SEARCH · Engineering Papers
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.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Absolute electron densities of upper ionospheric F layer by measuring radio phase dispersion between separating rocket capsules
Amplitude and phase measurements help characterize nearly paraboloidal reflectors. Deviation of microwave reflector from ideal paraboloidal shape deduced from far-field amplitude and phase measurements with help of theoretical technique referred to as microwave holographic metrology. Technique enables estimation of antenna-surface figure from measurements taken at prescribed number of field points. After determining amount of surface deviation, performance of antenna then improved by properly adjusting surface panels.
A set of measurements performed by the Michigan Tech Sensing and Signal Processing Group on the analog receiver built by the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for propagation measurements using the Olympus Satellite is described. Measurements of local oscillator (LO) phase noise were performed for all of the LOs supplied by JPL. In order to obtain the most useful set of measurements, LO phase noise measurements were made using the complete VPI receiver front end. This set of measurements demonstrates the performance of the receiver from the Radio Frequency (RF) input through the high Intermediate Frequency (IF) output. Three different measurements were made: LO phase noise with DC on the voltage controlled crystal oscillator (VCXO) port; LO phase noise with the 11.381 GHz LO locked to the reference signal generator; and a reference measurement with the JPL LOs out of the system.
An improved method and apparatus have been devised for measuring cyclic errors in the readouts of laser heterodyne interferometers that are configured and operated as displacement gauges. The cyclic errors arise as a consequence of mixing of spurious optical and electrical signals in beam launchers that are subsystems of such interferometers. The conventional approach to measurement of cyclic error involves phase measurements and yields values precise to within about 10 pm over air optical paths at laser wavelengths in the visible and near infrared. The present approach, which involves amplitude measurements instead of phase measurements, yields values precise to about .0.1 microns . about 100 times the precision of the conventional approach. In a displacement gauge of the type of interest here, the laser heterodyne interferometer is used to measure any change in distance along an optical axis between two corner-cube retroreflectors. One of the corner-cube retroreflectors is mounted on a piezoelectric transducer (see figure), which is used to introduce a low-frequency periodic displacement that can be measured by the gauges. The transducer is excited at a frequency of 9 Hz by a triangular waveform to generate a 9-Hz triangular-wave displacement having an amplitude of 25 microns. The displacement gives rise to both amplitude and phase modulation of the heterodyne signals in the gauges. The modulation includes cyclic error components, and the magnitude of the cyclic-error component of the phase modulation is what one needs to measure in order to determine the magnitude of the cyclic displacement error. The precision attainable in the conventional (phase measurement) approach to measuring cyclic error is limited because the phase measurements are af-
Waveguide bridge technique for measuring phase of coupled signal between two loosely coupled antennas
Measurement of full-field velocities via Particle Imaging Velocimetry (PIV) is common in research efforts involving fluid motion. While such measurements have been successfully performed in the liquid phase in a microgravity environment, gas-phase measurements have been beset by difficulties with seeding and laser strength. A synthesis of techniques developed at NASA LeRC exhibits promise in overcoming these difficulties. Typical implementation of PIV involves forming the light from a pulsed laser into a sheet that is some fraction of a millimeter thick and 50 or more millimeters wide. When a particle enters this sheet during a pulse, light scattered from the particle is recorded by a detector, which may be a film plane or a CCD array. Assuming that the particle remains within the boundaries of the sheet for the second pulse and can be distinguished from neighboring particles, comparison of the two images produces an average velocity vector for the time between the pulses. If the concentration of particles in the sampling volume is sufficiently large but the particles remain discrete, a full field map may be generated.
When it comes to “phase measurement” or “quantitative phase imaging”, many people will automatically connect them with “laser” and “interferometry”. Indeed, conventional quantitative phase imaging and phase measurement techniques generally rely on the superposition of two beams with a high degree of coherence: complex interferometric configurations, stringent requirements on the environmental stabilities, and associated laser speckle noise severely limit their applications in optical imaging and microscopy. On a different note, as one of the most well-known phase retrieval approaches, the transport of intensity equation (TIE) provides a new non-interferometric way to access quantitative phase information through intensity only measurement. Despite the insufficiency for interferometry, TIE is applicable under partially coherent illuminations (like the Köhler’s illumination in a conventional microscope), permitting optimum spatial resolution, higher signal-to-noise ratio, and better image quality. In this tutorial, we give an overview of the basic principle, research fields, and representative applications of TIE, focus particularly on optical imaging, metrology, and microscopy. The purpose of this tutorial is twofold. It should serve as a self-contained introduction to TIE for readers with little or no knowledge of TIE. On the other hand, it attempts to give an overview of recent developments in this field. These results highlight a new era in which strict coherence and interferometry are no longer prerequisites for quantitative phase imaging and diffraction tomography, paving the way toward new generation label-free three-dimensional microscopy, with applications in all branches of biomedicine.
Combustor noise measurements were performed using wave guide probes. Test results from two full scale annular combustor configurations in a combustor test rig are presented. A CF6-50 combustor represented a current design, and a double annular combustor represented the advanced clean combustor configuration. The overall acoustic power levels were found to correlate with the steady state heat release rate and inlet temperature. A theoretical analysis for the attenuation of combustor noise propagating through a turbine was extended from a subsonic relative flow condition to include the case of supersonic flow at the discharge side. The predicted attenuation from this analysis was compared to both engine data and extrapolated component combustor data. The attenuation of combustor noise through the CF6-50 turbine was found to be greater than 14 dB by both the analysis and the data.
Synchronized Phase Angle Measurements (SPAMs) are widely used in power systems in the applications of situational awareness. However, the practical time shifts can lead to unexpected angle differences among Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) manufactured from various vendors. Moreover, since most of PMUs calculate phase angle via Discrete Fourier Transform based approaches, this issue becomes even worse under the off-nominal frequency condition. To mitigate the impact of practical timing shift, this letter presents a fast method to rectify the SPAM for appropriate alignment. To verify the performance of the proposed method, laboratory and field tests have been conducted by implementing the method in PMUs and phasor data concentrators, respectively. The results demonstrate that the standard deviations of the phase angle differences have significantly decreased to 0.1$^{\circ }$ order with the adoption of the proposed method.
Frequency counted measurements and phase locking to noisy oscillators, showing counted frequency method sample variance slow convergence to actual variance
A system, method and apparatus for mixer phase response measurement comprises a vector network analyzer connectable to a device under test, an additional device connected to the analyzer the additional device configured to have an equal phase response to that of the device under test, a local oscillator connected to the device under test and the additional device, a series of switches connecting the device under test and the additional device to a vector voltmeter, and a reference generator connected to the vector voltmeter.
A fiber array polar nephelometer of advanced design, the FAN I is capable of in-situ phase function measurements of scattered light from man-made or natural atmospheric particles. The scattered light is measured at 100 different angles throughout 360 degrees, thus providing a potential measurement of the asymmetry of irregularly shaped particles. Phase functions can be measured at 10 to 100 Hz rates and the range of measurable single particle sizes is from 5 micron m to as large as 8mm. For particles smaller than 5 micro m the ensemble average can be measured. The FAN I is microprocessor controlled and the data may be stored on floppy disk or printed out in tabular and/or graphical form. The optical head may be separated from the computer system for operation in field or adverse conditions. Examples of laboratory measured scattering phase functions obtained with the FAN I for spherical particles is given to illustrate its measurement capabilities.
A quantitative measure of the phase correlations in a density field is presented based on the location of the maxima of the Fourier components of that field. It is found that this measue can easily detect non-Gaussian behavior either in artificially constructed density fields or those that become non-Gaussian from gravitational clustering of Gaussian initial conditions. It is found that different initial power spectra produce somewhat distinguishable signals, and the signals are robust against sparse sampling.
Simple battery-powered test circuit will contribute negligible error when taking open-loop measurements of gain and phase parameters. This is especially helpful when measuring high-grain circuits containing integrators.
X band horn antennas precision phase center measurement technique for high resolution system applications
The Microwave Reflectometer Ionization Sensor (MRIS) is an instrument being developed for use in detecting and ranging of electron density layers in the reentry plasma of a space transfer vehicle. The rationale for the selection of the Double Sideband Suppressed Carrier (DSBSC) system used in the feasibility study for the MRIS is presented. A 25 GHz single-oscillator system and a 220 GHz double-oscillator system are described. The 25 GHz system was constructed and tested in the laboratory and test results are presented. As developed, the system employs a sideband spacing of 160 MHz. Based on an estimated electromagnetic wave velocity in the plasma, a round-trip phase shift measurement accuracy of +/- 7.6 degrees was required for the desired +/- 1/2 cm distance measurement accuracy. The interaction of parallel ground and reflecting planes produces interference that prevents the basic DSBSC system from meeting the accuracy goal so a frequency modulation was added to the system to allow averaging of the measured phase deviation. With an FM deviation of +/- 1 GHz, laboratory measurements were made for distances from 5 to 61 cm tip free space. Accounting for the plasma velocity factor, 82 percent of the data were equal to or better than the desired accuracy. Based on this measured result a sideband spacing to 250 MHz could be expected to yield data approximately 96 percent within the accuracy goal.
Here, we investigate prospects of employing the linear cross entropy to experimentally access measurement-induced phase transitions without requiring any postselection of quantum trajectories. For two random circuits that are identical in the bulk but with different initial states, the linear cross entropy χ between the bulk measurement outcome distributions in the two circuits acts as an order parameter, and can be used to distinguish the volume law from area law phases. In the volume law phase (and in the thermodynamic limit) the bulk measurements cannot distinguish between the two different initial states, and χ = 1. In the area law phase χ < 1. For circuits with Clifford gates, we provide numerical evidence that χ can be sampled to accuracy ϵ from O(1/ϵ 2 ) trajectories, by running the first circuit on a quantum simulator without postselection, aided by a classical simulation of the second. We also find that for weak depolarizing noise the signature of the measurement-induced phase transitions is still present for intermediate system sizes. In our protocol we have the freedom of choosing initial states such that the “classical” side can be simulated efficiently, while simulating the “quantum” side is still classically hard.
Dual range linear measurement device accurately measures RF phase differences in either VHF or UHF ranges. The device has a capability consisting of a course range extending to 30 cm readable to 1 mm and any fine range portion of 2.5 cm readable to .01 mm.