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At least 901 records · Page 50

Data-driven Detection and Early Prediction of Thermoacoustic Instability in a Multi-nozzle Combustor

Thermoacoustic instability (TAI) is a critical issue in modern lean-burn gas-turbine combustors, which is induced by a strong coupling between the resonant combustor acoustics and fluctuations in the heat release rate. This instability may lead to high-amplitude pressure waves that generate undesirable noise levels as well as fatigue stresses in mechanical structures of the combustor. The intense pressure fluctuations due to TAI may also cause large flow perturbations and possibly flow reversal that may lead to flame oscillations, flame liftoff, and even flame blow-out. Hence, there is a strong need for exercising control actions in a timely fashion to mitigate the TAI phenomena. Anomaly detection is an essential prerequisite to the design of a good controller and such a detector must be able to reliably predict a forthcoming TAI. To detect and predict the onset of a TAI from an ensemble of pressure time series, this paper investigates three data-driven methods: Fast Fourier transform (FFT), symbolic time series analysis (STSA), and hidden Markov modeling (HMM). The main focus of the paper is to make a comparative evaluation of these three anomaly detection methods for classification of the current regime of operation into stable and unstable categories as well as for real-time identification of precursors to impending instabilities with short-length time series of measured variables (e.g., pressure oscillations). Finally, the results, generated on experimental data from a multi-nozzle combustor apparatus, have been compared to evaluate the performance of FFT, STSA, and HMM methods for TAI analysis.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Inverting infrasound data for the seismoacoustic source time functions and surface spall at the Source Physics Experiments Phase II: Dry Alluvium Geology

This report presents the infrasound data recorded as part of the Source Physics Experiment - Phase 2, Dry Alluvium Geology. This experiment, also known colloquially as DAG, consisted of four underground chemical explosions at the Nevada National Security Site. We focus our analysis on only the fourth explosion (DAG-4) as we determined that this was the only event that produced clear source-generated infrasound energy as recorded by the DAG sensors. We analyze the data using two inversion methods. The first method is designed to estimate the point-source seismoacoustic source time functions, and the second inversion method is designed to estimate the first-order characteristics (e.g. horizontal dimensions and maximum amplitude) of the actual spall surface. For both analysis methods, we are able to fit the data reasonably well, with various assumptions of the source model. The estimated seismoacoustic source appears to be a combination of a buried, isotropic explosion with a maximum amplitude of ~2 x 10 9 Nm and a vertically oriented force, applied to the Earth's surface with a maximum amplitude of 4 x 10 7 N. We use the vertically oriented force to simulate surface spall. The estimated spall surface has an approximate radius of ~40 m with a maximum acceleration magnitude in the range of 0.8 to 1.5 m/s/s. These estimates are approximately similar to the measured surface acceleration at the site.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

SEAFORML (Smart Exploration and Analysis For Optimal and Robust Machine Learning)

The poster discusses data analysis of the WAVgraph database and applied machine learning methods for it. The database is a long-term project that seeks to be a comprehensive repository of information on cyber threats and is updated regularly. It was previously unanalyzed and unexplored. The goal was to learn more about it and its contents in order to have a better understanding and enable better use. The data analysis and discovery enabled further exploration through natural language processing, similarity, and clustering methods. The poster shows some of the insights from the analysis and explains the methods used for the machine learning applications.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Investigation of dispersion-relation-preserving scheme and spectral analysis methods for acoustic waves

Important characteristics of the aeroacoustic wave propagation are mostly encoded in their dispersion relations. Hence, a computational aeroacoustic (CAA) algorithm, which reasonably preserves these relations, was investigated. It was derived using an optimization procedure to ensure, that the numerical derivatives preserved the wave number and angular frequency of the differential terms in the linearized, 2-D Euler equations. Then, simulations were performed to validate the scheme and a compatible set of discretized boundary conditions. The computational results were found to agree favorably with the exact solutions. The boundary conditions were transparent to the outgoing waves, except when the disturbance source was close to a boundary. The time-domain data generated by such CAA solutions were often intractable until their spectra was analyzed. Therefore, the relative merits of three different methods were included in the study. For simple, periodic waves, the periodogram method produced better estimates of the steep-sloped spectra than the Blackman-Tukey method. Also, for this problem, the Hanning window was more effective when used with the weighted-overlapped-segment-averaging and Blackman-Tukey methods gave better results than the periodogram method. Finally, it was demonstrated that the representation of time domain-data was significantly dependent on the particular spectral analysis method employed.

Vanel, Florence O.↗

Natural Gas LCA

This presentation was provided via a pre-recorded presentation at the 2025 Coordinating Research Council Life Cycle Analysis of Transportation Workshop at Argonne National Laboratory on October 9, 2025. The presentation provides an overview of the methods and data sources used in the report, Life Cycle Analysis of Natural Gas Extraction and Power Generation: U.S. 2020 Emissions Profile and briefly discusses discrepancies between top-down and bottom-up inventory methods and how those might be overcome.

LCA↗

Analysis of flight data from a High-Incidence Research Model by system identification methods

Data partitioning and modified stepwise regression were applied to recorded flight data from a Royal Aerospace Establishment high incidence research model. An aerodynamic model structure and corresponding stability and control derivatives were determined for angles of attack between 18 and 30 deg. Several nonlinearities in angles of attack and sideslip as well as a unique roll-dominated set of lateral modes were found. All flight estimated values were compared to available wind tunnel measurements.

Batterson, James G.↗

Utilization of Machine Learning Techniques for Managing the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite Constellation

National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) operates a constellation of ten geosynchronous Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS). The TDRS constellation consists of multiple geosynchronous communication relay satellites located around the equator so they can provide continual coverage of any mission in low earth orbit. The TDRS are located primarily in three oceanic regions around the earth. NASA’s White Sands Complex provides the ground communication support for TDRS located over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Another TDRS ground station in Guam supports the TDRS over the Indian Ocean. With these satellites the TDRS network can provide continuous coverage of satellites in low-earth orbit. The NASA Space Network (SN) project office at GSFC manages the constellation of spacecraft. Major customers of the TDRS constellation include, but are not limited to, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. The TDRS constellation has three generations of satellites and has been active for over 30 years providing reliable communication links between customer satellites and corresponding ground stations. However, one of the major concerns for TDRS, and in any space mission, is to ensure the health and safety of the spacecraft. Generally, engineers use telemetry data to monitor and analyze the performance and state of health of the spacecraft. Telemetry data contains hundreds of parameters that monitor each important component in the spacecraft, which can be utilized to recognize and characterize the behavior of the spacecraft. Each parameter contains considerable information to represent time-dependent properties of each spacecraft subsystem and component. During the entire life of a TDRS spacecraft, thousands of gigabytes of telemetry data are transmitted in real-time from the spacecraft to the ground station at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and recorded as historical data sets for engineers to process and analyze the events that occurred on-orbit. These parameters contain the function of multiple spacecraft subsystems, such as the attitude control system (ACS), Thermal, Electrical Power Subsystem (EPS), etc. . The first and second generations have exceeded their required lifetime and NASA is keen to manage these spacecrafts carefully in order to maximize the remaining life using the spacecraft telemetry. The challenge is to know when the risk of losing a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit exceeds the benefit of continued operations for customer support. In the TDRS fleet, the EPS is the most critical subsystem related to spacecraft operations. Failure of the EPS would strand a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. Since EPS provides power to the spacecraft, component failures ultimately lead to the inability to support the spacecraft loads and the communications payload. For instance, TDRS-8 has several anomalies in EPS including the Bus Voltage Limiter (BVL) shunt current, solar array loss of circuits, and failed battery cells. Any of these anomalies can cause critical issues to the spacecraft. Therefore, developing a system to analyze and perform early detection of a potential anomaly is an important issue in telemetry data analysis. In recent years, Telemetry Mining (TM) has been proposed to process telemetry data by using Data Mining (DM) techniques such as classification, clustering, regression and anomaly detection. Anomaly detection, also known as outlier detection, has been widely used in many data mining areas such as remote sensing, medical data processing and digital image processing. The goal of anomaly detection is to detect abnormal data, which contains a relatively low probability of occurrence among the entire data set. Early detection of anomalies is one of the most significant issues in managing the spacecraft configuration. If anomalies can be detected early enough, then the redundant resources can be used to extend the life of the operational spacecraft. We present an unsupervised anomaly detection method to process the EPS data extracted from TDRS-8. This is different from traditional analytical methods, which use telemetry data to illustrate behavior and physical meaning of each spacecraft component. TM connects multiple parameters as a vector and then conducts data analysis on this high dimension telemetry vector. This method is looking at the properties of a high dimensional vector that is able to consider the relationship between different parameters in the anomaly detection problem. This kind of method performs much better than the traditional limit checking method. In addition, we propose a new approach of real-time anomaly detection to process telemetry data in real-time, which can then be applied to spacecraft monitoring with high reliability, low cost and high accuracy.

Machine Learning (ML)↗

The Spectral Image Processing System (SIPS) - Interactive visualization and analysis of imaging spectrometer data

The Center for the Study of Earth from Space (CSES) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has developed a prototype interactive software system called the Spectral Image Processing System (SIPS) using IDL (the Interactive Data Language) on UNIX-based workstations. SIPS is designed to take advantage of the combination of high spectral resolution and spatial data presentation unique to imaging spectrometers. It streamlines analysis of these data by allowing scientists to rapidly interact with entire datasets. SIPS provides visualization tools for rapid exploratory analysis and numerical tools for quantitative modeling. The user interface is X-Windows-based, user friendly, and provides 'point and click' operation. SIPS is being used for multidisciplinary research concentrating on use of physically based analysis methods to enhance scientific results from imaging spectrometer data. The objective of this continuing effort is to develop operational techniques for quantitative analysis of imaging spectrometer data and to make them available to the scientific community prior to the launch of imaging spectrometer satellite systems such as the Earth Observing System (EOS) High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (HIRIS).

Kruse, F. A.↗

Parametrizing the detector response with neural networks

In high energy physics, characterizing the response of a detector to radiation is one of the most important and fundamental experimental tasks. In many cases, this task is accomplished by parameterizing summary statistics of the full detector response probability density. The parameterized detector response can then be used for calibration as well as for directly improving physics analysis sensitivity. This paper reports on how to parameterize summary statistics of the detector response using neural networks. Specifically, neural networks are powerful tools for incorporating multidimensional data and the loss function used during training determines which summary statistic is learned. One common summary statistic that has not been combined with deep learning (as far as the authors are aware) is the mode. A neural network-based approach to mode learning is proposed and empirically demonstrated in the context of high energy jet calibrations. Altogether, the neural network-based toolkit for detector response parameterization can enhance the utility of data collected at high energy physics experiments and beyond.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Recommendations for Using Noise Monitors to Estimate Noise Exposure During X-59 Community Tests

A low fidelity simulation approach is used to explore how to place and use noise monitors during X-59 QueSST community tests, where people’s annoyance to the noise produced by the X-59 aircraft will be gathered. Several recommendations are provided including: 1) the desired number of sparsely spaced noise monitor sites within the survey area, 2) whether to group and average measurements across multiple noise monitors located at a site, 3) what spacing should be used if grouped noise monitors are used, 4) an approach to mitigate ambient noise contamination at the measurement sites, 5) a method to combine empirical and predicted dose estimates to provide a single dose estimate for respondents, and 6) assessing how changes in turbulence intensity and array configuration affect dose uncertainty. To make these recommendations, the error that is expected when fitting contrived, smoothly varying sonic boom “reference exposure surfaces” is studied when a spatially sparse and scattered set of samples is used as responses for the fit. The reference exposure surfaces mimic the sonic boom exposure at ground level that might be expected in the X-59 survey area in the absence of atmospheric turbulence, ambient noise, and other localized effects. The spatial extent of these surfaces varies and is representative of the different survey area sizes that might be expected during future X-59 community overflight tests. These contrived reference surfaces are sampled, and those reference samples are then perturbed to mimic atmospheric turbulence, ambient noise and other localized effects that might affect noise monitor measurements within overflown communities. Two different surface fitting methods are investigated when fitting these perturbed samples to approximate the reference surface. The first method uses interpolation between the perturbed data at the scattered sites to compute the fit. The second method fits a polynomial surface model to the perturbed data using ordinary least squares regression analysis. For both fitting methods, the root mean square fit error is computed from the pointwise difference between the fit surface and the reference surface as the count and configuration of the sites is varied while also averaging the error across many different realizations of both the smooth variation of the reference exposure surface and the random, localized perturbations at the sample sites. Different site configurations are compared using this error statistic to make the recommendations noted above. Additionally, the two fitting approaches (interpolation vs linear regression) are compared based on the fit error observed in these simulations. These analyses, comparisons, and recommendations should inform future decisions on the noise monitor placement and the methods used to analyze the noise monitor data that is collected during X-59 community overflights.

sonic boom↗

Pattern Recognition Control Design

Spacecraft control algorithms must know the expected spacecraft response to any command to the available control effectors, such as reaction thrusters or torque devices. Spacecraft control system design approaches have traditionally relied on the estimated vehicle mass properties to determine the desired force and moment, as well as knowledge of the effector performance to efficiently control the spacecraft. A pattern recognition approach can be used to investigate the relationship between the control effector commands and the spacecraft responses. Instead of supplying the approximated vehicle properties and the effector performance characteristics, a database of information relating the effector commands and the desired vehicle response can be used for closed-loop control. A Monte Carlo simulation data set of the spacecraft dynamic response to effector commands can be analyzed to establish the influence a command has on the behavior of the spacecraft. A tool developed at NASA Johnson Space Center (Ref. 1) to analyze flight dynamics Monte Carlo data sets through pattern recognition methods can be used to perform this analysis. Once a comprehensive data set relating spacecraft responses with commands is established, it can be used in place of traditional control laws and gains set. This pattern recognition approach can be compared with traditional control algorithms to determine the potential benefits and uses.

Gambone, Elisabeth↗

Uncertainty Quantification of Calculated Temperatures for the AGR 5/6/7 Experiment

This report documents the quantification of uncertainty of the calculated temperature data for the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) 5/6/7 fuel irradiation experiment conducted in the Advanced Test Reactor at Idaho National Laboratory in support of the Advanced Reactor Technologies? research and development program. Recognizing uncertainties inherent in physics and thermal simulations of the AGR 5/6/7 capsules, the results of the numerical simulations are used in combination with statistical analysis methods to improve qualification of measured data. The calculated fuel temperatures for AGR tests are also used for validation of the fission product transport and fuel performance simulation models. These crucial roles of the calculated fuel temperatures in ensuring achievement of the AGR experimental program objectives require accurate determination of the model temperature uncertainties. This report covers temperature uncertainty results for each of the five AGR 5/6/7 capsules. To quantify the uncertainty of calculated temperatures determined using the ABAQUS finite element heat transfer code, this study identifies and analyzes model parameters of potential importance to the calculated temperatures of fuel compacts and thermocouples. The selection of input parameters for uncertainty quantification is based on the ranking of their influences upon temperature predictions. Thus, selected input parameters include those with high sensitivity and those with the largest uncertainty. Propagation of model parameter uncertainty and sensitivity is then used to quantify the overall uncertainty of calculated temperatures. Measurement uncertainty, analysis of modeling assumptions, and expert judgment are used as the basis to quantify the uncertainty range for selected input parameters. The input uncertainties are dynamic, accounting for the effect of unplanned events and changes in thermal properties of capsule components over extended exposure to high temperatures and fast neutron irradiation. The sensitivity analysis performed in this work went beyond the traditional local sensitivity. Using experimental design, analysis of pairwise interactions of model parameters was performed to establish sufficiency of the time dependent first order (linear) expansion terms in constructing the temperature response surface. To achieve completeness, uncertainty propagation made use of pairwise noise correlations of model parameters. Furthermore, using an interpolation scheme over the input parameter domain, the analysis obtains time dependent sensitivity over the test campaign duration. This allows computation of uncertainty for the calculated fuel temperatures and the calculated graphite temperatures at thermocouple locations during the entire irradiation period.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

The estimation of decay coefficient in pulsed transient data

The problem of estimation and interpretation of a decay coefficient in a pulsed transient signal is considered. Two methods are proposed in estimating the decay coefficient of pulsed decay transient data. The methods are derived through a spectral analysis for a parametric model of impulse response function of signal frequency. The several pulsed response data from T burner tests as well as some synthesized data are analyzed and the performance of the estimation procedures are examined. Suggestions for further research in this area are offered. The estimation procedures presented can be extended to the case of multiple frequencies in pulse response function and time dependent decay or growth coefficients.

Park, T. W.↗

Interpolation Methods for GTD Analysis of Shaped Reflectors

The finding of smooth analytic representations for antenna reflector surfaces which are prescribed only by discretized data obtained by various synthesis methods is examined. Frequently the data are distributed in a nonuniform grid and contain noise. The smoothness required is to C sub 1 for physical optics diffraction analysis and to C sub 2 for geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) analysis. The GTD analysis approach requires a surface description which returns data very rapidly. Two methods of interpolation, the global and the local methods, are discussed. They each have advantages and disadvantages; characteristics are discussed and examples are presented.

Galindo-Israel, V.↗

Objective analysis of observational data from the FGGE observing systems

An objective analysis procedure for updating the GLAS second and fourth order general atmospheric circulation models using observational data from the first GARP global experiment is described. The objective analysis procedure is based on a successive corrections method and the model is updated in a data assimilation cycle. Preparation of the observational data for analysis and the objective analysis scheme are described. The organization of the program and description of the required data sets are presented. The program logic and detailed descriptions of each subroutine are given.

Baker, W.↗

Detection of potential space station control/structure interaction with CO-ST-IN

The NASA Lewis Research Center is concerned with the potential of interaction between space station controllers and the solar PV array structures. The models required to handle this problem are very large, and automated methods were developed for the transfer of data between structural dynamic and control system analysis software. These methods emphasize the need to achieve accurate coupled analysis results while using as small a model as possible. Specific tools which help the analyst in this regard include modal order techniques, the use of mode acceleration to calculate internal loads and stresses and the transfer of Craig-Bampton components to reduce problems associated with modal sufficiency. These techniques were applied to a space station model with 366 modes below 1 Hz. Attitude control, and alpha and beta joint control were simulated. The inclusion of alpha and beta joint controllers is important when examining overall space station dynamics. An initial choice of control parameters does indicate a potential for control/structure interaction during reboost. As expected this is exacerbated by increasing the rate gain and decreasing the hysteresis of the reaction control system (RCS) in order to improve rigid body performance.

Carney, Kelly↗

Some effects of applying sonic boom minimization to supersonic cruise aircraft design

This paper presents a discussion of an aircraft shaping method to control sonic boom over-pressure levels along with the analysis of wind-tunnel data which validated the method. The results indicate that the sonic boom minimization method can guide the design team choices of aircraft planform and component arrangement toward a low-boom-level configuration while permitting sufficient freedom and flexibility to satisfy other design criteria. Further, it is shown that off-design flight conditions do not drastically change the overpressure sonic boom shape and strength.

Mack, R. J.↗