. Two are responsible for the Hanford Site, whereas the Pacific Northwest Site Office oversees PNNL. PNNL prepares an Annual Site Environmental Report to meet the requirements of DOE Order 231.1B, Environment, Safety and Health Reporting, and DOE Order 458.1, Radiation Protection of the Public and the Environment, thus assuring that the public is informed of any PNNL-Richland campus or PNNL-Sequim campus event that could adversely affect the health and safety of the public, site staff, or the environment. The report provides a synopsis of ongoing environmental management performance and compliance activities for operations that occur at the PNNL-Richland campus in Richland, Washington, and at the PNNL-Sequim campus near Sequim, Washington. It describes the location of and background for each facility; addresses compliance with applicable DOE, federal, state, and local regulations, and site-specific permits; documents environmental monitoring efforts and their status; presents potential radiation doses to staff and the public in the surrounding areas; and describes DOE-required data quality assurance methods used for data verification. The ASER report describes Compliance with Federal, State, and Local Laws and Regulations in 2023, Environmental Sustainability, Environmental monitoring and dose assessment, Natural and Cultural Resource Management, and Quality Assurance activities that took place during Calendar Year 2023.

40 CFR 61 Subpart H↗
DOE OSTI2025

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Annual Site Environmental Report for Calendar Year 2024

This report provides the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the public with information on the level of radioactive and non-radioactive pollutants (if any) that are added to the environment as a result of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s (PPPL) operations. This report fulfills the annual public reporting requirements of DOE Order 231.1B. The results of PPPL’s 2024 environmental surveillance and monitoring program are presented and discussed. The report also summarizes environmental initiatives, assessments, and community involvement programs that were undertaken in 2024. PPPL has engaged in fusion energy research since 1951 and at its current locations since 1958. The Laboratory’s mission is to develop the scientific knowledge and advanced engineering to enable fusion to power the US and the world, and to develop the understanding of plasmas from the nano- to the astrophysical scale. PPPL’s primary experiment, the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) is a collaboration among national laboratories, universities, and national and international research institutions and is a major element in the US Fusion Energy Sciences Program. Its design tests the physics principles of spherical torus (ST) plasmas, playing an important role in the development of smaller, more economical fusion reactors. Due to previous operational issues, NSTX-U did not operate in 2024. PPPL is engaged in a project to replace key NSTX-U components and systems to enable the operation of this international magnetic fusion user facility. In 2024, PPPL’s radiological environmental monitoring program measured tritium in the air at onsite sampling stations. Using highly sensitive air monitors, PPPL is capable of detecting small changes in the ambient levels of tritium. The operation of monitors located on D-site is used to demonstrate compliance with the National Emission Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs) regulations. Also included in PPPL’s radiological environmental monitoring program, are water monitoring – ground, surface, and waste waters. PPPL’s radiological monitoring program characterized the background levels of tritium in the environment and those data are presented in this report. Ground water monitoring continued under New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection’s (NJDEP) Site Remediation Program regulations. PPPL monitored for nonradiological contaminants, mainly volatile organic compounds (components of common degreasing solvents). In 2024, PPPL complied with permit limits for surface water and sanitary wastewater discharges. PPPL was honored with an award for EPEAT-certified electronics purchasing from the Global Electronics Council on July 25, 2024.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Annual Site Environmental Report for Calendar Year 2024

The report provides a synopsis of ongoing environmental management performance and compliance activities for operations that occur at the PNNL-Richland campus in Richland, Washington, and at the PNNL-Sequim campus near Sequim, Washington. It describes the location of and background for each facility; addresses compliance with applicable DOE, federal, state, and local regulations, and site-specific permits; documents environmental monitoring efforts and their status; presents potential radiation doses to staff and the public in the surrounding areas; and describes DOE-required data quality assurance methods used for data verification.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗