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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 73 records · Page 4

Topical Analyses Related to Co-located Industrial Facilities at Nuclear Power Plants

This report investigates topics of interest with regard to Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) utilizing flexible plant operations and generation (FPOG). Previous reports have identified the risk associated with co-located hydrogen generation facilities. This report evaluates special topics with regard to co-location of both hydrogen and syngas production facilities. A literature review was conducted to evaluate overpressure mitigation techniques that may be available to the NPP to reduce the consequence of an overpressure event. Also, the overpressure consequence of a catastrophic hydrogen storage tank failure event was analyzed. A comparison of the similarities and differences between the methodology utilized in HyRAM+ and Regulatory Guide 1.91 (R.G. 1.91) was performed for overpressure analysis. Also, the trinitrotoluene (TNT) equivalency methodology was utilized to evaluate an overpressure event at a Syngas production facility.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Topics in Astrophysical X-Ray and Gamma Ray Spectroscopy

A number of topics relating to astrophysical observations that have already been made or are currently planned of spectral features, mostly emission lines, in the X-ray and gamma ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum are investigated. These topics include: the production of characteristic X-ray and gamma ray lines by nonthermal ions, spectral features induced by processes occurring in strong magnetic fields, and the positron annihilation line at 0.5 MeV. The rate of X-ray production at 6.8 keV by the 2p to 1s transition in fast hydrogen- and helium-like iron ions, following both electron capture to excited levels and collisional excitation is calculated. The cross section for electron-ion Coulomb collisions in strong fields is also calculated.

Bussard, R. W.↗

Recent researches into solid bodies and magnetic fields in the solar system; Proceedings of the Topical Meeting and Symposium, Ottawa, Canada, May 16-June 2, 1982

Topics discussed include the magnetic history of the early solar system, impact processes in solid bodies (e.g., meteoroids and asteroids), and topics related to cometary missions. The section devoted to cometary missions lays particular stress on missions to Comet Halley; attention is given to such aspects of these missions as the investigation of hypervelocity impact on the Giotto Halley mission dust shield, the detection of energetic cometary and solar particles by the EPONA instrument on the Giotto mission, the dust hazard near Comet Halley in regard to the Vega project, and cometary ephemerides for spacecraft flyby missions.

Vette, J. I.↗

Cometary environments; Proceedings of Symposium 5, Workshop IV, and Topical Meeting of the 27th COSPAR Plenary Meeting, Espoo, Finland, July 18-29, 1988

Papers on the environment of comets are presented, covering topics such as constraints on the interstellar dust model of comet dust, dust particles and comet nuclei, models of cometary nuclei, subliming gas in the near-nuclear layer of the comet coma, the nucleus and rotation of Comet Halley, the surface albedo of comet nuclei, observational studies on Comet Halley, comet simulations, comet ion composition, and chemical abundances in comets. Additional topics include the O 1D and H2O production rate from comets, collisional coma models, the gas coma of Comet Giacobini-Zinner, IR properties of rough comet grains, studies of Comet Halley by Giotto, the impact of large dust particles on the Vega spacecraft, and carbonaceous materials as components of comet dust. Also, consideration is given to comet plasma boundaries, the comet ionopause, the solar wind-comet interaction, MHD turbulence and particle acceleration in a mass-loaded solar wind, combined first and second order Fermi acceleration at comets, discrete wave packets upstream from the earth and comets, and the visual appearance of comets under varying solar wind conditions.

Gombosi, T. I.↗

Remote sensing of atmosphere and oceans; Proceedings of Symposium 1 and of the Topical Meeting of the 27th COSPAR Plenary Meeting, Espoo, Finland, July 18-29, 1988

Papers are presented on the contribution of space remote sensing observations to the World Climate Research Program and the Global Change Program, covering topics such as space observations for global environmental monitoring, experiments related to land surface fluxes, studies of atmospheric composition, structure, motions, and precipitation, and remote sensing for oceanography, observational studies of the atmosphere, clouds, and the earth radiation budget. Also, papers are given on results from space observations for meteorology, oceanography, and mesoscale atmospheric and ocean processes. The topics include vertical atmospheric soundings, surface water temperature determination, sea level variability, data on the prehurricane atmosphere, linear and circular mesoscale convective systems, Karman vortex clouds, and temporal patterns of phytoplankton abundance.

Raschke, E.↗

Mining nonterrestrial resources: Information needs and research topics

An outline of topics we need to understand better in order to apply mining technology to a nonterrestrial environment is presented. The proposed list is not intended to be complete. It aims to identify representative topics that suggest productive research. Such research will reduce the uncertainties associated with extrapolating from conventional earthbound practice to nonterrestrial applications. One objective is to propose projects that should put future discussions of nonterrestrial mining on a firmer, less speculative basis.

Daemen, Jaak J. K.↗

Selected topics on the active control of helicopter aeromechanical and vibration problems

This paper describes in a concise manner three selected topics on the active control of helicopter aeromechanical and vibration problems. The three topics are as follows: (1) the active control of helicopter air-resonance using an LQG/LTR approach; (2) simulation of higher harmonic control (HHC) applied to a four bladed hingeless helicopter rotor in forward flight; and (3) vibration suppression in forward flight on a hingeless helicopter rotor using an actively controlled, partial span, trailing edge flap, which is mounted on the blade. Only a few selected illustrative results are presented. The results obtained clearly indicate that the partial span, actively controlled flap has considerable potential for vibration reduction in helicopter rotors.

Friedmann, Peretz P.↗

Fuels and Space Propellants for Reusable Launch Vehicles: A Small Business Innovation Research Topic and Its Commercial Vision

Under its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program (and with NASA Headquarters support), the NASA Lewis Research Center has initiated a topic entitled "Fuels and Space Propellants for Reusable Launch Vehicles." The aim of this project would be to assist in demonstrating and then commercializing new rocket propellants that are safer and more environmentally sound and that make space operations easier. Soon it will be possible to commercialize many new propellants and their related component technologies because of the large investments being made throughout the Government in rocket propellants and the technologies for using them. This article discusses the commercial vision for these fuels and propellants, the potential for these propellants to reduce space access costs, the options for commercial development, and the benefits to nonaerospace industries. This SBIR topic is designed to foster the development of propellants that provide improved safety, less environmental impact, higher density, higher I(sub sp), and simpler vehicle operations. In the development of aeronautics and space technology, there have been limits to vehicle performance imposed by traditionally used propellants and fuels. Increases in performance are possible with either increased propellant specific impulse, increased density, or both. Flight system safety will also be increased by the use of denser, more viscous propellants and fuels.

Palaszewski, Bryan A.↗

Topical Issue on Optical Particle Characterization and Remote Sensing of the Atmosphere: Part I

Increasing our understanding of the Earth-atmosphere system has been a scientific and political priority for the last few decades. This system not only touches on environmental science, but it has applicability to our broader understanding of planetary atmospheres in general. While this issue focuses primarily on electromagnetics, other fundamental fields of science, including fluid and thermodynamics play major roles. In recent years, significant research efforts have led to advances in the fields of radiative transfer and electromagnetic scattering from irregularly shaped particles. Recently, several workshops and small conferences have taken place to promote the fusion of these efforts. Late in 2013, for instance, two such meetings took place. The Optical Characterization of Atmospheric Aerosols (OCAA) meeting took place in Smolenice, Slovakia to promote a better understanding of microphysical properties of aerosol particles, and the characterization of such atmospheric particles using optical techniques. A complementary conference was organized in Nagoya, Japan, the 3rd International Symposium on Atmospheric Light Scattering and Remote Sensing (ISALSaRS), whose goal is to fuse the advances achieved in particle characterization with remote-sensing techniques. While the focus of these meetings is slightly different, they represent the same aspects of this rapidly growing field. This Topical Issue is the first of two parts. Within this issue we analyze different aspects of the problem of atmospheric characterization and present a broad overview of the topical area. Research includes theory and experiment, ranging from fundamental microphysical properties of individual aerosol particles to broad characterizations of atmospheric properties. Since this is an active field, we also have encouraged the submission of ideas for new methodologies that may represent the future of the field.

aerosols↗

BERT-Based Topic Modeling and Information Retrieval to Support Fishbone Diagramming for Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Wildfire Response

Recent concepts for emerging wildfire response operations have included unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) due to their increasing accessibility and capabilities. To integrate UAS into wildfire response safely, researchers have studied the use of large repositories of historic incident reports to improve the scope of root cause analysis. Recent work has emphasized applying state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to extract useful information from these repositories. However, it has not yet been studied how these results can be interpreted and integrated into the systems engineering process. In this work, we propose a process in which Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based topic modeling and information retrieval are applied to a relevant set of documents in order to support the development of a fishbone diagram in a semiautomated process. High-level themes in the document set are identified using topic modeling, which are then refined and interpreted by a human analyst. Then, the themes are used to guide a finer search using information retrieval, which returns specific incident reports of relevance. This provides traceability to specific incidents as well as broader categorizations that comprise the fishbone branches. We apply the proposed process to relevant documents from NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The proposed process is widely applicable when relevant documents are available, and the results from this study will be useful to identifying potential causes of wildfire response UAS incidents.

Hazard analysis↗

BERT-based Topic Modeling and Information Retrieval to Support Fishbone Diagramming for Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Wildfire Response

Recent concepts for emerging wildfire response operations have included unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) due to their increasing accessibility and capabilities. To integrate UAS into wildfire response safely, researchers have studied the use of large repositories of historic incident reports to improve the scope of root cause analysis. Recent work has emphasized applying state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to extract useful information from these repositories. However, it has not yet been studied how these results can be interpreted and integrated into the systems engineering process. In this work, we propose a process in which Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based topic modeling and information retrieval are applied to a relevant set of documents in order to support the development of a fishbone diagram in a semiautomated process. High-level themes in the document set are identified using topic modeling, which are then refined and interpreted by a human analyst. Then, the themes are used to guide a finer search using information retrieval, which returns specific incident reports of relevance. This provides traceability to specific incidents as well as broader categorizations that comprise the fishbone branches. We apply the proposed process to relevant documents from NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The proposed process is widely applicable when relevant documents are available, and the results from this study will be useful to identifying potential causes of wildfire response UAS incidents.

hazard analysis↗

BERT-based Topic Modeling and Information Retrieval to Support Fishbone Diagramming for Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Wildfire Response

Recent concepts for emerging wildfire response operations have included unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) due to their increasing accessibility and capabilities. To integrate UAS into wildfire response safely, researchers have studied the use of large repositories of historic incident reports to improve the scope of root cause analysis. Recent work has emphasized applying state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to extract useful information from these repositories. However, it has not yet been studied how these results can be interpreted and integrated into the systems engineering process. In this work, we propose a process in which Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based topic modeling and information retrieval are applied to a relevant set of documents in order to support the development of a fishbone diagram in a semiautomated process. High-level themes in the document set are identified using topic modeling, which are then refined and interpreted by a human analyst. Then, the themes are used to guide a finer search using information retrieval, which returns specific incident reports of relevance. This provides traceability to specific incidents as well as broader categorizations that comprise the fishbone branches. We apply the proposed process to relevant documents from NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The proposed process is widely applicable when relevant documents are available, and the results from this study will be useful to identifying potential causes of wildfire response UAS incidents.

hazard analysis↗

Using Topic Modeling and Text Embeddings to Predict Deleted Tweets

Predictive models for tweet deletion have been a relatively unexplored area of Twitter-related computational research. We first approach the deletion of tweets as a spam detection problem, applying a small set of handcrafted features to improve upon the current state-of-the- art in predicting deleted tweets. Next, we apply our approach to a dataset of deleted tweets that better reflects the current deletion rate. Since tweets are deleted for reasons beyond just the presence of spam, we apply topic modeling and text embeddings in order to capture the semantic content of tweets that can lead to tweet deletion. Our goal is to create an effective model that has a low-dimensional feature space and is also language-independent. A lean model would be computationally advantageous processing high-volumes of Twitter data, which can reach 9,885 tweets per second. Our results show that a small set of spam-related features combined with word topics and character-level text embeddings provide the best f1 when trained with a random forest model. The highest precision of the deleted tweet class is achieved by a modification of paragraph2vec to capture author identity.

Potash, Peter J.↗

Panel Session 16: Hot Topics and Emerging Issues in US Commercial LLRW Management and Disposal

This panel focused on emerging issues in commercial LLW management in the US from the perspective of active members of the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Forum, Inc. State, compact, federal and industry officials will share their views on a variety of timely and significant topics related to low-level radioactive waste management, disposal and related issues. Presentations proposed include: 1 - Overview of NRC Activities and Initiatives (John Tappert, US NRC (USA)); 2 - Advocates for Responsible Disposal in Texas (Edward Selig, Advocates for Responsible Disposal in Texas (ARDT) (USA)); 3 - Hot Topics and Emerging Issues in U.S. Commercial LLW Management and Disposal (Joe Weismann, US Ecology (USA)); 4 - DOE/NNSA Office of Radiological Security (ORS) Sealed Source Management and Disposal (David Martin, Energetics Incorporated (USA), Temeka Taplin, US DOE NNSA (USA))

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Panel Session 75: US NRC - Current and Emerging US NRC Regulatory Topics

The panel addressed several current and emerging NRC regulatory issues impacting the radioactive waste arena. The panelists provided different perspectives on several key issues such as the revision of 10 CFR Part 61, scoping study on very low-level waste and consolidated interim storage of spent nuclear fuel among other timely regulatory topics. Co-Chairs, John Tappert and Larry Camper, introduced the session panel members and provided a summary of the purpose of the session. The panel focused on several current and emerging US NRC regulatory issues impacting the radioactive waste arena and stakeholders. The panelists provided different perspectives on several key regulatory issues such as: the revision of 10CFR Part 61, the Greater-than-Class C (GTCC) and Transuranic (TRU) waste disposal, coping with studies on very low-level waste and waste classification system, as well as other timely regulatory topics. Presentations proposed include: 1 - Overview of NRC Low-Level Radioactive Waste Activities and Initiatives (Christepher McKenney, US NRC (USA)); 2 - Is the Grass Really Greener? Canadian Regulatory Perspective (Karine Glenn, Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (Canada)); 3 - EPRI Perspectives on 10CFR61 Revision (Lisa Edwards, EPRI (USA)); 4 - State of Nuclear Industry and Radwaste Management (Janet Schlueter, Nuclear Energy Institute (USA)); 5 - Concrete Steps the U.S. NRC Can Take to Improve LLW Disposal (Tom Magette, Talisman International (USA))

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Panel Session 14: US NRC - Current and Emerging US NRC Regulatory Topics

This panel focused on several current and emerging US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulatory issues impacting the commercial radioactive waste arena in the US. The panelists provided different perspectives on key issues such as the revision of 10 Code of Federal Regulations Part 61 'Licensing Requirements For Land Disposal Of Radioactive Waste', the scoping study on very low-level waste, the consolidated interim storage of spent nuclear fuel and other timely regulatory topics. Panelists with presentations: Overview of NRC Low-Level Radioactive Waste Activities and Initiatives (Patricia Holahan); US Nuclear Power Plant Waste Management - US LLW Disposal Issues (Joe Weismann); Decommissioning Rule (Vern C. Rogers); What is TRU? Definition, Legislation, and Rulemaking (David Carlson); LLRW Regulatory Topics of Interest in Texas (Bobby Janecka); International Low Level Waste Management Practices (Richard McGrath)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Characterizing the field of Atomic Layer Deposition: Authors, topics, and collaborations

This paper describes how Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) has evolved over time using a combination of bibliometric, social network, and text analysis. We examined the rate of knowledge production as well as changes in authors, journals, and collaborators, showing a steady growth of ALD research. The study of the collaboration network of ALD scientists over time points out that the ALD research community is becoming larger and more interconnected, with a largest connected component that spans 90% of the authors in 2015. In addition, the evolution of network centrality measures (degree and betweenness centrality) and author productivity revealed the central figures in ALD over time, including new “stars” appearing in the last decade. Finally, the study of the title words in our dataset is consistent with a shift in focus on research topics towards energy applications and nanotechnology.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗