Engineering Mechanics Division
Screening methods for metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors and resistors, impact survival testing of spacecraft electronic parts, and parachute jettisoning from planetary capsules
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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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Development of procedures for calculating stiffness and damping properties of elastomers in engineering applications. Part 1: Verification of basic methods
The primary aim of this investigation was verification of basic methods which are to be used in cataloging elastomer dynamic properties (stiffness and damping) in terms of viscoelastic model constants. These constants may then be used to predict dynamic properties for general elastomer shapes and operating conditions, thereby permitting optimum application of elastomers as energy absorption and/or energy storage devices in the control of vibrations in a broad variety of applications. The efforts reported involved: (1) literature search; (2) the design, fabrication and use of a test rig for obtaining elastomer dynamic test data over a wide range of frequencies, amplitudes, and preloads; and (3) the reduction of the test data, by means of a selected three-element elastomer model and specialized curve fitting techniques, to material properties. Material constants thus obtained have been used to calculate stiffness and damping for comparison with measured test data. These comparisons are excellent for a number of test conditions and only fair to poor for others. The results confirm the validity of the basic approach of the overall program and the mechanics of the cataloging procedure, and at the same time suggest areas in which refinements should be made.
Chiang, T.↗
Applications of hybrid and digital computation methods in aerospace-related sciences and engineering
The computing equipment in the engineering systems simulation laboratory of the Houston University Cullen College of Engineering is described and its advantages are summarized. The application of computer techniques in aerospace-related research psychology and in chemical, civil, electrical, industrial, and mechanical engineering is described in abstracts of 84 individual projects and in reprints of published reports. Research supports programs in acoustics, energy technology, systems engineering, and environment management as well as aerospace engineering.
Huang, C. J.↗
Double arch mirror study. Part 2: Engineering analysis report
A method of mounting a cryogenically cooled, lightweight, double arch, class mirror for infrared, astronomical telescopes was developed. A 50 cm, fused silica mirror was modified for use in a new mount configuration. The flexures and the finite element analysis of the mirror stresses are reported.
Iraninejad, B.↗
An improved multilevel optimization approach for the design of complex engineering systems
Multilevel optimization methods are being considered for the design of complex systems on distributed networks of computers or even parallel processors. An obstacle to the use of multilevel methods is that they can be computationally expensive because of the cycling necessary to account for the coupling between the subproblems. This research effort aims at increasing the efficiency of multilevel optimization by adapting two techniques that are widely used in conventional one-level optimization: constraint approximation and temporary constraint deletion. These improvements are implemented and tested on three-, ten- and 52-bar planar truss designs. The results show that for larger problems (approximately 100 design variables and larger), the cost of analysis dominates the total cost so that multilevel optimization is no more expensive than one-level optimization. If parallel processing is used or the analysis process itself is decomposed, then multilevel optimization stands to become more economical than one-level optimization.
Barthelemy, J.-F. M.↗
Analytical method for determining performance of turbojet-engine tail-pipe heat exchangers
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Behun, Michael↗
General algebraic method applied to control analysis of complex engine types
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ENGINE CONTROLS, TURBOJET↗
Method for Calculation of Laminar Heat Transfer in Air Flow Around Cylinders of Arbitrary Cross Section (including Large Temperature Differences and Transpiration Cooling)
The solution of heat-transfer problems has become vital for many aeronautical applications. The shapes of objects to be cooled can often be approximated by cylinders of various cross sections with flow normal to the axis as, for instance heat transfer on gas-turbine blades and on air foils heated for deicing purposes. A laminar region always exists near the stagnation point of such objects. A method previously presented by E. R. G. Eckert permits the calculation of local heat transfer around the periphery of cylinders of arbitrary cross section in the laminar region for flow of a fluid with constant property values with an accuracy sufficient for engineering purposes. The method is based on exact solutions of the boundary-layer equations for incompressible wedge-type flow and on the postulate that at any point on the cylinder the boundary-layer growth is the same as that on a wedge with comparable flow conditions. This method is extended herein to take into account the influence of large temperature differences between the cylinder wall and the flow as well as the influence of transpiration cooling when the same medium as the outside flow is used as coolant.
Eckert, E R↗
A Method of Measuring Jet Thrust of Turbojet Engines in Flight Installations
Measurement of the jet thrust of a turbojet engine in flight becomes more difficult as the number and complexity of the engine components increase. It is desirable, therefore, that a general correlation of jet thrust be developed which is applicable to a simple direct reading thrustmeter. In view of this need a correlation is presented which is independent of flight conditions and applicable to both non-afterburning and afterburning engines equipped with nonejector type fixed- and variable-area convergent exhaust nozzles. The general equation used in this correlation was derived from the theoretical jet-thrust equation for a choked convergent nozzle. The data used to verify the correlation were obtained over a range of altitudes from 10,000 to 54,000 feet and a range of flight Mach numbers from 0.4 to 1.1. A thrustometer based on this equation was installed on an afterburning turbojet engine equipped with a fixed area convergent exhaust nozzle. The results indicated that a meter based on this correlation would be applicable to a flight installation and that the probable error in thrust measurement would be approximately + or -1.5 percent provided the exhaust-nozzle thrust coefficient is known.
Sivo, Joseph N↗
A Neural Network Aero Design System for Advanced Turbo-Engines
An inverse design method calculates the blade shape that produces a prescribed input pressure distribution. By controlling this input pressure distribution the aerodynamic design objectives can easily be met. Because of the intrinsic relationship between pressure distribution and airfoil physical properties, a Neural Network can be trained to choose the optimal pressure distribution that would meet a set of physical requirements. Neural network systems have been attempted in the context of direct design methods. From properties ascribed to a set of blades the neural network is trained to infer the properties of an 'interpolated' blade shape. The problem is that, especially in transonic regimes where we deal with intrinsically non linear and ill posed problems, small perturbations of the blade shape can produce very large variations of the flow parameters. It is very unlikely that, under these circumstances, a neural network will be able to find the proper solution. The unique situation in the present method is that the neural network can be trained to extract the required input pressure distribution from a database of pressure distributions while the inverse method will still compute the exact blade shape that corresponds to this 'interpolated' input pressure distribution. In other words, the interpolation process is transferred to a smoother problem, namely, finding what pressure distribution would produce the required flow conditions and, once this is done, the inverse method will compute the exact solution for this problem. The use of neural network is, in this context, highly related to the use of proper optimization techniques. The optimization is used essentially as an automation procedure to force the input pressure distributions to achieve the required aero and structural design parameters. A multilayered feed forward network with back-propagation is used to train the system for pattern association and classification.
Sanz, Jose M.↗
A Neural Network Aero Design System for Advanced Turbo-Engines
An inverse design method calculates the blade shape that produces a prescribed input pressure distribution. By controlling this input pressure distribution the aerodynamic design objectives can easily be met. Because of the intrinsic relationship between pressure distribution and airfoil physical properties, a neural network can be trained to choose the optimal pressure distribution that would meet a set of physical requirements. The neural network technique works well not only as an interpolating device but also as an extrapolating device to achieve blade designs from a given database. Two validating test cases are discussed.
Sanz, Jose M.↗
An Optimal Orthogonal Decomposition Method for Kalman Filter-Based Turbofan Engine Thrust Estimation
A new linear point design technique is presented for the determination of tuning parameters that enable the optimal estimation of unmeasured engine outputs such as thrust. The engine s performance is affected by its level of degradation, generally described in terms of unmeasurable health parameters related to each major engine component. Accurate thrust reconstruction depends upon knowledge of these health parameters, but there are usually too few sensors to be able to estimate their values. In this new technique, a set of tuning parameters is determined which accounts for degradation by representing the overall effect of the larger set of health parameters as closely as possible in a least squares sense. The technique takes advantage of the properties of the singular value decomposition of a matrix to generate a tuning parameter vector of low enough dimension that it can be estimated by a Kalman filter. A concise design procedure to generate a tuning vector that specifically takes into account the variables of interest is presented. An example demonstrates the tuning parameters ability to facilitate matching of both measured and unmeasured engine outputs, as well as state variables. Additional properties of the formulation are shown to lend themselves well to diagnostics.
Litt, Jonathan S.↗
Calculation of Thermally-Induced Displacements in Spherically Domed Ion Engine Grids
An analytical method for predicting the thermally-induced normal and tangential displacements of spherically domed ion optics grids under an axisymmetric thermal loading is presented. A fixed edge support that could be thermally expanded is used for this analysis. Equations for the displacements both normal and tangential to the surface of the spherical shell are derived. A simplified equation for the displacement at the center of the spherical dome is also derived. The effects of plate perforation on displacements and stresses are determined by modeling the perforated plate as an equivalent solid plate with modified, or effective, material properties. Analytical model results are compared to the results from a finite element model. For the solid shell, comparisons showed that the analytical model produces results that closely match the finite element model results. The simplified equation for the normal displacement of the spherical dome center is also found to accurately predict this displacement. For the perforated shells, the analytical solution and simplified equation produce accurate results for materials with low thermal expansion coefficients.
Soulas, George C.↗
An Optimal Orthogonal Decomposition Method for Kalman Filter-Based Turbofan Engine Thrust Estimation
A new linear point design technique is presented for the determination of tuning parameters that enable the optimal estimation of unmeasured engine outputs, such as thrust. The engine s performance is affected by its level of degradation, generally described in terms of unmeasurable health parameters related to each major engine component. Accurate thrust reconstruction depends on knowledge of these health parameters, but there are usually too few sensors to be able to estimate their values. In this new technique, a set of tuning parameters is determined that accounts for degradation by representing the overall effect of the larger set of health parameters as closely as possible in a least-squares sense. The technique takes advantage of the properties of the singular value decomposition of a matrix to generate a tuning parameter vector of low enough dimension that it can be estimated by a Kalman filter. A concise design procedure to generate a tuning vector that specifically takes into account the variables of interest is presented. An example demonstrates the tuning parameters ability to facilitate matching of both measured and unmeasured engine outputs, as well as state variables. Additional properties of the formulation are shown to lend themselves well to diagnostics.
Litt, Jonathan S.↗
An Optimal Orthogonal Decomposition Method for Kalman Filter-Based Turbofan Engine Thrust Estimation
A new linear point design technique is presented for the determination of tuning parameters that enable the optimal estimation of unmeasured engine outputs, such as thrust. The engine's performance is affected by its level of degradation, generally described in terms of unmeasurable health parameters related to each major engine component. Accurate thrust reconstruction depends on knowledge of these health parameters, but there are usually too few sensors to be able to estimate their values. In this new technique, a set of tuning parameters is determined that accounts for degradation by representing the overall effect of the larger set of health parameters as closely as possible in a least squares sense. The technique takes advantage of the properties of the singular value decomposition of a matrix to generate a tuning parameter vector of low enough dimension that it can be estimated by a Kalman filter. A concise design procedure to generate a tuning vector that specifically takes into account the variables of interest is presented. An example demonstrates the tuning parameters ability to facilitate matching of both measured and unmeasured engine outputs, as well as state variables. Additional properties of the formulation are shown to lend themselves well to diagnostics.
Litt, Jonathan S.↗
Parametric 3D Atmospheric Reconstruction in Highly Variable Terrain with Recycled Monte Carlo Paths and an Adapted Bayesian Inference Engine
We describe a method for accelerating a 3D Monte Carlo forward radiative transfer model to the point where it can be used in a new kind of Bayesian retrieval framework. The remote sensing challenge is to detect and quantify a chemical effluent of a known absorbing gas produced by an industrial facility in a deep valley. The available data is a single low resolution noisy image of the scene in the near IR at an absorbing wavelength for the gas of interest. The detected sunlight has been multiply reflected by the variable terrain and/or scattered by an aerosol that is assumed partially known and partially unknown. We thus introduce a new class of remote sensing algorithms best described as "multi-pixel" techniques that call necessarily for a 3D radaitive transfer model (but demonstrated here in 2D); they can be added to conventional ones that exploit typically multi- or hyper-spectral data, sometimes with multi-angle capability, with or without information about polarization. The novel Bayesian inference methodology uses adaptively, with efficiency in mind, the fact that a Monte Carlo forward model has a known and controllable uncertainty depending on the number of sun-to-detector paths used.
Monte Carlo↗
Exploration of Scalable Methods to Fabricate Synthetic Lunar Minerals for Engineered Regolith Simulants
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Lunar↗
Application of the Collision-Imparted Velocity Method for Analyzing the Responses of Containment and Deflector Structures to Engine Rotor Fragment Impact
An approximate analysis, termed the Collision Imparted Velocity Method (CIVM), was employed for predicting the transient structural responses of containment rings or deflector rings which are subjected to impact from turbojet-engine rotor burst fragments. These 2-d structural rings may be initially circular or arbitrarily curved and may have either uniform or variable thickness; elastic, strain hardening, and strain rate material properties are accommodated. This approximate analysis utilizes kinetic energy and momentum conservation relations in order to predict the after-impact velocities of the fragment and the impacted ring segment. This information is then used in conjunction with a finite element structural response computation code to predict the transient, large deflection responses of the ring. Similarly, the equations of motion for each fragment are solved in small steps in time. Also, some comparisons of predictions with experimental data for fragment-impacted free containment rings are presented.
Collins, T. P.↗