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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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At least 109 records · Page 6
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2017

Development of a New Departure Aversion Standard for Light Aircraft

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) have recently established new light aircraft certification rules that introduce significant changes to the current regulations. The changes include moving from prescriptive design requirements to performance-based standards, transferring many of the acceptable means of compliance out of the rules and into consensus standards. In addition, the FAA/EASA rules change the performance requirements associated with some of the more salient safety issues regarding light aircraft. One significant change is the elimination of spin recovery demonstration. The new rules now call for enhanced stall warning and aircraft handling characteristics that demonstrate resistance to inadvertent departure from controlled flight. The means of compliance with these changes in a safe, cost-effective manner is a challenging problem. This paper discusses existing approaches to reducing the likelihood of departure from controlled flight and introduces a new approach, dubbed Departure Aversion, which allows applicants to tailor the amount of departure resistance, stall warning, and enhanced safety equipment to meet the new proposed rules. The Departure Aversion approach gives applicants the freedom to select the most cost-effective portfolio for their design, while meeting the safety intent of the new rules, by ensuring that any combination of the selected approaches will be at a higher equivalent level of safety than today's status quo.

Borer, Nicholas K.↗
DOE OSTI2020

Performance of Photovoltaic Systems Recorded by Open Solar Performance and Reliability Clearinghouse (oSPARC)

This article analyzes data from 2,200 photovoltaic systems collected through the Open Solar Performance and Reliability Clearinghouse (oSPARC, 2018) to draw conclusions about the measured performance of the systems, how it compares to expectations, and how wide the variation is. The systems range in size from 2 kW to 1,200 kW, with an average size of 229 kW, and were activated in oSPARC between March 13, 2007 and Dec. 16, 2016. Data regarding co-incident insolation and ambient temperature are provided through the oSPARC platform for the population of systems and summarized here. Results indicate that - after correcting for measured insolation, derating for temperature, and correcting for balance-of-system efficiency and degradation as a result of system age - the performance ratio of these 2,200 systems averages 91.7%. Adjusting for known parameters such as age and efficiency, the ratio would ideally be 100%. Thus, the 'underperformance' of this system sample is measured at 9.3% and suggests that as much as 9.3% could be recovered if the systems were caused to perform as expected through optimal operation and maintenance. Efforts to correlate the performance ratio with environmental conditions resulted in very low coefficients of regression, but the method already normalizes for actual site insolation and temperature, which are responsible for much of the site-specific variation. An exemption is air-quality nonattainment areas, where the measured performance of plants averages 86.9% and is consistently lower than the average of 95.9% in areas that are in compliance with air quality standards, likely because of particulate matter such as diesel soot exacerbating the soiling rate.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Applying Non-Energy Impacts from Other Jurisdictions in Cost-Benefit Analyses of Energy Efficiency Programs: Resources for States for Utility Customer-Funded Programs

Avoided energy and capacity costs are the primary yardstick utilities use to determine which energy efficiency programs are cost-effective for their customers. But sometimes "non-energy impacts" — not commonly recognized as directly associated with energy generation, transmission and distribution — represent substantial benefits, such as improving comfort, air quality and public health. Considering whether and how to include non-energy impacts is an important part of cost-benefit analyses for these programs. This report offers practical considerations for deciding which non-energy impacts to include and how to apply values or methods from other jurisdictions. Researchers reviewed studies quantifying non-energy impacts used in 30 states and applied a five-point system to indicate transferability of a value or method from each study for 16 categories of non-energy impacts: Water resource costs and benefits; Other fuels costs and benefits; Avoided environmental compliance costs; Environmental impacts; Productivity; Health and safety; Asset value; Energy and/or capacity price suppression effects; Avoided costs of compliance with Renewable Portfolio Standard requirements; Avoided credit and collection costs; Avoided ancillary services; Comfort; Economic development and job impacts; Public health impacts; Energy security impacts; Increased reliability. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office supported this work.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

Pre-Commercial Scale-Up of a Gas-Fired Absorption Heat Pump

The project sought to advance the maturity of SMTI’s 80 kBTU/hr residential space and water heating GAHP from the engineering prototype stage (TRL-7) to pre-production readiness by addressing manufacturing, balance of system design and installation, cost, reliability, and field application questions. As part of this project, the project team has: (1) Matured the design package for a commercially ready product (2) Demonstrated compliance with relevant ANSI standards (3) Completed manufacturing and assembly process specifications (4) Completed total production cost estimates and capital equipment requirements (5) Initiated component and system level reliability assessments (6) Completed a small field demonstration including measured performance, installation requirements and expected costs, and customer/key stakeholder feedback. (7) Completed a Techno-economic analysis for representative applications and climate zones, including justification for utility incentive programs. (8) Completed a market intelligence report. Scope of Work: A multi-faceted project was completed that included: (a) design for manufacturing tasks for both the sealed system and balance of system, (b) development and trial of key manufacturing processes and techniques, (c) evaluation of component and system level reliability, (d) exploration of make/buy decisions including impact on cost and required capital. Additionally, (e) installation and monitoring of a small number of field test units was completed to demonstrate energy savings and collect customer/installer feedback, and (f) a focused market research task was completed to explore potential barriers and improve market introduction plans. These tasks addressed many of the remaining technical risks regarding long-term reliability, verification of manufacturing cost estimates and identification of cost concerns, identify installation and balance of system design criteria necessary to achieve energy savings and installed cost goals, and identify market barriers and strategies prior to product market introduction.

03 NATURAL GAS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Summary of Stack Tests at TA-16-Bldg 205: Horizontal Duct on WETF Roof

In late 2023 and early 2024, testing was done at the Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility (WETF) rooftop exhaust duct to verify that the stack sample location was in compliance with the ANSI standard for stack sampling, ANSI N13.1-1999. This ANSI standard is called out by the Clean Air Act rules for airborne radionuclide emissions from DOE facilities, 40 CFR 61 Subpart H. This sample location is designated 16020504, indicating Technical Area 16, Building 0205. The rooftop duct formerly discharged to Exhaust Stack 04, but in 2007 it was re-routed to exhaust out Building 0450, Exhaust Stack 05. For continuity, we have kept the 16020504 designation to represent this duct sample location.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Reassessment of PHDS Fulcrum40h High Purity Germanium (HPGe) Detector System Performance

This report presents a comprehensive evaluation of the updated PHDS Fulcrum40h High Purity Germanium (HPGe) detector system, benchmarking its performance, usability, and software capabilities against the current National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) HPGe Detector System Requirements Document. Systematic measurements were conducted using a single Fulcrum40h detector to assess key parameters including gamma efficiency and resolution, neutron detection efficiency, gamma pulse-pileup response, and gamma-to-neutron crosstalk. The Fulcrum40h system, acquired in August 2022, has undergone recent updates by PHDS to address deficiencies identified following the initial NEST requirements release. The results provide critical insights into the detector’s operational capabilities and compliance with NNSA NEST standards.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
NASA NTRS1980

Certification of the concentrating solar collector

Report describes procedures and results of extensive testing of concentrating solar collector performed for certification of systems compliance with government performance standards. Test includes operational, electrical, mechanical, and thermal checks, as well as structural integrity.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1982

Payload IVA training and simulation

The development of a training program for the intravehicular operation of space shuttle payloads is discussed. The priorities for the program are compliance with established training standards, and accommodating changes. Simulation devices are also reviewed.

Monsees, J. H.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Automating a human factors evaluation of graphical user interfaces for NASA applications: An update on CHIMES

Capturing human factors knowledge about the design of graphical user interfaces (GUI's) and applying this knowledge on-line are the primary objectives of the Computer-Human Interaction Models (CHIMES) project. The current CHIMES prototype is designed to check a GUI's compliance with industry-standard guidelines, general human factors guidelines, and human factors recommendations on color usage. Following the evaluation, CHIMES presents human factors feedback and advice to the GUI designer. The paper describes the approach to modeling human factors guidelines, the system architecture, a new method developed to convert quantitative RGB primaries into qualitative color representations, and the potential for integrating CHIMES with user interface management systems (UIMS). Both the conceptual approach and its implementation are discussed. This paper updates the presentation on CHIMES at the first International Symposium on Ground Data Systems for Spacecraft Control.

Jiang, Jian-Ping↗
NASA NTRS1990

Hardware independence checkout software

ACSI has developed a program utilizing CLIPS to assess compliance with various programming standards. Essentially the program parses C code to extract the names of all function calls. These are asserted as CLIPS facts which also include information about line numbers, source file names, and called functions. Rules have been devised to establish functions called that have not been defined in any of the source parsed. These are compared against lists of standards (represented as facts) using rules that check intersections and/or unions of these. By piping the output into other processes the source is appropriately commented by generating and executing parsed scripts.

Cameron, Barry W.↗
NASA NTRS2001

Trends and Options in the Disposal of Launch Vehicle Orbital Stages

An increasing number of agencies and organizations around the world provide guidelines for the disposal of launch vehicle stages placed in Earth orbit. The limitation of orbital lifetime following the satellite delivery mission, particularly in low Earth orbit, is viewed as one of the most important space debris mitigation measures. For higher altitude missions, orbital stages may be maneuvered into more rapidly decaying orbits or may be left in longer-term disposal orbits. This paper summarizes the recent disposal practices of all launch vehicle types and evaluates their compliance with existing national standards. Although the owners and operators of some satellite systems, e.g., Iridium and Globalstar, have levied orbital stage disposal requirements on launch service providers, in general, insufficient attention and communication is given to this topic. Sunsynchronous and geosynchronous missions may pose some of the most difficult challenges for the responsible disposal of orbital stages. A variety of disposal options are normally available, some of which may even influence the design of the spacecraft to be deployed. Also at issue is whether normal launch vehicle propellant reserves can be relied upon for post-mission disposal of orbital stages.

Johnson, Nicholas L.↗
NASA NTRS2011

Haptic-Multimodal Flight Control System Update

The rapidly advancing capabilities of autonomous aircraft suggest a future where many of the responsibilities of today s pilot transition to the vehicle, transforming the pilot s job into something akin to driving a car or simply being a passenger. Notionally, this transition will reduce the specialized skills, training, and attention required of the human user while improving safety and performance. However, our experience with highly automated aircraft highlights many challenges to this transition including: lack of automation resilience; adverse human-automation interaction under stress; and the difficulty of developing certification standards and methods of compliance for complex systems performing critical functions traditionally performed by the pilot (e.g., sense and avoid vs. see and avoid). Recognizing these opportunities and realities, researchers at NASA Langley are developing a haptic-multimodal flight control (HFC) system concept that can serve as a bridge between today s state of the art aircraft that are highly automated but have little autonomy and can only be operated safely by highly trained experts (i.e., pilots) to a future in which non-experts (e.g., drivers) can safely and reliably use autonomous aircraft to perform a variety of missions. This paper reviews the motivation and theoretical basis of the HFC system, describes its current state of development, and presents results from two pilot-in-the-loop simulation studies. These preliminary studies suggest the HFC reshapes human-automation interaction in a way well-suited to revolutionary ease-of-use.

Goodrich, Kenneth H.↗
NASA NTRS2016

Exploration Clinical Decision Support System: Medical Data Architecture

The Exploration Clinical Decision Support (ECDS) System project is intended to enhance the Exploration Medical Capability (ExMC) Element for extended duration, deep-space mission planning in HRP. A major development guideline is the Risk of "Adverse Health Outcomes & Decrements in Performance due to Limitations of In-flight Medical Conditions". ECDS attempts to mitigate that Risk by providing crew-specific health information, actionable insight, crew guidance and advice based on computational algorithmic analysis. The availability of inflight health diagnostic computational methods has been identified as an essential capability for human exploration missions. Inflight electronic health data sources are often heterogeneous, and thus may be isolated or not examined as an aggregate whole. The ECDS System objective provides both a data architecture that collects and manages disparate health data, and an active knowledge system that analyzes health evidence to deliver case-specific advice. A single, cohesive space-ready decision support capability that considers all exploration clinical measurements is not commercially available at present. Hence, this Task is a newly coordinated development effort by which ECDS and its supporting data infrastructure will demonstrate the feasibility of intelligent data mining and predictive modeling as a biomedical diagnostic support mechanism on manned exploration missions. The initial step towards ground and flight demonstrations has been the research and development of both image and clinical text-based computer-aided patient diagnosis. Human anatomical images displaying abnormal/pathological features have been annotated using controlled terminology templates, marked-up, and then stored in compliance with the AIM standard. These images have been filtered and disease characterized based on machine learning of semantic and quantitative feature vectors. The next phase will evaluate disease treatment response via quantitative linear dimension biomarkers that enable image content-based retrieval and criteria assessment. In addition, a data mining engine (DME) is applied to cross-sectional adult surveys for predicting occurrence of renal calculi, ranked by statistical significance of demographics and specific food ingestion. In addition to this precursor space flight algorithm training, the DME will utilize a feature-engineering capability for unstructured clinical text classification health discovery. The ECDS backbone is a proposed multi-tier modular architecture providing data messaging protocols, storage, management and real-time patient data access. Technology demonstrations and success metrics will be finalized in FY16.

Biomedical support↗
NASA NTRS2021

Toward Certification of Machine-Learning Systems for Low Criticality Airborne Applications

The exceptional progress in the field of machine learning (ML) in recent years has attracted a lot of interest in using this technology in aviation. Possible airborne applications of ML include safety-critical functions, which must be developed in compliance with rigorous certification standards of the aviation industry. Current certification standards for the aviation industry were developed prior to the ML renaissance without taking specifics of ML technology into account. There are some fundamental incompatibilities between traditional design assurance approaches and certain aspects of ML-based systems. In this paper, we analyze the current airborne certification standards and show that all objectives of the standards can be achieved for a low-criticality ML-based system if certain assumptions about ML development workflow are applied.

Avionics↗
DOE OSTI2023

SRS 2022 Annual Site Environmental Report (ASER)

ASER stands for the Annual Site Environmental Report and is the primary document that the U.S. Department of Energy uses to inform the public of environmental performance and conditions at SRS. • ASERs are required by U.S. Department of Energy to provide the public and stakeholders information on: – Environmental program performance – Site wide environmental monitoring and surveillance effectiveness – Compliance status with environmental standards and requirements • SRS published its first ASER in 1959

DAVIS, COLLEEN↗
DOE OSTI2021

Physical and Visual Evaluation of Filters for Direct Observation of the Sun and the International Standard ISO 12312-2:2015

We investigated the compliance of 43 commercially available solar filters (eclipse glasses) with the ISO 12312-2:2015 standard by measuring their spectral transmittances (280–2000 nm) and calculating their luminous, solar ultraviolet A, ultraviolet B, and infrared (IR) transmittances. We also evaluated the filters for usability by observing the full midday Sun and rating the view on a seven-point balanced scale, from “far too dark, details seen only with great difficulty” to “far too light, uncomfortable to view the Sun.” The mean ratings of two observers, one experienced and one inexperienced in solar observing, differed by 0.28 (95% confidence interval of the mean = 0.26). The inexperienced observer tended to be less accepting of high transmittances. All 43 solar filters complied with the UV and IR requirements. Eighteen filters passed the luminous transmittance requirements, and 24 were borderline too light or too dark. Seven of the 15 solar filters with a luminous transmittance darker than the requirement were rated as acceptable. One filter that passed and another that was borderline too light were rated as too light or far too light. The ISO 12312-2 limits derive from welding filter standards and do not represent an appropriate evidence base for direct solar viewing. This work provides the evidence base for a maximum 0.0012% and a minimum 0.00004% luminous transmittance for solar filters. The results of this study also support the use of welding filters between shades 12 and 16. Lighter welding filters are more acceptable than solar filters of the same luminous transmittance.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗