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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 127 records · Page 7
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2018

Electrokinetic flow of an aqueous electrolyte in amorphous silica nanotubes

Here, we study the pressure-driven flow of aqueous NaCl in amorphous silica nanotubes using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations featuring both polarizable and non-polarizable molecular models. Different pressures, electrolyte concentrations and pore sizes are examined. Our results indicate a flow that deviates considerably from the predictions of Poiseuille fluid mechanics. Due to preferential adsorption of the different ionic species by surface SiO– or SiOH groups, we find that a significant electric current is generated, but with opposite polarities using polarizable vs. fixed charge models for water and ions, emphasizing the need for careful parameterization in such complex systems. We also examine the influence of partial deprotonation of the silica surface, and we find that much more current is generated in a dehydrogenated nanopore, even though the overall efficiency remains low. These findings indicate that different methods of nanopore preparation, which can produce a range of surface properties, should be examined more closely in the related experimental methods to generate electrokinetic current.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2021

An exact inversion method for extracting orientation ordering by small-angle scattering

Here, we outline a nonparametric inversion strategy for determining the orientation distribution function (ODF) of sheared interacting rods using small-angle scattering techniques. With the presence of direct inter-rod interaction and fluid mechanical forces, the scattering spectra are no longer characterized by the azimuthal symmetry in the coordinates defined by the principal directions of simple shear conditions, which severely compounds the reconstruction of ODFs based on currently available methods developed for dilute systems. Using a real spherical harmonic expansion scheme, the real-space ODFs are uniquely determined from the anisotropic scattering spectra and their numerical accuracy is verified computationally. Our method can be generalized to extract ODFs of uniaxially anisotropic objects under different flow conditions in a properly transformed reference frame with suitable basis vectors.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2013

The final stage of gravitational collapse for high density fluid medium

The High density high density fluids can be represented by a stiff matter state equation P={rho} and also by the Hagedorn state equation. The first is constructed using a lagrangian that allows bare nucleons to interact attractively via scalar meson exchange, and repulsively by a more massive vector meson exchange; the second consider that for large mass the spectrum of hadrons grows exponentially, namely {rho}(m) {approx}exp(m/T{sub H}), where T{sub H} is the Hagedorn temperature, resulting the state equation P = P{sub 0}+{rho}{sub 0}ln({rho}/{rho}{sub 0}). We study the gravitational collapse for a high density fluid, considering a Hagedorn state equation in a presence of a vacuum component.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Steady fall of isothermal, resistive-viscous, compressible fluid across magnetic field

This is a basic MHD study of the steady fall of an infinite, vertical slab of isothermal, resistive-viscous, compressible fluid across a dipped magnetic field in uniform gravity. This double-diffusion steady flow in unbounded space poses a nonlinear but numerically tractable, one-dimensional (1D) free-boundary problem, assuming constant coefficients of resistivity and viscosity. The steady flow is determined by a dimensionless number μ{sub 1} proportional to the triple product of the two diffusion coefficients and the square of the linear total mass. For a sufficiently large μ{sub 1}, the Lorentz, viscous, fluid-pressure, and gravitational forces pack and collimate the fluid into a steady flow of a finite width defined by the two zero-pressure free-boundaries of the slab with vacuum. The viscous force is essential in this collimation effect. The study conjectures that in the regime μ{sub 1}→0, the 1D steady state exists only for μ{sub 1}∈Ω, a spectrum of an infinite number of discrete values, including μ{sub 1} = 0 that corresponds to two steady states, the classical zero-resistivity static slab of Kippenhahn and Schlüter [R. Kippenhahn and A. Schlüter, Z. Astrophys. 43, 36 (1957)] and its recent generalization [B. C. Low et al., Astrophys. J. 755, 34 (2012)] to admit an inviscid resistive flow. The pair of zero-pressure boundaries of each of the μ{sub 1}→0 steady-state slabs are located at infinity. Computational evidence suggests that the Ω steady-states are densely distributed around μ{sub 1} = 0, as an accumulation point, but are sparsely separated by open intervals of μ{sub 1}-values for which the slab must be either time-dependent or spatially multi-dimensional. The widths of these intervals are vanishingly small as μ{sub 1}→0. This topological structure of physical states is similar to that described by Landau and Liftshitz [L. D. Landau and E. M. Lifshitz, Fluid Mechanics (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1959)] to explain the onset of hydrodynamic turbulence. The implications of this MHD study are discussed, with an interest in the prominences in the solar atmosphere and the interstellar clouds in the Galaxy.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Impact of gas flow rate on breakdown of filamentary dielectric barrier discharges

The influence of gas flow rate on breakdown properties and stability of pulsed dielectric barrier discharges (DBDs) in a single filament arrangement using a gas mixture of 0.1 vol. % O{sub 2} in N{sub 2} at atmospheric pressure was investigated by means of electrical and optical diagnostics, accompanied by fluid dynamics and electrostatics simulations. A higher flow rate perpendicular to the electrode symmetry axis resulted in an increased breakdown voltage and DBD current maximum, a higher discharge inception jitter, and a larger emission diameter of the discharge channel. In addition, a shift of the filament position for low gas flow rates with respect to the electrode symmetry axis was observed. These effects can be explained by the change of the residence time of charge carriers in the discharge region—i.e., the volume pre-ionization—for changed flow conditions due to the convective transport of particles out of the center of the gap.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Investigating flow patterns and related dynamics in multi-instability turbulent plasmas using a three-point cross-phase time delay estimation velocimetry scheme

Complexities of flow patterns in the azimuthal cross-section of a cylindrical magnetized helicon plasma and the corresponding plasma dynamics are investigated by means of a novel scheme for time delay estimation velocimetry. The advantage of this introduced method is the capability of calculating the time-averaged 2D velocity fields of propagating wave-like structures and patterns in complex spatiotemporal data. It is able to distinguish and visualize the details of simultaneously present superimposed entangled dynamics and it can be applied to fluid-like systems exhibiting frequently repeating patterns (e.g., waves in plasmas, waves in fluids, dynamics in planetary atmospheres, etc.). The velocity calculations are based on time delay estimation obtained from cross-phase analysis of time series. Each velocity vector is unambiguously calculated from three time series measured at three different non-collinear spatial points. This method, when applied to fast imaging, has been crucial to understand the rich plasma dynamics in the azimuthal cross-section of a cylindrical linear magnetized helicon plasma. The capabilities and the limitations of this velocimetry method are discussed and demonstrated for two completely different plasma regimes, i.e., for quasi-coherent wave dynamics and for complex broadband wave dynamics involving simultaneously present multiple instabilities.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Asymptotic behavior of the mixed mass in Rayleigh–Taylor and Richtmyer–Meshkov instability induced flows

Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) and Richtmyer–Meshkov instability (RMI) are serious practical issues in inertial confinement fusion research, and also have relevance to many cases of astrophysical fluid dynamics. So far, much of the attention has been paid to the late-time scaling of the mixed width, which is used as a surrogate to how well the fluids have been mixed. Yet, the actual amount of mixed mass could be viewed as a more direct indicator on the evolution of the mixing layers due to hydrodynamic instabilities. Despite its importance, there is no systematic study as yet on the scaling of the mixed mass for either the RTI or the RMI induced flow. In this article, the normalized mixed mass (Ψ) is introduced for measuring the efficiency of the mixed mass. Six large numerical simulation databases have been employed: the RTI cases with heavy-to-light fluid density ratios of 1.5, 3, and 9; the single shock RMI cases with density ratios of 3 and 20; and a reshock RMI case with density ratio of 3. Using simulated flow fields, the normalized mixed mass Ψ is shown to be more sensitive in discriminating the variation with Atwood number for the RTI flows. Moreover, Ψ is demonstrated to provide more consistent results for both the RTI and RMI flows when compared with the traditional mixedness parameters, Ξ and Θ.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2016

Flow characteristics in narrowed coronary bypass graft

Tortuous saphenous vein graft (SVG) hemodynamics was investigated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques. Computed tomography (CT) technology is used for non-invasive bypass graft assessment 7 days after surgery. CT investigation shown two regions with severe shape remodelling first is an elbow type contortion and second is a severe curvature with tortuous area reduction. In conclusion, the helical flow induced by vessel torsion may stabilize the blood flow in the distal part of the SVG, reducing the flow disturbance and suppressing the flow separation, but in the distal end of the graft, promote the inflammatory processes in the vessels.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2017

Explosive attractor solutions to a universal cubic delay equation

New explosive attractor solutions have been found in a universal cubic delay equation that has been studied in both the plasma and the fluid mechanics literature. Through computational simulations and analytic approximations, it is found that the oscillatory component of the explosive mode amplitude solutions are described through multi-frequency Fourier expansions with respect to a pseudo-time variable. The spectral dependence of these solutions as a function of a system parameter, ϕ, is studied. The mode amplitude that is described in the explosive regime has two main features: a well-known envelope (t0−t)−5/2, with t0 the blow-up time of the amplitude, and a spectrum of discrete oscillations with ever-increasing frequencies, which may give experimental information about the properties of a system's equilibrium.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2015

Osborne Reynolds pipe flow: Direct simulation from laminar through gradual transition to fully developed turbulence

We report that the precise dynamics of breakdown in pipe transition is a century-old unresolved problem in fluid mechanics. We demonstrate that the abruptness and mysteriousness attributed to the Osborne Reynolds pipe transition can be partially resolved with a spatially developing direct simulation that carries weakly but finitely perturbed laminar inflow through gradual rather than abrupt transition arriving at the fully developed turbulent state. Our results with this approach show during transition the energy norms of such inlet perturbations grow exponentially rather than algebraically with axial distance. When inlet disturbance is located in the core region, helical vortex filaments evolve into large-scale reverse hairpin vortices. The interaction of these reverse hairpins among themselves or with the near-wall flow when they descend to the surface from the core produces small-scale hairpin packets, which leads to breakdown. When inlet disturbance is near the wall, certain quasi-spanwise structure is stretched into a Lambda vortex, and develops into a large-scale hairpin vortex. Small-scale hairpin packets emerge near the tip region of the large-scale hairpin vortex, and subsequently grow into a turbulent spot, which is itself a local concentration of small-scale hairpin vortices. This vortex dynamics is broadly analogous to that in the boundary layer bypass transition and in the secondary instability and breakdown stage of natural transition, suggesting the possibility of a partial unification. Under parabolic base flow the friction factor overshoots Moody’s correlation. Plug base flow requires stronger inlet disturbance for transition. Finally, accuracy of the results is demonstrated by comparing with analytical solutions before breakdown, and with fully developed turbulence measurements after the completion of transition.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Particle image velocimetry analysis with simultaneous uncertainty quantification using Bayesian neural networks

Particle image velocimetry (PIV) is an effective tool in experimental fluid mechanics for extracting flow fields from images. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used to perform PIV analysis with accuracy on par with classical methods. Here we extend the use of CNNs to analyze PIV data while providing simultaneous uncertainty quantification on the inferred flow field. The method we apply in this paper is a Bayesian convolutional neural network (BCNN) which learns distributions of the CNN weights through variational Bayes. In order to demonstrate the utility of BCNNs for the PIV task, we compare the performance of three distinct BCNN models with simple architectures. The first network estimates flow velocity from image interrogation regions only. Our second model learns to infer velocity from both the image interrogation regions and interrogation region cross-correlation maps. Finally, our best performing network infers velocities from interrogation region cross-correlation maps only. We find that BCNNs using interrogation region cross-correlation maps as inputs perform better than those using interrogation windows only as inputs and discuss reasons why this may be the case. Additionally, we test the best performing BCNN on a full synthetic test image pair and a real image pair from the 1st International PIV Challenge. We show that ~98% of true particle displacements from the full synthetic image pair can be captured within the BCNN's 95% confidence intervals, and that the BCNN's performance on the real image pair is quantitatively similar to that of algorithms tested in the 1st International PIV Challenge. Finally, we show that BCNNs can be generalized to be used with multi-pass PIV algorithms with a moderate loss in accuracy, which may be overcome by future work on finetuning and training schemes. So to our knowledge, this is the first use of Bayesian neural networks to perform PIV.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2017

Renormalization-group flow of the effective action of cosmological large-scale structures

Following an approach of Matarrese and Pietroni, we derive the functional renormalization group (RG) flow of the effective action of cosmological large-scale structures. Perturbative solutions of this RG flow equation are shown to be consistent with standard cosmological perturbation theory. Non-perturbative approximate solutions can be obtained by truncating the a priori infinite set of possible effective actions to a finite subspace. Using for the truncated effective action a form dictated by dissipative fluid dynamics, we derive RG flow equations for the scale dependence of the effective viscosity and sound velocity of non-interacting dark matter, and we solve them numerically. Physically, the effective viscosity and sound velocity account for the interactions of long-wavelength fluctuations with the spectrum of smaller-scale perturbations. We find that the RG flow exhibits an attractor behaviour in the IR that significantly reduces the dependence of the effective viscosity and sound velocity on the input values at the UV scale. This allows for a self-contained computation of matter and velocity power spectra for which the sensitivity to UV modes is under control.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2016

Asymmetric collapse by dissolution or melting in a uniform flow

An advection-diffusion-limited dissolution model of an object being eroded by a two-dimensional potential flow is presented. By taking advantage of the conformal invariance of the model, a numerical method is introduced that tracks the evolution of the object boundary in terms of a time-dependent Laurent series. Simulations of a variety of dissolving objects are shown, which shrink and collapse to a single point in finite time. The simulations reveal a surprising exact relationship, whereby the collapse point is the root of a non-Analytic function given in terms of the flow velocity and the Laurent series coefficients describing the initial shape. This result is subsequently derived using residue calculus. The structure of the non-Analytic function is examined for three different test cases, and a practical approach to determine the collapse point using a generalized Newton-Raphson root-finding algorithm is outlined. These examples also illustrate the possibility that the model breaks down in finite time prior to complete collapse, due to a topological singularity, as the dissolving boundary overlaps itself rather than breaking up into multiple domains (analogous to droplet pinch-off in fluid mechanics). In conclusion, the model raises fundamental mathematical questions about broken symmetries in finite-Time singularities of both continuous and stochastic dynamical systems.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2018

Self-assembly of a drop pattern from a two-dimensional grid of nanometric metallic filaments

We report experiments, modeling, and numerical simulations of the self–assembly of particle patterns obtained from a nanometric metallic square grid. Initially, nickel filaments of rectangular cross section are patterned on a SiO 2 flat surface, and then they are melted by laser irradiation with ~18-ns pulses. During this time, the liquefied metal dewets the substrate, leading to a linear array of drops along each side of the squares. The experimental data provide a series of SEM images of the resultant morphology as a function of the number of laser pulses or cumulative liquid lifetime. These data are analyzed in terms of fluid mechanical models that account for mass conservation and consider flow evolution with the aim to predict the final number of drops resulting from each side of the square. The aspect ratio, δ, between the square sides' lengths and their widths is an essential parameter of the problem. Our models allow us to predict the δ intervals within which a certain final number of drops are expected. The comparison with experimental data shows a good agreement with the model that explicitly considers the Stokes flow developed in the filaments neck region that lead to breakup points. Furthermore, numerical simulations that solve the Navier-Stokes equations along with slip boundary condition at the contact lines are implemented to describe the dynamics of the problem.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Dispersion Relations Alone Cannot Guarantee Causality

We show that linear superpositions of plane waves involving a single-valued, covariantly stable dispersion relation ω ( k ) always propagate outside the light cone unless ω ( k ) = a + b k . This implies that there is no notion of causality for individual dispersion relations since no mathematical condition on the function ω ( k ) (such as the front velocity or the asymptotic group velocity conditions) can serve as a sufficient condition for subluminal propagation in dispersive media. Instead, causality can only emerge from a careful cancellation that occurs when one superimposes all the excitation branches of a physical model. This happens automatically in local theories of matter that are covariantly stable. Hence, we find that the need for nonhydrodynamic modes in relativistic fluid mechanics is analogous to the need for antiparticles in relativistic quantum mechanics. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Physics↗
DOE OSTI2024

Impedance Emulation Control of Wave Energy Converters

Modeling and control of wave energy conversion (WEC) systems for maximum power extraction is challenging due to complex multiphysics that include fluids, mechanics, and machine drives. To uncover an intuitive model that clearly depicts WEC system operation, we utilize a force-current equivalent circuit framework which then enables us to design an impedance emulation control strategy. To provide context for our framework, we focus on a standard reference model-3 (RM3) point absorber device coupled to a permanent magnet synchronous generator. After the proposed extremum seeking controller is computed, we experimentally validate its performance on a platform that consists of two back-to-back connected inverters that emulate the WEC system.

wave energy conversion, impedance emulation, machi↗
DOE OSTI2020

Geometry-Driven Detection, Tracking and Visual Analysis of Viscous and Gravitational Fingers

Viscous and gravitational flow instabilities cause a displacement front to break up into finger-like fluids. The detection and evolutionary analysis of these fingering instabilities are critical in multiple scientific disciplines such as fluid mechanics and hydrogeology. However, previous detection methods of the viscous and gravitational fingers are based on density thresholding, which provides limited geometric information of the fingers. The geometric structures of fingers and their evolution are important yet little studied in the literature. In this work, we explore the geometric detection and evolution of the fingers in detail to elucidate the dynamics of the instability. Additionally, we propose a ridge voxel detection method to guide the extraction of finger cores from three-dimensional (3D) scalar fields. After skeletonizing finger cores into skeletons, we design a spanning tree based approach to capture how fingers branch spatially from the finger skeletons. Finally, we devise a novel geometric-glyph augmented tracking graph to study how the fingers and their branches grow, merge, and split over time. Feedback from earth scientists demonstrates the usefulness of our approach to performing spatio-temporal geometric analyses of fingers.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗