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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 595 records · Page 33

Tracking The Double Eagle

Last summer a trio of aeronauts made aviation history. Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman, all of Albuquerque, New Mexico, piloted their balloon Double Eagle I1 from Presque Isle, Maine to Miserey, France, some 50 miles from Paris. They were the first to negotiate a successful Atlantic crossing in a freeflying balloon after a score of attempts over a span of more than a century. A year earlier, Abruzzo and Anderson had made an unsuccessful try in their predecessor balloon Double Eagle. On that occasion, a NASA-developed satellite beacon helped save their lives. Carried aboard the balloon, the simple, seven-pound beacon continuously transmitted signals to NASA's Nimbus-6 satellite. Nimbus relayed the signals to monitors at Goddard Space Flight Center, enabling Goddard to compute the balloon's position. Position reports were then telephoned regularly to Double Eagle's control center at Bedford, Massachusetts. This monitoring system proved invaluable when the balloon encountered trouble several days after liftoff.

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NASA Engineering and Safety Center Technical Bulletin No. 21-01: Experimental and Computational Study of Cavitation in Hydrogen Peroxide

Cavitation in liquid propulsion systems can lead to performance degradation and hardware failures. The NESC sponsored an investigation to measure and model cavitation in pressurized hydrogen peroxide fl ow. The experimentally measured and computationally predicted cavitation lengths were compared as a function of cavitation number. The measured and predicted data exhibited close agreement over the range of pressures and temperatures studied, and no calibration of the cavitation model coefficients was needed.

NESC Technical Bulletin No. 21-01↗

Human Centered Design and Development for NASA's MerBoard

This viewgraph presentation provides an overview of the design and development process for NASA's MerBoard. These devices are large interactive display screens which can be shown on the user's computer, which will allow scientists in many locations to interpret and evaluate mission data in real-time. These tools are scheduled to be used during the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover (MER) expeditions. Topics covered include: mission overview, Mer Human Centered Computers, FIDO 2001 observations and MerBoard prototypes.

Trimble, Jay↗

Nonlinear structural analysis for fiber-reinforced superalloy turbine blades

A computational capability for predicting the nonlinear thermomechanical structural response of fiber-reinforced superalloy (FRS) turbine blades is described. This capability is embedded in a special purpose computer code (COBSTRAN) developed at the NASA Lewis Research Center. Special features of this computational capability include accounting for: fiber/matrix reaction, nonlinear and anisotropic material behavior, complex stress distribution due to local and global heterogeneity, and residual stresses due to initial fabrication and/or inelastic behavior during subsequent missions. Numerical results are presented from analyses of a hypothetical FRS turbine blade subjected to a fabrication process and subsequent mission cycle. The results demonstrate the capabilities of this computational tool to; predict local stress/strain response and capture trends of local nonlinear and anisotropic material behavior, relate the effects of this local behavior to the global response of a multilayered fiber-composite turbine blade, and trace material history from fabrication through successive missions.

Hopkins, D. A.↗

Computational Fluid Dynamics

This collection of papers was presented at the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Conference held at Ames Research Center in California on March 12 through 14, 1991. It is an overview of CFD activities at NASA Lewis Research Center. The main thrust of computational work at Lewis is aimed at propulsion systems. Specific issues related to propulsion CFD and associated modeling will also be presented. Examples of results obtained with the most recent algorithm development will also be presented.

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Sunspot: A program to model the behavior of hypervelocity impact damaged multilayer insulation in the Sunspot thermal vacuum chamber of Marshall Space Flight Center

The development of a computer program to predict the degradation of the insulating capabilities of the multilayer insulation (MLI) blanket of Space Station Freedom due to a hypervelocity impact with a space debris particle is described. A finite difference scheme is used for the calculations. The computer program was written in Microsoft BASIC. Also described is a test program that was undertaken to validate the numerical model. Twelve MLI specimens were impacted at hypervelocities with simulated debris particles using a light gas gun at Marshall Space Flight Center. The impact-damaged MLI specimens were then tested for insulating capability in the space environment of the Sunspot thermal vacuum chamber at MSFC. Two undamaged MLI specimens were also tested for comparison with the test results of the damaged specimens. The numerical model was found to adequately predict behavior of the MLI specimens in the Sunspot chamber. A parameter, called diameter ratio, was developed to relate the nominal MLI impact damage to the apparent (for thermal analysis purposes) impact damage based on the hypervelocity impact conditions of a specimen.

Rule, W. K.↗

Estimating Health Services Requirements

In computer program NOROCA populations statistics from National Center for Health Statistics used with computational procedure to estimate health service utilization rates, physician demands (by specialty) and hospital bed demands (by type of service). Computational procedure applicable to health service area of any size and even used to estimate statewide demands for health services.

Alexander, H. M.↗

Error Representation in Time For Compressible Flow Calculations

Time plays an essential role in most real world fluid mechanics problems, e.g. turbulence, combustion, acoustic noise, moving geometries, blast waves, etc. Time dependent calculations now dominate the computational landscape at the various NASA Research Centers but the accuracy of these computations is often not well understood. In this presentation, we investigate error representation (and error control) for time-periodic problems as a prelude to the investigation of feasibility of error control for stationary statistics and space-time averages. o These statistics and averages (e.g. time-averaged lift and drag forces) are often the output quantities sought by engineers. o For systems such as the Navier-Stokes equations, pointwise error estimates deteriorate rapidly which increasing Reynolds number while statistics and averages may remain well behaved.

Barth, Timothy J.↗

White paper: A plan for cooperation between NASA and DARPA to establish a center for advanced architectures

Large, complex computer systems require many years of development. It is recognized that large scale systems are unlikely to be delivered in useful condition unless users are intimately involved throughout the design process. A mechanism is described that will involve users in the design of advanced computing systems and will accelerate the insertion of new systems into scientific research. This mechanism is embodied in a facility called the Center for Advanced Architectures (CAA). CAA would be a division of RIACS (Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science) and would receive its technical direction from a Scientific Advisory Board established by RIACS. The CAA described here is a possible implementation of a center envisaged in a proposed cooperation between NASA and DARPA.

Denning, P. J.↗

Fault localization in a microfabricated surface ion trap using diamond nitrogen-vacancy center magnetometry

Here, as quantum computing hardware becomes more complex with ongoing design innovations and growing capabilities, the quantum computing community needs increasingly powerful techniques for fabrication failure root-cause analysis. This is especially true for trapped-ion quantum computing. As trapped-ion quantum computing aims to scale to thousands of ions, the electrode numbers are growing to several hundred, with likely integrated photonic components also adding to the electrical and fabrication complexity, making faults even harder to locate. In this work, we used a high-resolution quantum magnetic imaging technique, based on nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond, to investigate short-circuit faults in an ion trap chip. We imaged currents from these short-circuit faults to ground and compared them to intentionally created faults, finding that the root cause of the faults was failures in the on-chip trench capacitors. This work, where we exploited the performance advantages of a quantum magnetic sensing technique to troubleshoot a piece of quantum computing hardware, is a unique example of the evolving synergy between emerging quantum technologies to achieve capabilities that were previously inaccessible.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Yesterday, today and tomorrow: A perspective of CFD at NASA's Ames Research Center

The opportunity to reflect on the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) progam at the NASA Ames Research Center (its beginning, its present state, and its direction for the future) is afforded. Essential elements of the research program during each period are reviewed, including people, facilities, and research problems. The burgeoning role that CFD is playing in the aerospace business is discussed, as is the necessity for validated CFD tools. The current aeronautical position of this country is assessed, as are revolutionary goals to help maintain its aeronautical supremacy in the world.

Kutler, Paul↗

Implementation of hydrologic models at Goddard Space Flight Center

Major watershed simulation models were implemented on the computer system at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and their operation was verified. Historical and physiographic data were acquired for two Maryland river basins (Monocasy River above Jug Bridge and Patuxent River near Laurel, Maryland) and the models were calibrated to simulate them. GSFC personnel were instructed in model operation after the models were implemented.

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Accommodating Heterogeneity in a Debugger for Distributed Computations

In an ongoing project at NASA Ames Research Center, we are building debugger for distributed computations running on a heterogeneous set of machines. Historically, such debuggers have been built as front-ends to existing source-level debuggers on the target platforms. In effect, these back-end debuggers are providing a collection of debugger services to a client. The major drawback is that because of inconsistencies among the back-end debuggers, the front-end must use a different protocol when talking to each back-end debugger. This can make the front-end quite complex. We have avoided this complexity problem by defining the client-server debugger protocol. While it does require vendors to adapt their existing debugger code to meet the protocol, vendors are generally interested in doing so because the approach has several advantages. In addition to solving the heterogenous platform debugging problem, it will be pos~sible to write interesting debugger user interfaces that can be easily ported across a variety of machines. This will likely encourage investment in application-domain specific debuggers. In fact, the user interface of our debugger will be geared to scientists developing computational fluid dynamics codes. This paper describes some of the problems encountered in developing a portable debugger for heterogenous, distributed computing and how the architecture of our debugger avoids them. It then provides a detailed description of the debugger client-server protocol. Some of the more interesting attributes of the protocol are: (1) It is object-oriented; (2) It uses callback functions to capture the asynchronous nature of debugging in a procedural fashion; (3) It contains abstractions, such as in-line instrumentation, for the debugging of computationally intensive programs; (4) For remote debugging, it has operations that enable the implementor to optimize message passing traffic between client and server. The soundness of the protocol is being tested through the implementation of a prototype client and server pair.

Hood, Robert↗

Toward lower-diameter large-scale HPC and data center networks with co-packaged optics

We investigate the advantages of using co-packaged optics for building low-diameter, large-scale high-performance computing (HPC) and data center networks. The increased escape bandwidth offered by co-packaged optics can enable high-radix switch implementations of more than 150 switch ports, which can be combined with data rates of up to 400 Gb/s per port. From the network architecture perspective, the key benefits of using co-packaged optics in future fat-tree networks include (a) the ability to implement large-scale topologies of > <#comment/> 11 , 000 end points by eliminating the need for a third switching layer and (b) the ability to provide up to 4 × <#comment/> higher bisection bandwidth compared to existing solutions, reducing at the same time the number of required switch application-specific integrated circuits by > <#comment/> 80 % <#comment/> . From the network operation perspective, both reduced energy consumption and lower packet delays can be achieved since fewer hops are required; i.e., packets need to traverse fewer serializer/deserializer lanes and fewer switch buffers, which reduces the probability of contending with other packets and improves the tolerance of network congestion. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated via discrete-event simulations for a wide range of representative HPC synthetic-traffic cases that include both hotspot and non-hotspot scenarios. The simulation results suggest that co-packaged optics form a promising solution to keep up with bandwidth scaling in future networks, while the reduced number of switching layers can lead to significant mean packet delay improvements that start from 30% and reach up to 74% for high-load conditions.

Maniotis, Pavlos (ORCID:0000000244905253)↗

Finite Element Aircraft Simulation of Turbulence

A turbulence model has been developed for realtime aircraft simulation that accommodates stochastic turbulence and distributed discrete gusts as a function of the terrain. This model is applicable to conventional aircraft, V/STOL aircraft, and disc rotor model helicopter simulations. Vehicle angular activity in response to turbulence is computed from geometrical and temporal relationships rather than by using the conventional continuum approximations that assume uniform gust immersion and low frequency responses. By using techniques similar to those recently developed for blade-element rotor models, the angular-rate filters of conventional turbulence models are not required. The model produces rotational rates as well as air mass translational velocities in response to both stochastic and deterministic disturbances, where the discrete gusts and turbulence magnitudes may be correlated with significant terrain features or ship models. Assuming isotropy, a two-dimensional vertical turbulence field is created. A novel Gaussian interpolation technique is used to distribute vertical turbulence on the wing span or lateral rotor disc, and this distribution is used to compute roll responses. Air mass velocities are applied at significant centers of pressure in the computation of the aircraft's pitch and roll responses.

McFarland, R. E.↗

Green Computing Catalyzer Kickoff: Green Artificial Intelligence (AI) Directions

For the 2022 JISEA annual meeting, JISEA introduces in this presentation the new Green Computing Catalyzer. The new catalyzer looks to establish green computing as a salient research domain at NREL, and crucially, to begin to address the looming computing energy crisis. The presentation provides some basic numbers, establishing energy use and source or carbon emissions for computing. The presentation also includes a brief history of green computing at NREL, empirical deep learning efficiency study, and research directions.

AI efficiency↗