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At least 937 records · Page 52

State-Dependent Pseudo-Linear Filter for Spacecraft Attitude and Rate Estimation

This paper presents the development and performance of a special algorithm for estimating the attitude and angular rate of a spacecraft. The algorithm is a pseudo-linear Kalman filter, which is an ordinary linear Kalman filter that operates on a linear model whose matrices are current state estimate dependent. The nonlinear rotational dynamics equation of the spacecraft is presented in the state space as a state-dependent linear system. Two types of measurements are considered. One type is a measurement of the quaternion of rotation, which is obtained from a newly introduced star tracker based apparatus. The other type of measurement is that of vectors, which permits the use of a variety of vector measuring sensors like sun sensors and magnetometers. While quaternion measurements are related linearly to the state vector, vector measurements constitute a nonlinear function of the state vector. Therefore, in this paper, a state-dependent linear measurement equation is developed for the vector measurement case. The state-dependent pseudo linear filter is applied to simulated spacecraft rotations and adequate estimates of the spacecraft attitude and rate are obtained for the case of quaternion measurements as well as of vector measurements.

Bar-Itzhack, Itzhack Y.↗

Water Filters

A compact, lightweight electrolytic water filter generates silver ions in concentrations of 50 to 100 parts per billion in the water flow system. Silver ions serve as effective bactericide/deodorizers. Ray Ward requested and received from NASA a technical information package on the Shuttle filter, and used it as basis for his own initial development, a home use filter.

Source record↗

Aircraft Engine Sensor/Actuator/Component Fault Diagnosis Using a Bank of Kalman Filters

In this report, a fault detection and isolation (FDI) system which utilizes a bank of Kalman filters is developed for aircraft engine sensor and actuator FDI in conjunction with the detection of component faults. This FDI approach uses multiple Kalman filters, each of which is designed based on a specific hypothesis for detecting a specific sensor or actuator fault. In the event that a fault does occur, all filters except the one using the correct hypothesis will produce large estimation errors, from which a specific fault is isolated. In the meantime, a set of parameters that indicate engine component performance is estimated for the detection of abrupt degradation. The performance of the FDI system is evaluated against a nonlinear engine simulation for various engine faults at cruise operating conditions. In order to mimic the real engine environment, the nonlinear simulation is executed not only at the nominal, or healthy, condition but also at aged conditions. When the FDI system designed at the healthy condition is applied to an aged engine, the effectiveness of the FDI system is impacted by the mismatch in the engine health condition. Depending on its severity, this mismatch can cause the FDI system to generate incorrect diagnostic results, such as false alarms and missed detections. To partially recover the nominal performance, two approaches, which incorporate information regarding the engine s aging condition in the FDI system, will be discussed and evaluated. The results indicate that the proposed FDI system is promising for reliable diagnostics of aircraft engines.

Kobayashi, Takahisa↗

International Space Station Bacteria Filter Element Post-Flight Testing and Service Life Prediction

The International Space Station uses high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters to remove particulate matter from the cabin atmosphere. Known as Bacteria Filter Elements (BFEs), there are 13 elements deployed on board the ISS's U.S. Segment. The pre-flight service life prediction of 1 year for the BFEs is based upon performance engineering analysis of data collected during developmental testing that used a synthetic dust challenge. While this challenge is considered reasonable and conservative from a design perspective, an understanding of the actual filter loading is required to best manage the critical ISS Program resources. Thus testing was conducted on BFEs returned from the ISS to refine the service life prediction. Results from this testing and implications to ISS resource management are discussed. Recommendations for realizing significant savings to the ISS Program are presented.

Perry, J. L.↗

Application of a Bank of Kalman Filters for Aircraft Engine Fault Diagnostics

In this paper, a bank of Kalman filters is applied to aircraft gas turbine engine sensor and actuator fault detection and isolation (FDI) in conjunction with the detection of component faults. This approach uses multiple Kalman filters, each of which is designed for detecting a specific sensor or actuator fault. In the event that a fault does occur, all filters except the one using the correct hypothesis will produce large estimation errors, thereby isolating the specific fault. In the meantime, a set of parameters that indicate engine component performance is estimated for the detection of abrupt degradation. The proposed FDI approach is applied to a nonlinear engine simulation at nominal and aged conditions, and the evaluation results for various engine faults at cruise operating conditions are given. The ability of the proposed approach to reliably detect and isolate sensor and actuator faults is demonstrated.

Kobayashi, Takahisa↗

Filtering in Hybrid Dynamic Bayesian Networks

We demonstrate experimentally that inference in a complex hybrid Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) is possible using the 2 - T i e Slice DBN (2T-DBN) from [Koller & Lerner, 20001 to model fault detection in a watertank system. In [Koller & Lerner, 20001 a generic Particle Filter (PF) is used for inference. We extend the experiment and perform approximate inference using The Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and the Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF). Furthermore, we combine these techniques in a 'non-strict' Rao-Blackwellisation framework and apply it to the watertank system. We show that UKF and UKF in a PF framework outperfom the generic PF, EKF and EKF in a PF framework with respect to accuracy and robustness in terms of estimation RMSE. Especially we demonstrate the superiority of UKF in a PF framework when our beliefs of how data was generated are wrong. We also show that the choice of network structure is very important for the performance of the generic PF and the EKF algorithms, but not for the UKF algorithms. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of data noise in the water[ank simulation. Theory and implementation is based on the theory presented.

Andersen, Morten Nonboe↗

Filtering and Control of High Speed Motor Current in a Flywheel Energy Storage System

The NASA Glenn Research Center has been developing technology to enable the use of high speed flywheel energy storage units in future spacecraft for the last several years. An integral part of the flywheel unit is the three phase motor/generator that is used to accelerate and decelerate the flywheel. The motor/generator voltage is supplied from a pulse width modulated (PWM) inverter operating from a fixed DC voltage supply. The motor current is regulated through a closed loop current control that commands the necessary voltage from the inverter to achieve the desired current. The current regulation loop is the innermost control loop of the overall flywheel system and, as a result, must be fast and accurate over the entire operating speed range (20,000 to 60,000 rpm) of the flywheel. The voltage applied to the motor is a high frequency PWM version of the DC bus voltage that results in the commanded fundamental value plus higher order harmonics. Most of the harmonic content is at the switching frequency and above. The higher order harmonics cause a rapid change in voltage to be applied to the motor that can result in large voltage stresses across the motor windings. In addition, the high frequency content in the motor causes sensor noise in the magnetic bearings that leads to disturbances for the bearing control. To alleviate these problems, a filter is used to present a more sinusoidal voltage to the motor/generator. However, the filter adds additional dynamics and phase lag to the motor system that can interfere with the performance of the current regulator. This paper will discuss the tuning methodology and results for the motor/generator current regulator and the impact of the filter on the control. Results at speeds up to 50,000 rpm are presented.

Kenny, Barbara H.↗

Kalman Filter Estimation of Spinning Spacecraft Attitude using Markley Variables

There are several different ways to represent spacecraft attitude and its time rate of change. For spinning or momentum-biased spacecraft, one particular representation has been put forward as a superior parameterization for numerical integration. Markley has demonstrated that these new variables have fewer rapidly varying elements for spinning spacecraft than other commonly used representations and provide advantages when integrating the equations of motion. The current work demonstrates how a Kalman filter can be devised to estimate the attitude using these new variables. The seven Markley variables are subject to one constraint condition, making the error covariance matrix singular. The filter design presented here explicitly accounts for this constraint by using a six-component error state in the filter update step. The reduced dimension error state is unconstrained and its covariance matrix is nonsingular.

Sedlak, Joseph E.↗

A VHDL Core for Intrinsic Evolution of Discrete Time Filters with Signal Feedback

The design of an Evolvable Machine VHDL Core is presented, representing a discrete-time processing structure capable of supporting control system applications. This VHDL Core is implemented in an FPGA and is interfaced with an evolutionary algorithm implemented in firmware on a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) to create an evolvable system platform. The salient features of this architecture are presented. The capability to implement IIR filter structures is presented along with the results of the intrinsic evolution of a filter. The robustness of the evolved filter design is tested and its unique characteristics are described.

Gwaltney, David A.↗

A VHDL Core for Intrinsic Evolution of Discrete Time Filters with Signal Feedback

Evolution of a novel low-pass filter design has been presented along with an assessment of its capabilities. (1) Performed well with the two added sines used as input during the evolution. (2) Also performs well when the input includes more sine at frequencies between the two used during evolution. (3) Fails to perform when input is a sine sweep with wider bandwidth. (4) This illustrates the importance of designing the evolutionary process to be representative of the environment that will be seen by the evolved design during deployment. The use of non-standard operators and fewer resources should allow the EMVCore to implement more compact representations of digital filters and to provide fault tolerance by implementing a new solution in the remaining tiles after some are damaged. The EMVCore can be used to implement standard discrete time filters in addition to evolved components.

Gwaltney, David A.↗

International Space Station Bacteria Filter Element Service Life Evaluation

The International Space Station (ISS) uses high-efficiency particulate air filters to remove particulate matter from the cabin atmosphere. Known as bacteria filter elements (BFEs), there are 13 elements deployed on board the ISS's U.S. segment in the flight 4R assembly level. The preflight service life prediction of 1 yr for the BFEs is based upon engineering analysis of data collected during developmental testing that used a synthetic dust challenge. While this challenge is considered reasonable and conservative from a design perspective, an understanding of the actual filter loading is required to best manage the critical ISS program resources. Testing was conducted on BFEs returned from the ISS to refine the service life prediction. Results from this testing and implications to ISS resource management are provided.

Perry, J. L.↗

Practical Active Capacitor Filter

A method and apparatus is described that filters an electrical signal. The filtering uses a capacitor multiplier circuit where the capacitor multiplier circuit uses at least one amplifier circuit and at least one capacitor. A filtered electrical signal results from a direct connection from an output of the at least one amplifier circuit.

Shuler, Robert L., Jr.↗

Flexible Generation of Kalman Filter Code

Domain-specific program synthesis can automatically generate high quality code in complex domains from succinct specifications, but the range of programs which can be generated by a given synthesis system is typically narrow. Obtaining code which falls outside this narrow scope necessitates either 1) extension of the code generator, which is usually very expensive, or 2) manual modification of the generated code, which is often difficult and which must be redone whenever changes are made to the program specification. In this paper, we describe adaptations and extensions of the AUTOFILTER Kalman filter synthesis system which greatly extend the range of programs which can be generated. Users augment the input specification with a specification of code fragments and how those fragments should interleave with or replace parts of the synthesized filter. This allows users to generate a much wider range of programs without their needing to modify the synthesis system or edit generated code. We demonstrate the usefulness of the approach by applying it to the synthesis of a complex state estimator which combines code from several Kalman filters with user-specified code. The work described in this paper allows the complex design decisions necessary for real-world applications to be reflected in the synthesized code. When executed on simulated input data, the generated state estimator was found to produce comparable estimates to those produced by a handcoded estimator

Richardson, Julian↗

Second order filter response with series coupled silica microresonators

We have demonstrated an approach for fabricating a photonic filter with second order response function. The filter consists of two germania-doped silica microtoroidal or microspherical resonators cascaded in series. We use UV irradiation to tune the mode of one microcavity to bring it close to the mode of the second microcavity. This approach produces a filter function with much sharper rolloff than can be obtained with the individual microresonators.

processing lithium niobate↗

Digital Modem Design Based on Multirate Filter Banks

A new approach for the architecture of an all digital modem design is presented. The key feature is a lower processing rate than that of the Nyquist rate (the input sampling rate) and even the symbol rate. The lower processing rate is achieved by the use of a parallel structure, based on multirate filter banks concepts. In this proposed scheme, matched filtering is implemented in the subbands of an analysis/synthesis filter bank.

digital modem design↗

Tunable Microstrip Filters Using Selectively Etched Ferroelectric Thin-Film Varactors for Coupling

We report on the use of patterned ferroelectric films to fabricate proof of concept tunable one-pole microstrip filters with excellent transmission and mismatch/reflection properties at frequencies up to 24 GHz. By controlling the electric field distribution within the coupling region between the resonator and input/output lines, sufficiently high loaded and unloaded Q values are maintained so as to be useful for microstrip filter design, with low mismatch loss. In the 23 - 24 GHz region, the filter was tunable over a 100 MHz range, the loaded and unloaded Q values were 29 and 68, respectively, and the reflection losses were below -16 dB, which demonstrates the suitability of these films for practical microwave applications.

Mueller, Carl H.↗

TDRSS Augmentation for Launch and Ascent High Speed Navigation Filter

An investigation was performed to evaluate the feasibility and possible advantages of augmenting the High Speed Trajectory Determination (HSTD) ground navigation filter with measurements from the Tracking & Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) constellation. The proposed communications system strategy for Constellation uses TDRSS rather than ground S-band, so the capability of replacing the S-band navigation capability with TDRSS was considered. HSTD simulations were performed with combinations of S-band, C-band, and TDRSS measurements. Several assumptions are made with regard to measurement biases and signal noise characteristics to produce first-look level accuracies. Preliminary results show that solutions using TDRSS instead of S-band have similar or improved performance from the view of filter covariance and may be a feasible alternative. These results also show that TDRSS tracking alone gives poorer observations and resulting performance Operational and other constraints to the use of TDRSS in a high-speed ground navigation filter are not addressed.

Holt, Greg .↗

Zero Gyro Kalman Filtering in the Presence of a Reaction Wheel Failure

Typical implementation of Kalman filters for spacecraft attitude estimation involves the use of gyros for three-axis rate measurements. When there are less than three axes of information available, the accuracy of the Kalman filter depends highly on the accuracy of the dynamics model. This is particularly significant during the transient period when a reaction wheel with a high momentum fails, is taken off-line, and spins down. This paper looks at how a reaction wheel failure can affect the zero-gyro Kalman filter performance for the Hubble Space Telescope and what steps are taken to minimize its impact.

Hur-Diaz, Sun↗