Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “simulation testbed”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

1,017 records · Page 57
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2014

Forward modeling transient brightenings and microflares around an active region observed with Hi-C

Small-scale flare-like brightenings around active regions are among the smallest and most fundamental of energetic transient events in the corona, providing a testbed for models of heating and active region dynamics. In a previous study, we modeled a large collection of these microflares observed with Hinode/X-Ray Telescope (XRT) using EBTEL and found that they required multiple heating events, but could not distinguish between multiple heating events on a single strand, or multiple strands each experiencing a single heating event. We present here a similar study, but with extreme-ultraviolet data of Active Region 11520 from the High Resolution Coronal Imager (Hi-C) sounding rocket. Hi-C provides an order of magnitude improvement to the spatial resolution of XRT, and a cooler temperature sensitivity, which combine to provide significant improvements to our ability to detect and model microflare activity around active regions. We have found that at the spatial resolution of Hi-C (≈0.''3), the events occur much more frequently than expected (57 events detected, only 1 or 2 expected), and are most likely made from strands of the order of 100 km wide, each of which is impulsively heated with multiple heating events. These findings tend to support bursty reconnection as the cause of the energy release responsible for the brightenings.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
NASA NTRS2012

Morpheus: Advancing Technologies for Human Exploration

NASA's Morpheus Project has developed and tested a prototype planetary lander capable of vertical takeoff and landing. Designed to serve as a vertical testbed (VTB) for advanced spacecraft technologies, the vehicle provides a platform for bringing technologies from the laboratory into an integrated flight system at relatively low cost. This allows individual technologies to mature into capabilities that can be incorporated into human exploration missions. The Morpheus vehicle is propelled by a LOX/Methane engine and sized to carry a payload of 1100 lb to the lunar surface. In addition to VTB vehicles, the Project s major elements include ground support systems and an operations facility. Initial testing will demonstrate technologies used to perform autonomous hazard avoidance and precision landing on a lunar or other planetary surface. The Morpheus vehicle successfully performed a set of integrated vehicle test flights including hot-fire and tethered hover tests, leading up to un-tethered free-flights. The initial phase of this development and testing campaign is being conducted on-site at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), with the first fully integrated vehicle firing its engine less than one year after project initiation. Designed, developed, manufactured and operated in-house by engineers at JSC, the Morpheus Project represents an unprecedented departure from recent NASA programs that traditionally require longer, more expensive development lifecycles and testing at remote, dedicated testing facilities. Morpheus testing includes three major types of integrated tests. A hot-fire (HF) is a static vehicle test of the LOX/Methane propulsion system. Tether tests (TT) have the vehicle suspended above the ground using a crane, which allows testing of the propulsion and integrated Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GN&C) in hovering flight without the risk of a vehicle departure or crash. Morpheus free-flights (FF) test the complete Morpheus system without the additional safeguards provided during tether. A variety of free-flight trajectories are planned to incrementally build up to a fully functional Morpheus lander capable of flying planetary landing trajectories. In FY12, these tests will culminate with autonomous flights simulating a 1 km lunar approach trajectory, hazard avoidance maneuvers and precision landing in a prepared hazard field at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC). This paper describes Morpheus integrated testing campaign, infrastructure, and facilities, and the payloads being incorporated on the vehicle. The Project s fast pace, rapid prototyping, frequent testing, and lessons learned depart from traditional engineering development at JSC. The Morpheus team employs lean, agile development with a guiding belief that technologies offer promise, but capabilities offer solutions, achievable without astronomical costs and timelines.

Olansen, Jon B.↗
NASA NTRS2013

Hyperspectral Microwave Atmospheric Sounder (HyMAS) Architecture and Design Accommodations

The Hyperspectral Microwave Atmospheric Sounder (HyMAS) is being developed at Lincoln Laboratories and accommodated by the Goddard Space Flight Center for a flight opportunity on a NASA research aircraft. The term "hyperspectral microwave" is used to indicate an all-weather sounding that performs equivalent to hyperspectral infrared sounders in clear air with vertical resolution of approximately 1 km. Deploying the HyMAS equipped scanhead with the existing Conical Scanning Microwave Imaging Radiometer (CoSMIR) shortens the path to a flight demonstration. Hyperspectral microwave is achieved through the use of independent RF antennas that sample the volume of the Earth s atmosphere through various levels of frequencies, thereby producing a set of dense, spaced vertical weighting functions. The simulations proposed for HyMAS 118/183-GHz system should yield surface precipitation rate and water path retrievals for small hail, soft hail, or snow pellets, snow, rainwater, etc. with accuracies comparable to those of the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder. Further improvements in retrieval methodology (for example, polarization exploitation) are expected. The CoSMIR instrument is a packaging concept re-used on HyMAS to ease the integration features of the scanhead. The HyMAS scanhead will include an ultra-compact Intermediate Frequency Processor (IFP) module that is mounted inside the door to improve thermal management. The IFP is fabricated with materials made of Low-Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) technology integrated with detectors, amplifiers, A/D conversion and data aggregation. The IFP will put out 52 channels of 16 bit data comprised of 4-9 channel data streams for temperature profiles and 2-8 channel streams for water vapor. With the limited volume of the existing CoSMIR scanhead and new HyMAS front end components, the HyMAS team at Goddard began preliminary layout work inside the new drum. Importing and re-using models of the shell, the scan head computer, and the slip rings developed for CoSMIR was the starting point. The next step was to modify the antenna faceplate to accommodate the dimensions of the three dual polarization Gaussian Optics Antenna (GOA) assemblies. Two mechanical concepts for the core technology, the hyperspectral IFP, were captured in a design tradeoff. Connector models considered minimum bend radii for the IFP analog connectors. Hyperspectral imaging is accomplished by strategically using a short wavelength intermediate frequency of 18-29 GHz, and thus reducing the size of components in the connection of the front end to the IFP. The SMK (2.92mm) Series connector will lay near the hinge line to minimize its flexing. The digital output of the IFP will use a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) that must be accommodated by the scan head computer. To make that computer more reliable, maintainable, and forward compatible with the 52 HyMAS channels, a testbed of the scan head, calibration, and archive computers and the PIC24 microprocessor that resides on the IFP is in development. The computers will be programmed using a new framework application called Interoperable Remote Component (IRC). This software allows flexibility to program computers that communicate with each other and can adapt easily to the emerging HyMAS requirements for data format, algorithms, and graphical user interface (GUI). It is expected that the CoSMIR instrument will cut over to the IRC after it is adapted on an updated CoSMIR testbed.

Hilliard, Lawrence↗
DOE OSTI2016

CLUMPY DISKS AS A TESTBED FOR FEEDBACK-REGULATED GALAXY FORMATION

We study the dependence of fragmentation in massive gas-rich galaxy disks at z >1 on stellar feedback schemes and hydrodynamical solvers, employing the GASOLINE2 SPH code and the lagrangian mesh-less code GIZMO in finite mass mode. Non-cosmological galaxy disk runs with the standard delayed-cooling blastwave feedback are compared with runs adopting a new superbubble feedback, which produces winds by modeling the detailed physics of supernova-driven bubbles and leads to efficient self-regulation of star formation. We find that, with blastwave feedback, massive star-forming clumps form in comparable number and with very similar masses in GASOLINE2 and GIZMO. Typical clump masses are in the range 10{sup 7}–10{sup 8} M {sub ⊙}, lower than in most previous works, while giant clumps with masses above 10{sup 9} M {sub ⊙} are exceedingly rare. By contrast, superbubble feedback does not produce massive star-forming bound clumps as galaxies never undergo a phase of violent disk instability. In this scheme, only sporadic, unbound star-forming overdensities lasting a few tens of Myr can arise, triggered by non-linear perturbations from massive satellite companions. We conclude that there is severe tension between explaining massive star-forming clumps observed at z >1 primarily as the result of disk fragmentation driven by gravitational instability and the prevailing view of feedback-regulated galaxy formation. The link between disk stability and star formation efficiency should thus be regarded as a key testing ground for galaxy formation theory.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2016

Towards a Scalable and Adaptive Application Support Platform for Large-Scale Distributed E-Sciences in High-Performance Network Environments

The advent of large-scale collaborative scientific applications has demonstrated the potential for broad scientific communities to pool globally distributed resources to produce unprecedented data acquisition, movement, and analysis. System resources including supercomputers, data repositories, computing facilities, network infrastructures, storage systems, and display devices have been increasingly deployed at national laboratories and academic institutes. These resources are typically shared by large communities of users over Internet or dedicated networks and hence exhibit an inherent dynamic nature in their availability, accessibility, capacity, and stability. Scientific applications using either experimental facilities or computation-based simulations with various physical, chemical, climatic, and biological models feature diverse scientific workflows as simple as linear pipelines or as complex as a directed acyclic graphs, which must be executed and supported over wide-area networks with massively distributed resources. Application users oftentimes need to manually configure their computing tasks over networks in an ad hoc manner, hence significantly limiting the productivity of scientists and constraining the utilization of resources. The success of these large-scale distributed applications requires a highly adaptive and massively scalable workflow platform that provides automated and optimized computing and networking services. This project is to design and develop a generic Scientific Workflow Automation and Management Platform (SWAMP), which contains a web-based user interface specially tailored for a target application, a set of user libraries, and several easy-to-use computing and networking toolkits for application scientists to conveniently assemble, execute, monitor, and control complex computing workflows in heterogeneous high-performance network environments. SWAMP will enable the automation and management of the entire process of scientific workflows with the convenience of a few mouse clicks while hiding the implementation and technical details from end users. Particularly, we will consider two types of applications with distinct performance requirements: data-centric and service-centric applications. For data-centric applications, the main workflow task involves large-volume data generation, catalog, storage, and movement typically from supercomputers or experimental facilities to a team of geographically distributed users; while for service-centric applications, the main focus of workflow is on data archiving, preprocessing, filtering, synthesis, visualization, and other application-specific analysis. We will conduct a comprehensive comparison of existing workflow systems and choose the best suited one with open-source code, a flexible system structure, and a large user base as the starting point for our development. Based on the chosen system, we will develop and integrate new components including a black box design of computing modules, performance monitoring and prediction, and workflow optimization and reconfiguration, which are missing from existing workflow systems. A modular design for separating specification, execution, and monitoring aspects will be adopted to establish a common generic infrastructure suited for a wide spectrum of science applications. We will further design and develop efficient workflow mapping and scheduling algorithms to optimize the workflow performance in terms of minimum end-to-end delay, maximum frame rate, and highest reliability. We will develop and demonstrate the SWAMP system in a local environment, the grid network, and the 100Gpbs Advanced Network Initiative (ANI) testbed. The demonstration will target scientific applications in climate modeling and high energy physics and the functions to be demonstrated include workflow deployment, execution, steering, and reconfiguration. Throughout the project period, we will work closely with the science communities in the fields of climate modeling and high energy physics including Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) projects to mature the system for production use.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Performance Evaluation of Intelligent Solar Control Software Through Hardware-in-the-Loop (CRADA Final Report)

Recent research has highlighted the potential for solar to act as a zero-marginal-cost and zero-emission flexibility resource on the bulk power system when operated with advanced control systems. To increase the performance of these systems, leading technologies, including machine learning (ML) and hierarchical inverter set point allocation, have been developed by Latimer Controls, Inc. to estimate the headroom of large PV plants for grid operation and control; however, these technologies lack comprehensive validation under real-world application scenarios. Latimer Controls, Inc. received two voucher awards for research at a national laboratory from the Department of Energy American Made Solar Prize Round 6. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) was selected to collaborate with Latimer staff to conduct a performance evaluation of Latimer PV control software. The NREL team will develop a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed to perform testing and validation of the Latimer PV control technology in a de-risked yet realistic testbed environment. Latimer and NREL worked together to analyze the test data, draw conclusions from the results, and disseminate the resulting scientific findings. In this CRADA work, we propose to test and validate the real-world application of the Latimer Control solution in an HIL environment. We evaluate the performance of different flexible solar technologies in responding to automatic generation control signals in a closed-loop fashion. In particular, a data-driven potential high limit (PHL) estimation is developed for large solar plants to accurately estimate their headroom so that they have fast and short-time regulation and control capability to participate in grid services and respond to grid signals in real time (e.g., AGC). This PHL estimation algorithm is embedded in a hardware power plant controller (PPC) and tested with an IEEE-39 bus system model developed in RTDS. To account for the varying cloud conditions and diverse inverter dispatches, we developed a 135-MW PV plant with detailed modeling of 27 individual PV modules and inverters using RTDS. The real-world communications used in such big plants, such as ModBus TCP/IP for inverter level and DNP3 for plant level, were developed to emulate the real-world applications in big PV plants. The ML-based PHL estimation method is tested under nine separate weather scenarios against the ‘reference-control’ solution, hereafter referred to as the baseline solution. The baseline method reserves a subset of inverters (reference group) to operate at their PHL at all times and dispatches only the remaining inverters (control group) at curtailed levels to fulfill the flexibility need. Despite being successfully piloted by NREL in California in 2017 and Chile in 2020, there exist two gaps in the state of the art to fully unlock the flexibility of PV plants: a. There is a trade-off between the PHL estimation accuracy and the flexibility range. b. There lacks granularity in the PHL estimation to capture the variation across inverters. The Latimer solution seeks to address these gaps by applying machine learning methods to improve PHL estimation accuracy while accounting for variability at every inverter. Performance metrics were taken from the 2023 Georgia Power CARES utility-scale RFP. The results demonstrate that the ML-based approach outperforms the traditional baseline method in PHL estimation accuracy for 7 of 9 scenarios. The average PHL error across the nine scenarios was 7.40% for the ML-based method, 2.06% less than the 9.46% PHL error average across scenarios that was exhibited by the baseline method. Additionally, the PHL error was below 5% for at least 95% of the testing interval for 3 of 9 tested intervals with the ML approach, whereas it did not achieve this metric for any of the baseline tests. Overall, simulation results indicate the superior performance of an ML-based approach compared to the conventional baseline reference-control approach, showcasing its potential to support grid stability and operational efficiency. This laboratory HIL testing using real PPC, representative power system simulation models in real-time with detailed PV plant and inverter models, and real-world communication protocols gives us confidence that this machine learning based PHL estimation algorithm works well in the hardware PPC and therefore de-risks future field commissioning. The end goal of this project is to advance grid technology to address the grid operation challenges brought by solar plant’s variability and uncertainties in power generation.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Slip Tendency Analysis of Fracture Networks to Determine Suitability of Candidate Testbeds for the EGS Collab Hydroshear Experiment

Experiment 2 of the EGS Collab project is aimed at testing stimulation by hydro-shearing of existing natural fractures, versus Experiment 1, which is focused on hydraulic fracturing a rock mass to enhance permeability. The main criterion for the testbed selection in Experiment 2 is the presence of an interconnected network of fractures, at least 10 meters in extent, and with orientations such that shear slip can be induced at injection pressures less than the minimum horizontal stress (Shmin). The feasibility analysis for this experiment requires a well-constrained stress state along with well-characterized fracture networks. The fracture systems at two candidate locations in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), the 4850 Level (number refers to depth below ground surface in feet) and the 4100 Level, have been characterized to different extents. The 4850 Level has a well-characterized Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) from borehole (drilled for an experimental test bed) and drift observations. In contrast, the 4100 level has a fracture network characterized only by observations from the drift wall, which provides little constraint on fracture extents. This paper will present assessments for the interpreted slip potential for the natural fractures at the two locations. Data uncertainties are addressed by performing a probabilistic analysis that takes into account the uncertainty in the stress state, uncertainty in the fracture properties, and preliminary borehole locations. There is strong evidence of shear stimulation of some natural fractures in Experiment 1 on the 4850 level. We use examples of natural fractures strongly linked to shear stimulation in Experiment 1 from multiple monitoring indicators to test the consistency of the stress model and guide the uncertainty interpretation. This analysis is intended to guide the site selection process for Experiment 2 by highlighting the fracture orientations that are likely to be shear-stimulated in a majority of modeled realizations.

40 EE - Geothermal Technologies Office (EE-4G)↗
DOE OSTI2014

Review of Enabling Technologies to Facilitate Secure Compute Customization

High performance computing environments are often used for a wide variety of workloads ranging from simulation, data transformation and analysis, and complex workflows to name just a few. These systems may process data for a variety of users, often requiring strong separation between job allocations. There are many challenges to establishing these secure enclaves within the shared infrastructure of high-performance computing (HPC) environments. The isolation mechanisms in the system software are the basic building blocks for enabling secure compute enclaves. There are a variety of approaches and the focus of this report is to review the different virtualization technologies that facilitate the creation of secure compute enclaves. The report reviews current operating system (OS) protection mechanisms and modern virtualization technologies to better understand the performance/isolation properties. We also examine the feasibility of running ``virtualized'' computing resources as non-privileged users, and providing controlled administrative permissions for standard users running within a virtualized context. Our examination includes technologies such as Linux containers (LXC [32], Docker [15]) and full virtualization (KVM [26], Xen [5]). We categorize these different approaches to virtualization into two broad groups: OS-level virtualization and system-level virtualization. The OS-level virtualization uses containers to allow a single OS kernel to be partitioned to create Virtual Environments (VE), e.g., LXC. The resources within the host's kernel are only virtualized in the sense of separate namespaces. In contrast, system-level virtualization uses hypervisors to manage multiple OS kernels and virtualize the physical resources (hardware) to create Virtual Machines (VM), e.g., Xen, KVM. This terminology of VE and VM, detailed in Section 2, is used throughout the report to distinguish between the two different approaches to providing virtualized execution environments. As part of our technology review we analyzed several current virtualization solutions to assess their vulnerabilities. This included a review of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) for Xen, KVM, LXC and Docker to gauge their susceptibility to different attacks. The complete details are provided in Section 5 on page 33. Based on this review we concluded that system-level virtualization solutions have many more vulnerabilities than OS level virtualization solutions. As such, security mechanisms like sVirt (Section 3.3) should be considered when using system-level virtualization solutions in order to protect the host against exploits. The majority of vulnerabilities related to KVM, LXC, and Docker are in specific regions of the system. Therefore, future "zero day attacks" are likely to be in the same regions, which suggests that protecting these areas can simplify the protection of the host and maintain the isolation between users. The evaluations of virtualization technologies done thus far are discussed in Section 4. This includes experiments with 'user' namespaces in VEs, which provides the ability to isolate user privileges and allow a user to run with different UIDs within the container while mapping them to non-privileged UIDs in the host. We have identified Linux namespaces as a promising mechanism to isolate shared resources, while maintaining good performance. In Section 4.1 we describe our tests with LXC as a non-root user and leveraging namespaces to control UID/GID mappings and support controlled sharing of parallel file-systems. We highlight several of these namespace capabilities in Section 6.2.3. The other evaluations that were performed during this initial phase of work provide baseline performance data for comparing VEs and VMs to purely native execution. In Section 4.2 we performed tests using the High-Performance Computing Conjugate Gradient (HPCCG) benchmark to establish baseline performance for a scientific application when run on the Native (host) machine in contrast with execution under Docker and KVM. Our tests verified prior studies showing roughly 2-4% overheads in application execution time & MFlops when running in hypervisor-base environments (VMs) as compared to near native performance with VEs. For more details, see Figures 4.5 (page 28), 4.6 (page 28), and 4.7 (page 29). Additionally, in Section 4.3 we include network measurements for TCP bandwidth performance over the 10GigE interface in our testbed. The Native and Docker based tests achieved >= ~9Gbits/sec, while the KVM configuration only achieved 2.5Gbits/sec (Table 4.6 on page 32). This may be a configuration issue with our KVM installation, and is a point for further testing as we refine the network settings in the testbed. The initial network tests were done using a bridged networking configuration. The report outline is as follows: - Section 1 introduces the report and clarifies the scope of the proj...

Aderholdt, Ferrol↗