Cryogenics design of a compact, cryocooler conduction-cooled SRF accelerator for e-beam production
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This paper describes the mechanical design, analysis, fabrication, testing, and lessons learned by developing a uniquely designed spaceflight-like actuator. The linear proof mass actuator (LPMA) was designed to attach to both a large space structure and a ground test model without modification. Previous designs lacked the power to perform in a terrestrial environment while other designs failed to produce the desired accelerations or frequency range for spaceflight applications. Thus, the design for a unique actuator was conceived and developed at NASA Langley Research Center. The basic design consists of four large mechanical parts (mass, upper housing, lower housing, and center support) and numerous smaller supporting components including an accelerometer, encoder, and four drive motors. Fabrication personnel were included early in the design phase of the LPMA as part of an integrated manufacturing process to alleviate potential difficulties in machining an already challenging design. Operating testing of the LPMA demonstrated that the actuator is capable of various types of load functions.
This paper describes the mechanical design, analysis, fabrication, testing, and lessons learned by developing a uniquely designed spaceflight-like actuator. The Linear Proof Mass Actuator (LPMA) was designed to attach to both a large space structure and a ground test model without modification. Previous designs lacked the power to perform in a terrestrial environment while other designs failed to produce the desired accelerations or frequency range for spaceflight applications. Thus, the design for a unique actuator was conceived and developed at NASA Langley Research Center. The basic design consists of four large mechanical parts (Mass, Upper Housing, Lower Housing, and Center Support) and numerous smaller supporting components including an accelerometer, encoder, and four drive motors. Fabrication personnel were included early in the design phase of the LPMA as part of an integrated manufacturing process to alleviate potential difficulties in machining an already challenging design. Operational testing of the LPMA demonstrated that the actuator is capable of various types of load functions.
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Abstract Nuclear waste glass vitrification furnaces are lined with refractory ceramic blocks to contain the molten glass. The refractory liner is susceptible to corrosion and has a finite service lifetime. For this reason, predicting the refractory corrosion in contact with molten glass is integral to estimating melter service lifetime. Standardized laboratory tests varying time and temperature are commonly performed to estimate refractory material loss as a function of glass composition. These data are time and resource‐intensive to collect and are susceptible to considerable measurement error. In order to accelerate glass formulation and design for nuclear waste vitrification, methods are needed to increase laboratory‐scale throughput while maintaining data quality. In this work, a method to remove the residual glass from a corroded coupon using hydrofluoric acid is presented that accelerates the throughput of sample analysis while simultaneously facilitating more accurate measurements.
As magnetic confinement fusion energy gains traction internationally to enable abundant energy production, designing components for fusion systems is a pressing challenge. During the planned lifetime of a fusion device, components evolve in extreme environments and must withstand large, repeated thermal loads and bombardment by 14 MeV neutrons, plasma ions, and neutral particles (deuterium, tritium, and helium), corrosive conditions, etc. All these physical processes take place simultaneously, interact in intricate ways, and impose important constraints that can affect performance. Experimental data is rare and costly to obtain, making design particularly challenging. Predictive computational frameworks must be an integral part of an accelerated and cost-effective design process by modeling fusion system performance in simulated environments. To better understand component degradation and operational impacts on their performance, the Software for Advanced Large-scale Analysis of MAgnetic confinement for Numerical Design, Engineering & Research (SALAMANDER) is designed as an open-source, fully integrated, multiphysics, multiscale, NQA-1 compliant framework facilitating 3D, high-fidelity fusion system modeling. To that end, SALAMANDER is a MOOSE-based framework, and therefore leverages MOOSE upstream libraries such as PETSc and libMesh to deliver sophisticated finite element, finite volume, and nonlinear solver technology for fusion energy simulations. SALAMANDER couples MOOSE physics module capabilities—such as thermal hydraulics, heat conduction, Navier-Stokes, and thermomechanics—with tritium transport via TMAP8, neutronics via Cardinal, and nascent particle-in-cell capabilities. Direct simulation Monte Carlo methods will be used to address neutral transport near the walls. By coupling all these physics in an integrated application, SALAMANDER will enable high-fidelity modeling of irradiation levels and plasma exposure conditions of plasma facing components and their impact on heat and tritium distributions, as well as the resulting mechanical constraints experienced by the plasma facing components and performance of blanket systems. Furthermore, SALAMANDER will be particularly suited for engineering studies thanks to the stochastic tool module readily available in MOOSE, allowing for extended uncertainty quantification and risk analysis studies. It is also able to use computer-aided design (CAD) meshes to model complex geometries, which is indispensable for fusion systems. SALAMANDER therefore supports design, safety, engineering, and research projects for magnetic confinement fusion systems
Locating low frequency radio observatories on the lunar surface has a number of advantages. Here, we describe the Radio Observatory for Lunar Sortie Science (ROLSS), a concept for a low frequency, radio imaging interferometric array designed to study particle acceleration in the corona and inner heliosphere. ROLSS would be deployed during an early lunar sortie or by a robotic rover as part of an unmanned landing. The prime science mission is to image type II and type III solar radio bursts with the aim of determining the sites at and mechanisms by which the radiating particles are accelerated. Secondary science goals include constraining the density of the lunar ionosphere by searching for a low radio frequency cutoff of the solar radio emissions and constraining the low energy electron population in astrophysical sources. Furthermore, ROLSS serves a pathfinder function for larger lunar radio arrays. Key design requirements on ROLES include the operational frequency and angular resolution. The electron densities in the solar corona and inner heliosphere are such that the relevant emission occurs below 10 MHz, essentially unobservable from Earth's surface due to the terrestrial ionospheric cutoff. Resolving the potential sites of particle acceleration requires an instrument with an angular resolution of at least 2 deg, equivalent to a linear array size of approximately 500 meters. Operations would consist of data acquisition during the lunar day, with regular data downlinks. The major components of the ROLSS array are 3 antenna arms arranged in a Y shape, with a central electronics package (CEP). Each antenna arm is a linear strip of polyimide film (e.g., Kapton (TM)) on which 16 single polarization dipole antennas are located by depositing a conductor (e.g., silver). The arms also contain transmission lines for carrying the radio signals from the science antennas to the CEP.
A comprehensive set of flying qualities design criteria was prepared for use in the supersonic cruise research program. The framework for stating the design criteria is established and design criteria are included which address specific failures, approach to dangerous flight conditions, flight at high angle of attack, longitudinal and lateral directional stability and control, the primary flight control system, and secondary flight controls. Examples are given of lateral directional design criteria limiting lateral accelerations at the cockpit, time to roll through 30 deg of bank, and time delay in the pilot's command path. Flight test data from the Concorde certification program are used to substantiate a number of the proposed design criteria.
Fusion energy meets the twenty-first century World Grand Challenge of sustainable, ubiquitous, and safer energy sources. However, harnessing the promise of fusion energy has proven elusive. The competing approaches to fusion power plant design include inertial confinement fusion, National Ignition Facility (ICF-NIF, Z machine, etc.,) magnetic confinement fusion (MCF-Tokamak, stellarators, etc.), and other approaches that show promise in small- (flow stabilized Z pinches) or large-scale applications. These approaches are being accelerated with private and public funding and seek to demonstrate the feasibility of different approaches to fusion-based power plants. Yet, how can the necessary pulsed power technologies for these disruptive technology bases be accelerated with no clear “Dominant Design?” Roadmapping holds the promise to identify and develop common critical pulsed power components for laboratory, prototype, and commercial fusion, and can accelerate the commercialization of fusion reactor designs. A preroadmapping Workshop on Pulsed Power for Fusion was held at the IEEE International Pulsed Power Conference in San Antonio, TX, USA, in June 2023. The workshop had 177 attendees. Here, the common elements for many of the ICF technologies vying for dominant design were identified. The advancement of these technologies through roadmapping will enhance commercial expectations that require their rapid and innovative development in the next five years, as well as the next five to ten years. The key technologies identified that underpin and limit the advancement of fusion power include pulsed power technologies such as energy storage, high-voltage switching, additive manufacturing, and modular pulsed power circuit topologies. In conclusion, they are the focus of our effort in the following roadmap scenario, which will delineate potential paths to technology development.
This report finalizes design specifications for developing batched kernels for small tensor operations for unassembled matrix-free iterative solvers, batched solvers for partially assembled operators, and batched solvers with support for various sparse formats. The outcome of the project milestones is a set of interfaces to Batched Sparse LA solvers running on hardware accelerators for use in ECP Libraries and Applications. It is part of the development of sparse batched kernels, solvers/preconditioners as well as creating interoperability in xSDK libraries with sparse and dense batched functions to benefit ECP applications. The participants included representatives from ECP libraries (not limited to the xSDK project), applications, and vendors (AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA). Batched sparse linear algebra solvers form the new frontier for algorithmic development and performance engineering. Many applications (ECP and non-ECP alike) require simultaneous solutions of small linear systems of equations that are structurally sparse. To move towards high hardware utilization, it is important to provide these applications with appropriate interfaces to efficient batched sparse solvers running on modern hardware accelerators. We present interface designs in use by HPC software libraries supporting batched sparse linear algebra and the development of sparse batched kernel codes for solvers and preconditioners. We also address the potential interoperability opportunities to keep the software portable between the major hardware accelerators from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. The presented interface specifications includes batched band, sparse iterative, and sparse direct solvers. This report summarizes progress in Kokkos Kernels and the xSDK libraries MAGMA, Ginkgo, hypre, SUNDIALS, and SuperLU_dist.
Shape memory alloys (SMAs) are a unique class of materials with several remarkable properties including shape recovery, superelasticity, etc. Nickel-titanium (NiTi) based alloys are the most widely studied of this class, with compositions including ternary, quaternary, or higher additions being considered. Especially important for many NASA applications is the ability to tune the martensitic phase transition temperature of NiTi alloys by varying the alloy composition and processing conditions. In addition, low hysteresis and an acceptable recoverable transformation strain are required. Over the past several years, a significant database of SMA properties has been assembled by NASA researchers. Such a database is ideal for data science-based approaches. We present results from our machine learning approach for designing new SMAs with target properties within our range of interest. Our developed models are capable of accurately predicting the transition temperature, hysteresis, and transformation strain of SMAs across a wide range of compositions. This approach has the potential to significantly accelerate the discovery and design of new SMA materials.
We demonstrate transfer learning capabilities in a machine-learned algorithm trained for particle-flow reconstruction in high energy particle colliders. This paper presents a cross-detector fine-tuning study, where we initially pretrain the model on a large full simulation dataset from one detector design, and subsequently fine-tune the model on a sample with a different collider and detector design. Specifically, we use the Compact Linear Collider detector (CLICdet) model for the initial training set and demonstrate successful knowledge transfer to the CLIC-like detector (CLD) proposed for the Future Circular Collider in electron-positron mode. We show that with an order of magnitude less samples from the second dataset, we can achieve the same performance as a costly training from scratch, across particle-level and event-level performance metrics, including jet and missing transverse momentum resolution. Furthermore, we find that the fine-tuned model achieves comparable performance to the traditional rule-based particle-flow approach on event-level metrics after training on 100,000 CLD events, whereas a model trained from scratch requires at least 1 million CLD events to achieve similar reconstruction performance. To our knowledge, this represents the first full-simulation cross-detector transfer learning study for particle-flow reconstruction. These findings offer valuable insights towards building large foundation models that can be fine-tuned across different detector designs and geometries, helping to accelerate the development cycle for new detectors and opening the door to rapid detector design and optimization using machine learning.
Multicomponent plastics cannot be processed using mechanical recycling technologies, hindering efforts to deal with plastic waste. Multicomponent plastics include multilayer plastic films, which are widely used for food and healthcare packaging. Multilayer films combine several layers (potentially dozens) of different polymers to protect products from external factors (e.g., oxygen, water, temperature, shock, and light). Solvent-based separation processes have emerged as a promising alternative to recycle these complex materials. For instance, the Solvent-Targeted Recovery and Precipitation (STRAP TM ) process uses sequential solvent washes to selectively dissolve and separate constituent polymers from multicomponent plastic waste, including films. STRAP TM process design (separation sequence, type of solvents, and operating conditions) changes significantly depending on the design of the multilayer plastic film (e.g., number, types, and proportions of polymers). The ability to quickly quantify the economic and environmental benefits of diverse STRAP TM process designs is essential to accelerate the development of sustainable recycling processes and more recyclable multilayer film products. In this work, we present a fast computational framework that integrates molecular-scale models, process modeling, and techno-economic and life cycle analysis to quickly evaluate STRAP TM designs. The computational framework is general and can be used to study the processing of complex multilayer plastic waste streams that contain many layers. Furthermore, we highlight the different uses of the framework via targeted case studies.
Ionic liquids (ILs) are a novel class of solvents that have attracted significant attention due to their unique and tunable properties. Among their physiochemical characteristics, surface tension plays a critical role in various industrial applications including electrolytes, heat transfer fluids, and separation processes. However, because of the exploratory nature of IL design and the vast combinatorial space of possible anion–cation pairs, the experimental determination of these properties is often impractical, being both time-consuming and costly. To overcome these challenges, computational approaches are increasingly employed to develop accurate predictive models that can accelerate IL discovery and design. In this study, we present two deep learning (DL) models for predicting the surface tension of ILs across a broad temperature range at a constant pressure. The models use simplified molecular input line entry system, SMILES, representations of ILs to extract molecular features as inputs. Both DL models demonstrate excellent agreement with experimental data, achieving an R 2 value of 0.990 and a root-mean-square error of 0.792 mN/m. In conclusion, these results offer valuable insights for the rapid screening and rational design of ILs with tailored surface tension values.
The U.S. Magnet Development Program (US-MDP) is aimed at developing high-field accelerator magnets with magnetic fields beyond the limits of Nb 3 Sn technology. Recent progress with composite wires and Rutherford cables based on the first generation high-temperature superconductor Bi 2 Sr 2 CaCu 2 O 8-x (Bi2212) allows considering them for this purpose. However, Bi2212 wires and cables are sensitive to transverse stresses and strains, which are large in high-field accelerator magnets. This requires magnet designs with stress management concepts to control azimuthal and radial strains in the coil windings and prevent the degradation of the current carrying capability of Bi2212 conductor or even its permanent damage. This paper describes a novel stress management approach, which was developed at Fermilab for high-field large-aperture Nb 3 Sn accelerator magnets, and is now being applied to high-field dipole inserts based on Bi2212 Rutherford cables. The insert conceptual design and main parameters, including the superconducting wire and cable, as well as the coil stress management structure, key technological steps and approaches, test configurations and their target parameters, are presented and discussed.
The Integrable Optics Test Accelerator (IOTA) at Fermilab is transitioning from an electron beam facility to a proton beam facility for studies in nonlinear accelerator optics and space-charge dominated proton beams. This project involves the commissioning and fabrication of Ionization Profile Monitors (IPMs) to enable beam profile measurements at IOTA. In general, IPMs work on principle of residual gas ionization by the beam to generate beam profile. This work focuses on a mechanical design that leverages a controlled injection of noble gases, primarily Argon, as the ultra-high vacuum of the IOTA ring provides insufficient residual gas for ionization. Efforts to understand vacuum integration to ensure compatibility with the storage ring environment, the integration of real-time data acquisition systems and the commissioning of the IPMs will be discussed. This project provides a versatile diagnostic tool, supporting IOTA’s role as a testbed for larger-scale accelerator facilities and contributing to the broader understanding of beam physics in high-intensity, high-space-charge regimes.
A hypersonic aircraft is designed which uses scramjets to accelerate from Mach 6 to Mach 10 and sustain that speed for two minutes. Different propulsion systems were considered and it was decided that the aircraft would use one full scale turbofan-ramjet. Two solid rocket boosters were added to save fuel and help the aircraft pass through the transonic region. After considering aerodynamics, aircraft design, stability and control, cooling systems, mission profile, and landing systems, a conventional aircraft configuration was chosen over that of a waverider. The conventional design was chosen due to its landing characteristics and the relative expense compared to the waverider. Fuel requirements and the integration of the engine systems and their inlets are also taken into consideration in the final design. A hypersonic aircraft was designed which uses scramjets to accelerate from Mach 6 to Mach 10 and sustain that speed for two minutes. Different propulsion systems were considered and a full scale turbofan-ramjet was chosen. Two solid rocket boosters were added to save fuel and help the aircraft pass through the transonic reqion. After the aerodynamics, aircraft design, stability and control, cooling systems, mission profile, landing systems, and their physical interactions were considered, a conventional aircraft configuration was chosen over that of a waverider. The conventional design was chosen due to its landing characteristics and the relative expense compared to the waverider. Fuel requirements and the integration of the engine systems and their inlets were also considered in the designing process.
Locating low frequency radio observatories on the lunar surface has a number of advantages, including fixes locations for the antennas and no terrestrial interference on the far side of the moon. Here, we describe the Radio Observatory for Lunar Sortie Science (ROLSS), a concept for a low frequency, radio imaging interferometric array designed to study particle acceleration in the corona and inner heliosphere. ROLSS would be deployed during an early lunar sortie or by a robotic rover as part of an unmanned landing. The prime science mission is to image type II and type III solar radio bursts with the aim of determining the sites at and mechanisms by which the radiating particles are accelerated. Secondary science goals include constraining the density of the lunar ionosphere by searching for a low radio frequency cutoff of the solar radio emissions and constraining the low energy electron population in astrophysical sources. Furthermore, ROLSS serves a pathfinder function for larger lunar radio arrays designed for faint sources.