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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1992

Situation awareness in command and control settings

Many military and civilian operational settings are described as command and control (C2) environments characterized by high information load, extensive team coordination, and communication demands. To address these problems, designers have turned to the application of automation and decision aids. Currently, there are few techniques for assessing the performance of C2 operators with which to guide applications. A need exists for constructs on which to evaluate C2 systems. One possible concept for addressing these issues is that of Situation Awareness (SA). The SA concept and methodologies have developed largely around the cockpit environment. The extension is discussed of the SA concept to a team context related to C2 environments. Then the implications of such an approach for developing a methodology to empirically measure team SA in a C2 environment which should allow for the assessment of SA of both individual operators and overall SA of operational teams. The discussion also focuses on how a knowledge of SA may impact the design and development of systems which optimize rather than maximize information access and processing and, subsequently, improve C2 decision making.

Patterson, Robert W.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Human-in-the-loop evaluation of RMS Active Damping Augmentation

Active Damping Augmentation is the insertion of Controls-Structures Integration Technology to benefit the on-orbit performance of the Space Shuttle Remote Manipulator System. The goal is to reduce the vibration decay time of the Remote Manipulator System following normal payload maneuvers and operations. Simulation of Active Damping Augmentation was conducted in the realtime human-in-the-loop Systems Engineering Simulator at the NASA Johnson Space Center. The objective of this study was to obtain a qualitative measure of operational performance improvement from astronaut operators and to obtain supporting quantitative performance data. Sensing of vibratory motions was simulated using a three-axis accelerometer mounted at the end of the lower boom of the Remote Manipulator System. The sensed motions were used in a feedback control law to generate commands to the joint servo mechanisms which reduced the unwanted oscillations. Active damping of the Remote Manipulator System with an attached 3990 lb. payload was successfully demonstrated. Six astronaut operators examined the performance of an Active Damping Augmentation control law following single-joint and coordinated six-joint translational and rotational maneuvers. Active Damping Augmentation disturbance rejection of Orbiter thruster firings was also evaluated. Significant reductions in the dynamic response of the 3990 lb. payload were observed. Astronaut operators recommended investigation of Active Damping Augmentation benefits to heavier payloads where oscillations are a bigger problem (e.g. Space Station Freedom assembly operators).

Demeo, Martha E.↗
NASA NTRS1981

Solar Maximum Mission - A systems overview

The Solar Maximum Mission (SMM), or the central effort of the Solar Maximum Year research endeavor is discussed. The mission's attempt to exploit the synergistic advantages of correlated data to obtain a complete picture of solar phenomena is stressed, as is the coordination provided by a world-wide network of ground-based observations. The prominent features of the SMM observatory, including the payload module and the solar-array system, are shown diagramatically and the science instruments (coronagraph/polarimeter, ultraviolet spectrometer/polarimeter, soft X-ray polychromater) are discussed. Descriptions of the spacecraft's electrical power system, attitude determination and control systems and communications systems are also included. The Experiment Operations Facility, which provides quick response to rapidly changing solar conditions and permits coordination with a multitude of ground observatories and coordinated experiments, is described.

Guha, A. K.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

An Experimental System for Strategic Flight Path Management in Advanced Air Mobility

In the concept envisioned for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations, fleets of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles would operate between vertiports distributed within a densely populated area. These operations would be largely independent from the existing air traffic control system and would place the responsibility for flight planning and aircraft separation on fleet operators. The fourth major level on the UAM Maturity Level scale, UML-4, relies on “collaborative and responsible” automation to enable operations in non-visual conditions with medium traffic density (hundreds of aircraft in one metropolitan region) and medium complexity. This level of service places many requirements on automation systems to assist the operators of these aircraft. NASA has developed the Autonomous Operations Planner (AOP), a reference prototype Flight Path Management automation system, and has modified AOP to support research of anticipated UML-4 operations. AOP creates a four-dimensional flight plan conforming to the constraints of these operations, evaluates and modifies the flight plan during flight as conditions and constraints evolve, and coordinates the flight plan with other airspace users and with service providers. This version of AOP has been integrated into the Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft and used in a flight test activity. In this paper we discuss anticipated characteristics of UAM operations, modifications that were made to AOP to adapt to that environment or to support the flight test, and observations of software and aircraft performance during the flight test. The aircraft achieved four-dimensional conformance with the flight plan and AOP provided adequate planning in almost all cases. We discuss improvements that could be made to AOP to address deficiencies that were observed.

Autonomous Operations Planner↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

An Experimental System for Strategic Flight Path Management in Advanced Air Mobility

In the concept envisioned for Urban Air Mobility (UAM) operations, fleets of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles would operate between vertiports distributed within a densely populated area. These operations would be largely independent from the existing air traffic control system and would place the responsibility for flight planning and aircraft separation on fleet operators. The fourth major level on the UAM Maturity Level scale, UML-4, relies on “collaborative and responsible” automation to enable operations in non-visual conditions with medium traffic density (hundreds of aircraft in one metropolitan region) and medium complexity. This level of service places many requirements on automation systems to assist the operators of these aircraft. NASA has developed the Autonomous Operations Planner (AOP), a reference prototype Flight Path Management automation system, and has modified AOP to support research of anticipated UML-4 operations. AOP creates a four-dimensional flight plan conforming to the constraints of these operations, evaluates and modifies the flight plan during flight as conditions and constraints evolve, and coordinates the flight plan with other airspace users and with service providers. This version of AOP has been integrated into the Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft and used in a flight test activity. In this paper we discuss anticipated characteristics of UAM operations, modifications that were made to AOP to adapt to that environment or to support the flight test, and observations of software and aircraft performance during the flight test. The aircraft achieved four-dimensional conformance with the flight plan and AOP provided adequate planning in almost all cases. We discuss improvements that could be made to AOP to address deficiencies that were observed.

Autonomous Operations Planner↗
DOE OSTI2023

Optimal mitigation and control over power system dynamics for stochastic grid resilience

Optimal mitigation planning for highly disruptive contingencies to a transmission-level power system requires optimization with dynamic power system constraints, due to the key role of dynamics in system stability to major perturbations. We formulate a generalized disjunctive program to determine optimal grid component hardening choices for protecting against major failures, with differential algebraic constraints representing system dynamics (specifically, differential equations representing generator and load behavior and algebraic equations representing instantaneous power balance over the transmission system). We optionally allow stochastic optimal pre-positioning across all considered failure scenarios, and optimal emergency control within each scenario. This novel formulation allows, for the first time, analyzing the resilience interdependencies of mitigation planning, preventive control, and emergency control. Using all three strategies in concert is particularly effective at maintaining robust power system operation under severe contingencies, as we demonstrate on the western system coordinating council 9-bus test system using synthetic multi-device outage scenarios.

30 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Characterization and alignment of a resonant cavity beam position monitor for the Compact LInear Collider (CLIC) project at CERN

Beam diagnostic devices are essential tools to sense the properties of the beam in particle accelerators. Beam Position Monitors (BPMs) are used to detect the transverse beam spatial coordinates. A large number of high-resolution resonant cavity BPMs, operating at 14GHz, are proposed to monitor the orbit of the two main beam linacs of the CLIC project. This paper discusses innovative calibration techniques on a dedicated test bench in the frame of the PACMAN project. The particular location of the electromagnetic center of the resonant cavity BPM is detected utilizing a stretched-wire measurement approach. Measurements, RF characterization and final fiducialization of the BPM electrical offset are treated with details. Initial studies through EM simulations of the cavity BPM are covered. The presented experimental results prove the feasibility of the alignment methodology with nanometric resolution.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Nonlocal nucleon matrix elements in the rest frame

Extracting parton structure from lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations requires studying the coordinate scale 𝑧 3 dependence of the matrix elements of bilocal operators. The most significant contribution comes from the 𝑧 3 dependence induced by ultraviolet (UV) renormalization of the Wilson line. We demonstrate that the next-to-leading order perturbative calculations of the renormalization factor can describe, to a few percent accuracy, the logarithm of the lattice QCD rest frame matrix elements with separations up to distances of 0.6 fm on multiple lattice spacings. The residual discrepancies can be modeled by a leading effect from the structure of the nucleon.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Compilation of a Comprehensive Earthquake Catalog and Relocations in the Caucasus Region

Instrumental seismic monitoring has a long history in the Caucasus and started in 1899 when the first seismograph was installed in Tbilisi, Georgia. Much of the analog paper records from this time period are preserved in the Tbilisi archives because Georgia served as the regional data center. In the 1990s, due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the political turmoil in the region, the analog networks and the communication between the newly formed national networks deteriorated. In Georgia, for the next 13 yr, the seismic network coverage was poor until the 2002 Tbilisi earthquake. Following this earthquake, the first permanent digital seismic station in Georgia was established in Tbilisi in 2003. The digital era progressively improved the ability to collect and archive data and today more than a hundred broadband seismic stations (including temporary arrays) are operating in the southern Caucasus. Until recently, the region lacked a coordinated effort to catalog all analog and digital era data collected by different countries into a single repository. As a result of collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Ilia State University, and the Republican Seismic Survey Center of Azerbaijan, a comprehensive earthquake catalog was compiled for the Caucasus and neighboring areas as part of a broader probabilistic seismic hazard assessment project. Here this project digitized Soviet-era paper bulletins, compiled a unified earthquake catalog from regional bulletins, developed 1D reference velocity model, and used it to relocate the events. The final catalog contains 16,963 events with magnitudes 3.7 and above, bringing together all the available data sets in the Caucasus region from 1900 to 2015, significantly improving locations, and generating the most complete earthquake catalog in the region, temporally and geographically.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Dynamics Informed Optimization for Resilient Energy Systems

Optimal mitigation planning for highly disruptive contingencies to a transmission-level power system requires optimization with dynamic power system constraints, due to the key role of dynamics in system stability to major perturbations. We formulate a generalized disjunctive program to determine optimal grid component hardening choices for protecting against major failures, with differential algebraic constraints representing system dynamics (specifically, differential equations representing generator and load behavior and algebraic equations representing instantaneous power balance over the transmission system). We optionally allow stochastic optimal pre-positioning across all considered failure scenarios, and optimal emergency control within each scenario. This novel formulation allows, for the first time, analyzing the resilience interdependencies of mitigation planning, preventive control, and emergency control. Using all three strategies in concert is particularly effective at maintaining robust power system operation under severe contingencies, as we demonstrate on the Western System Coordinating Council (WSCC) 9-bus test system using synthetic multi-device outage scenarios. Towards integrating our modeling framework with real threats and more realistic power systems, we explore applying hybrid dynamics to power systems. Our work is applied to basic RL circuits with the ultimate goal of using the methodology to model protective tripping schemes in the grid. Finally, we survey mitigation techniques for HEMP threats and describe a GIS application developed to create threat scenarios in a grid with geographic detail.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

WRPS Hanford Update [Slides]

The purpose of this report is to coordinate with the staff from WRPS, the current contract holder for operations at the Hanford site to better inform design decisions for the Autonomous systems for Hanford waste tank handling project. The project goals are to support risk reduction associated with monitoring, inspection and mapping of Hanford tank underground pits and includes: 1. A pit mock-up demonstration of Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) Autonomous Pit Exploration System (APES) technology, which has two configurations: A. The Autonomous Robotic Arm, which is a proposed collaboration with Florida International University (FIU) and has capabilities to visually inspect, monitor, map and conduct simple tool manipulation tasks in the tank pits, and B. The robotic crawler configuration, which has capabilities to deploy to the bottom of the pits and conduct closer and bottom-up visual inspections. 2. An Implementation Plan that identifies Hanford site-wide application of the INL remote robotics technologies to enhance the performance of the tank farm systems and the characterization of the waste they contain to mitigate risk and optimize the overall waste mission. 3. A first-of-a-kind environmental digital twin will be produced. Digital twins to date require permanently installed sensors in order to produce asset specific predictions. This project will use the intermittent signals during inspections from deployed sensors on robotic systems to produce the data sets used by AI/ML to enable predictions of issues on tanks.

42 - ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Observing Arctic Sea Ice

Our understanding of Arctic sea ice and its wide-ranging influence is deeply rooted in observation. Advancing technologies have profoundly improved our ability to observe Arctic sea ice, document its processes and properties, and describe atmosphere-ice-ocean interactions with unprecedented detail. Yet, our progress toward better understanding the Arctic sea ice system is mired by the stark disparities between observations that tend to be siloed by method, scientific discipline, and application. This article presents a review and philosophical design for observing sea ice and accelerating our understanding of the Arctic sea ice system. We give a brief history of Arctic sea ice observations and showcase the 2018 melt season within the context of five observational themes: spatial heterogeneity, temporal variability, cross-disciplinary science, scalability, and retrieval uncertainty. We synthesize buoy data, optical imagery, satellite retrievals, and airborne measurements to demonstrate how disparate data sets can be woven together to transcend observational-scale issues. The results show that there are limitations to interpreting any single data set alone. However, many of these limitations can be surmounted by combining observations that cross spatial and temporal scales. We conclude the article with pathways toward coordinating across observational platforms in order to: (1) optimize the scientific, operational, and community return on observational investments, and (2) facilitate a richer understanding of Arctic sea ice and its role in the climate system.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1971

Launch vehicle system requirements and restraints for the ERTS-A spacecraft

The technical requirements and restraints imposed by the ERTS spacecraft upon the Delta launch vehicle, shroud system, associated launch complex, and range are presented for technical coordination among various agencies involved in the launch vehicle and launch operations. The payload and spacecraft systems are described, and the mission, design, test, and launch base data are outlined.

Corrigan, J. F.↗
NASA NTRS1984

Satellite Precipitation and Cloud Experiment (SPACE)

An experiment plan was formulated to support an investigation of the precipitation processes associated with mesoscale systems and the interaction of rain producing cloud complexes with the meso and macro-scale environment. The field program necessary to accomplish the scientific goals is designed to incorporate satellite information (VIS and IR as well as VAS data), special radiosonde and surface observing capabilities, radar observations of storms development, special observations from aircraft and ground based lightning measurements. The observing network comprises rawinsonde stations located in northern Alabama and eastern Tennessee. A high density raingauge network and the MSFC lightning location network also cover the area. Coordination with NASA U2 and ER2 aircraft programs and with the operational requirements of the microburst severe thunderstorm program can assure the most efficient utilization of the observing resources.

Arnold, J. E.↗
NASA NTRS1983

Dynamics of a surge observed in the C IV and H alpha lines

Time sequences of a surge have been obtained in Active Region 2701 during a coordinated SMY program, on October 2nd, 1980, while the MSDP spectrograph operated in H-alpha at the Meudon Solar Tower and the UVSP spectrometer on SMM observed in the 1548 A C IV resonance line. The cold (H-alpha) and hot (C IV) material follow the same channel, and the event lasts about 10 min in both lines. A good correlation is found between H-alpha and C IV velocities; radial velocities along the surge are in the range 40-60 km/s in both cases. The observations are consistent with the hypothesis that a pressure gradient drives the surge. The H-alpha data seem to indicate the presence of a shock wave in the chromosphere, while the C IV quantities (velocities, accelerations) vary on a very short time scale. Their maxima occur at some locations which could be interpreted as 'pinched' zones.

Schmieder, B.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Space Station Freedom - Accommodation for technology R&D

The paper examines the features of the accommodation equipment designed for the candidate technology payloads of the Space Station, which include magnetic plasma thruster systems and a hypothetical advanced electromagnetic propulsion system utilizing high-temperature superconductivity materials. The review of the accommodation-equipment concepts supports the assumption that some propulsion technologies can be tested on the Space Station while being attached externally to the station's truss structure. For testing technologies with inherent operation or performance hazards, space platforms and smaller free-flyers coordinated with the Space Station can be used. Diagrams illustrating typical accommodation equipment configurations are included.

Holt, Alan C.↗
NASA NTRS1992

The Global Ocean Observing System

A Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) should be established now with international coordination (1) to address issues of global change, (2) to implement operational ENSO forecasts, (3) to provide the data required to apply global ocean circulation models, and (4) to extract the greatest value from the one billion dollar investment over the next ten years in ocean remote sensing by the world's space agencies. The objectives of GOOS will focus on climatic and oceanic predictions, on assessing coastal pollution, and in determining the sustainability of living marine resources and ecosystems. GOOS will be a complete system including satellite observations, in situ observations, numerical modeling of ocean processes, and data exchange and management. A series of practical and economic benefits will be derived from the information generated by GOOS. In addition to the marine science community, these benefits will be realized by the energy industries of the world, and by the world's fisheries. The basic oceanic variables that are required to meet the oceanic and predictability objectives of GOOS include wind velocity over the ocean, sea surface temperature and salinity, oceanic profiles of temperature and salinity, surface current, sea level, the extent and thickness of sea ice, the partial pressure of CO2 in surface waters, and the chlorophyll concentration of surface waters. Ocean circulation models and coupled ocean-atmosphere models can be used to evaluate observing system design, to assimilate diverse data sets from in situ and remotely sensed observations, and ultimately to predict future states of the system. The volume of ocean data will increase enormously over the next decade as new satellite systems are launched and as complementary in situ measuring systems are deployed. These data must be transmitted, quality controlled, exchanged, analyzed, and archived with the best state-of-the-art computational methods.

Kester, Dana↗
NASA NTRS1992

Global Temperature and Salinity Pilot Project

Data exchange and data management programs have been evolving over many years. Within the international community there are two main programs to support the exchange, management and processing of real time and delayed mode data. The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) operate the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) program which coordinates the exchange of delayed mode data between national oceanographic data centers, World Data Centers and the user community. The Integrated Global Ocean Services System is a joint IOC/World Meteorological Organization (WMO) program for the exchange and management of real-time data. These two programs are complemented by mechanisms that have been established within scientific programs to exchange and manage project data sets. In particular TOGA and WOCE have identified a data management requirement and established the appropriate infrastructure to achieve this. Where GTSPP fits into this existing framework is discussed.

Searle, Ben↗