Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Adaptive Sampling”

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.

At least 1,297 records · Page 72

Friends of hot Jupiters. I. A radial velocity search for massive, long-period companions to close-in gas giant planets

In this paper we search for distant massive companions to known transiting gas giant planets that may have influenced the dynamical evolution of these systems. We present new radial velocity observations for a sample of 51 planets obtained using the Keck HIRES instrument, and find statistically significant accelerations in fifteen systems. Six of these systems have no previously reported accelerations in the published literature: HAT-P-10, HAT-P-22, HAT-P-29, HAT-P-32, WASP-10, and XO-2. We combine our radial velocity fits with Keck NIRC2 adaptive optics (AO) imaging data to place constraints on the allowed masses and orbital periods of the companions responsible for the detected accelerations. The estimated masses of the companions range between 1-500 M {sub Jup}, with orbital semi-major axes typically between 1-75 AU. A significant majority of the companions detected by our survey are constrained to have minimum masses comparable to or larger than those of the transiting planets in these systems, making them candidates for influencing the orbital evolution of the inner gas giant. We estimate a total occurrence rate of 51% ± 10% for companions with masses between 1-13 M {sub Jup} and orbital semi-major axes between 1-20 AU in our sample. We find no statistically significant difference between the frequency of companions to transiting planets with misaligned or eccentric orbits and those with well-aligned, circular orbits. We combine our expanded sample of radial velocity measurements with constraints from transit and secondary eclipse observations to provide improved measurements of the physical and orbital characteristics of all of the planets included in our survey.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Strain-dependent partial slip on rock fractures under seismic-frequency torsion: Seismic-Frequency Fracture Partial Slip

Measurements of nonlinear modulus and attenuation of fractures provide the opportunity to probe their mechanical state. We have adapted a low-frequency torsional apparatus to explore the seismic signature of fractures under low normal stress, simulating low effective stress environments such as shallow or high pore pressure reservoirs. We report strain-dependent modulus and attenuation for fractured samples of Duperow dolomite (a carbon sequestration target reservoir in Montana), Blue Canyon Dome rhyolite (a geothermal analog reservoir in New Mexico), and Montello granite (a deep basement disposal analog from Wisconsin). We use a simple single effective asperity partial slip model to fit our measured stress-strain curves, and solve for the friction coefficient, contact radius, and full slip condition. These observations have the potential to develop into new field techniques for measuring differences in frictional properties during reservoir engineering manipulations and estimate the stress conditions where reservoir fractures and faults begin to fully slip.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Evaluating the active site-substrate interplay between x-ray crystal structure and molecular dynamics in chorismate mutase

Designing realistic quantum mechanical (QM) models of enzymes is dependent on reliably discerning and modeling residues, solvents, and cofactors important in crafting the active site microenvironment. Interatomic van der Waals contacts have previously demonstrated usefulness toward designing QM-models, but their measured values (and subsequent residue importance rankings) are expected to be influenceable by subtle changes in protein structure. Using chorismate mutase as a case study, this work examines the differences in ligand-residue interatomic contacts between an x-ray crystal structure and structures from a molecular dynamics simulation. Select structures are further analyzed using symmetry adapted perturbation theory to compute ab initio ligand-residue interaction energies. The findings of this study show that ligand-residue interatomic contacts measured for an x-ray crystal structure are not predictive of active site contacts from a sampling of molecular dynamics frames. In addition, the variability in interatomic contacts among structures is not correlated with variability in interaction energies. However, the results spotlight using interaction energies to characterize and rank residue importance in future computational enzymology workflows.

Chemistry↗

Experimental investigation of two-phase flow in rock salt

This Test Plan describes procedures for conducting laboratory scale flow tests on intact, damaged, crushed, and consolidated crushed salt to measure the capillary pressure and relative permeability functions. The primary focus of the tests will be on samples of bedded geologic salt from the WIPP underground. However, the tests described herein are directly applicable to domal salt. Samples being tested will be confined by a range of triaxial stress states ranging from atmospheric pressure up to those approximating lithostatic. Initially these tests will be conducted at room temperature, but testing procedures and equipment will be evaluated to determine adaptability to conducting similar tests under elevated temperatures.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

Meta-analysis of peptides to detect protein significance

Shotgun assays are widely used in biotechnologies to char- acterize large molecules, which are hard to be measured as a whole directly. For instance, in Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) shotgun experiments, proteins in biological samples are digested into peptides, and then peptides are separated and measured. However, in proteomics study, investigators are usually interested in the performance of the whole proteins instead of those peptide fragments. In light of meta-analysis, we propose an adaptive thresholding method to select informative peptides, and combine peptide-level models to protein-level analysis. Overall, the meta-analysis procedure and modeling rationale can be adapted to data analysis of other types of shotgun assays.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Space processing of composite materials

Materials and processes for the testing of aluminum-base fiber and particle composites, and of metal foams under extended-time low-g conditions were investigated. A wetting and dispersion technique was developed, based on the theory that under the absence of a gas phase all solids are wetted by liquids. The process is characterized by a high vacuum environment and a high temperature cycle. Successful wetting and dispersion experiments were carried out with sapphire fibers, whiskers and particles, and with fibers of silicon carbide, pyrolytic graphite and tungsten. The developed process and facilities permit the preparation of a precomposite which serves as sample material for flight experiments. Low-g processing consists then merely in the uniform redistribution of the reinforcements during a melting cycle. For the preparation of metal foams, gas generation by means of a thermally decomposing compound was found most adaptable to flight experiments. For flight experiments, the use of compacted mixture of the component materials limits low-g processing to a simple melt cycle.

Steurer, W. H.↗

Flight test experience with an adaptive control system using a maximum likelihood parameter estimation technique

The flight test performance of an adaptive control system for the F-8 DFBW aircraft is summarized. The adaptive system is based on explicit identification of surface effectiveness parameters which are used for gain scheduling in a command augmentation system. Performance of this control law under various design parameter variations is presented. These include variations in test signal level, sample rate, and identification channel structure. Flight performance closely matches analysis and simulation predictions from previous references.

Hartmann, G.↗

Iodine susceptibility of pseudomonads grown attached to stainless steel surfaces

Pseudomonads were adapted to grow in phosphate-buffered water and on stainless steel surfaces to study the iodine sensitivity of attached and planktonic cells. Cultures adapted to low nutrient growth were incubated at room temperature in a circulating reactor system with stainless steel coupons to allow biofilm formation on the metal surfaces. In some experiments, the reactor was partially emptied and refilled with buffer at each sampling time to simulate a "fill-and-draw" water system. Biofilms of attached bacteria, resuspended biofilm bacteria, and reactor suspension, were exposed to 1 mg l-1 iodine for 2 min. Attached bacterial populations which established on coupons within 3 to 5 days displayed a significant increase in resistance to iodine. Increased resistance was also observed for resuspended cells from the biofilm and planktonic bacteria in the system suspension. Generally, intact biofilms and resuspended biofilm cells were most resistant, followed by planktonic bacteria and phosphate buffer cultures. Thus, biofilm formation on stainless steel surfaces within water systems can result in significantly increased disinfection resistance of commonly-occurring water-borne bacteria that may enhance their ability to colonise water treatment and distribution systems.

NASA Program Environmental Health↗

The Mojave Desert: A Martian Analog Site for Future Astrobiology Themed Missions

Astrobiological interest in Mars is highlighted by evidence that Mars was once warm enough to have liquid water present on its surface long enough to create geologic formations that could only exist in the presense of extended fluvial periods. These periods existed at the same time life on Earth arose. If life began on Mars as well during this period, it is reasonable to assume it may have adapted to the subsurface as environments at the surface changed into the inhospitable state we find today. If the next series of Mars missions (Mars Science Laboratory, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter proposed for launch in 2016, and potential near surface sample return) fail to discover either extinct or extant life on Mars, a subsurface mission would be necessary to attempt to "close the book" on the existence of martian life. Mars is much colder and drier than Earth, with a very low pressure CO2 environment and no obvious habitats. Terrestrial regions with limited precipitation, and hence reduced active biota, are some of the best martian low to mid latitude analogs to be found on Earth, be they the Antarctic dry valleys, the Atacama or Mojave Deserts. The Mojave Desert/Death Valley region is considered a Mars analog site by the Terrestrial Analogs Panel of the NSF-sponsored decadal survey; a field guide was even developed and a workshop was held on its applicability as a Mars analog. This region has received a great deal of attention due to its accessibility and the variety of landforms and processes observed relevant to martian studies.

Mars analog sites↗

Accelerated Dimension-Independent Adaptive Metropolis

This work describes improvements from algorithmic and architectural means to black-box Bayesian inference over high-dimensional parameter spaces. The well-known adaptive Metropolis (AM) algorithm [33] is extended herein to scale asymptotically uniformly with respect to the underlying parameter dimension for Gaussian targets, by respecting the variance of the target. The resulting algorithm, referred to as the dimension-independent adaptive Metropolis (DIAM) algorithm, also shows improved performance with respect to adaptive Metropolis on non-Gaussian targets. This algorithm is further improved, and the possibility of probing high-dimensional (with dimension d 1000) targets is enabled, via GPU-accelerated numerical libraries and periodically synchronized concurrent chains (justi ed a posteriori). Asymptotically in dimension, this GPU implementation exhibits a factor of four improvement versus a competitive CPU-based Intel MKL parallel version alone. Strong scaling to concurrent chains is exhibited, through a combination of longer time per sample batch (weak scaling) and yet fewer necessary samples to convergence. The algorithm performance is illustrated on several Gaussian and non-Gaussian target examples, in which the dimension may be in excess of one thousand.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Glucuronidase Function in Clinical Samples

The purpose of this CRADA is to expand upon the work previously performed through CRADA No. PNNL/381. As explained in the previous CRADA, Glucuronidase enzymes are important for contributing to enterohepatic recycling of numerous therapeutic drug compounds, resulting in impaired or prolonged drug activity. Further, other pathways within the gut, such as bile acid metabolism through the action of bile salt hydrolase enzymes (BSH), have shown to impact both the development of colon cancers and impact recovery. Adapting the activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) technologies developed at PNNL to a microtiter plate-based chemical probe assay was the first step in demonstrating the clinical usability of the technology. With assay proof-of-concept complete through CRADA No. PNNL/381, clinical cohort testing using the developed assay is the next step towards commercialization of this technology. Some chemotherapeutic agents are mediated by gut-produced microbiota through enterohepatic circulation. For example, irinotecan, the first line treatment for many colon and other cancers, can be recycled into a patient’s system through gut microbiota produced glucuronidase enzymes. A significant percentage of patients subjected to irinotecan treatment experience dose-limiting diarrhea and gastric distress that limits treatment options and delays effective intervention. Relatedly, bile salt hydrolases modify ratios of bile acids in the gut, which alter nutrient and pharmaceutical uptake by the intestines and impact patient response to treatment. Coupled together these gut-mediated disorders can significantly decrease patient outcomes. In this project, we propose to investigate a clinical cohort of samples from colon cancer patients to better understand gut microbiome activities surrounding microbiota produced glucuronidases to aid clinician decisions and enhance therapeutic intervention. Our project will measure glucuronidase activity of individual patients and compare this activity to a variety of factors, including patient medical history, treatment response, and overall outcomes. Data will be compared with metagenomic, metabolomic, and proteomic analyses to fully defined the entire gut microbiome space and correlate results with the glucuronidase activity. Resultant analysis is expected to provide actionable information to direct decision making towards therapeutic intervention.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Minimized aging of isocyanurate-based rigid cellular foams for buildings through tailored barrier facers and optimized formulation

The thermal resistivity (h·ft 2 ·°F/Btu/in.) of closed-cell rigid foam insulation materials significantly decreases over time. Diffusion-tight facers are designed to significantly enhance initial thermal resistivity and long-term thermal performance by preventing gas diffusion into the foam cells and inhibiting the escape of low thermal conductivity blowing agents. In addition to the gas diffusion property of the facer film, adhesion between the foam and the facer is crucial for achieving diffusion-tight bonding. Here, this study addresses the challenge of thermal aging by investigating how facer film properties and foam formulation influence the durability of thermal performance. A systematic evaluation was conducted to understand the effects of polymeric barrier films, surface treatments, facer coverage, and foam matrix rigidity on thermal resistivity over time. Key findings reveal that diffusion-tight facers, particularly those with metallized layers and compatible heat seal layers, significantly reduce gas exchange and improve foam-facer adhesion. The optimized system, incorporating barrier facers and a tailored polyisocyanurate foam formulation, achieved initial and aged thermal resistivity values after 200 days of approximately 8.3 and 7.4 h ft 2 ·°F/Btu/in., respectively representing only a 10 % reduction compared to a 17 % reduction observed in control samples without facers. Notably, polyurethane spray foams with facers exhibited only a 4 % reduction in thermal resistivity, compared to a 23 % decrease in control samples, demonstrating nearly six times better retention of thermal performance. This innovative facer technology presents a promising solution for reducing energy costs and represents a significant advancement in optimizing energy management for building envelopes in future technologies. This technology can also be adapted for other applications that necessitate the preservation of long-term thermal performance.

Wanasinghe, Shiwanka Vidarshi [Oak Ridge National ↗

Reinforced dynamics for enhanced sampling in large atomic and molecular systems

A new approach for efficiently exploring the configuration space and computing the free energy of large atomic and molecular systems is proposed, motivated by an analogy with reinforcement learning. There are two major components in this new approach. Like metadynamics, it allows for an efficient exploration of the configuration space by adding an adaptively computed biasing potential to the original dynamics. Like deep reinforcement learning, this biasing potential is trained on the fly using deep neural networks, with data collected judiciously from the exploration and an uncertainty indicator from the neural network model playing the role of the reward function. Parameterization using neural networks makes it feasible to handle cases with a large set of collective variables. This has the potential advantage that selecting precisely the right set of collective variables has now become less critical for capturing the structural transformations of the system. Finally, the method is illustrated by studying the full-atom explicit solvent models of alanine dipeptide and tripeptide, as well as the system of a polyalanine-10 molecule with 20 collective variables.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

HIGH-SPEED IMAGING AND WAVEFRONT SENSING WITH AN INFRARED AVALANCHE PHOTODIODE ARRAY

Infrared avalanche photodiode (APD) arrays represent a panacea for many branches of astronomy by enabling extremely low-noise, high-speed, and even photon-counting measurements at near-infrared wavelengths. We recently demonstrated the use of an early engineering-grade infrared APD array that achieves a correlated double sampling read noise of 0.73 e{sup −} in the lab, and a total noise of 2.52 e{sup −} on sky, and supports simultaneous high-speed imaging and tip-tilt wavefront sensing with the Robo-AO visible-light laser adaptive optics (AO) system at the Palomar Observatory 1.5 m telescope. Here we report on the improved image quality simultaneously achieved at visible and infrared wavelengths by using the array as part of an image stabilization control loop with AO-sharpened guide stars. We also discuss a newly enabled survey of nearby late M-dwarf multiplicity, as well as future uses of this technology in other AO and high-contrast imaging applications.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Post-composing ontology terms for efficient phenotyping in plant breeding

Abstract Ontologies are widely used in databases to standardize data, improving data quality, integration, and ease of comparison. Within ontologies tailored to diverse use cases, post-composing user-defined terms reconciles the demands for standardization on the one hand and flexibility on the other. In many instances of Breedbase, a digital ecosystem for plant breeding designed for genomic selection, the goal is to capture phenotypic data using highly curated and rigorous crop ontologies, while adapting to the specific requirements of plant breeders to record data quickly and efficiently. For example, post-composing enables users to tailor ontology terms to suit specific and granular use cases such as repeated measurements on different plant parts and special sample preparation techniques. To achieve this, we have implemented a post-composing tool based on orthogonal ontologies providing users with the ability to introduce additional levels of phenotyping granularity tailored to unique experimental designs. Post-composed terms are designed to be reused by all breeding programs within a Breedbase instance but are not exported to the crop reference ontologies. Breedbase users can post-compose terms across various categories, such as plant anatomy, treatments, temporal events, and breeding cycles, and, as a result, generate highly specific terms for more accurate phenotyping.

Mathematical & Computational Biology↗

Cross-Domain Recognition by Identifying Joint Subspaces of Source Domain and Target Domain

This paper introduces here a new method to solve the cross-domain recognition problem. Different from the traditional domain adaption methods which rely on a global domain shift for all classes between the source and target domains, the proposed method is more flexible to capture individual class variations across domains. By adopting a natural and widely used assumption that the data samples from the same class should lay on an intrinsic low-dimensional subspace, even if they come from different domains, the proposed method circumvents the limitation of the global domain shift, and solves the cross-domain recognition by finding the joint subspaces of the source and target domains. Specifically, given labeled samples in the source domain, we construct a subspace for each of the classes. Then we construct subspaces in the target domain, called anchor subspaces, by collecting unlabeled samples that are close to each other and are highly likely to belong to the same class. The corresponding class label is then assigned by minimizing a cost function which reflects the overlap and topological structure consistency between subspaces across the source and target domains, and within the anchor subspaces, respectively. We further combine the anchor subspaces to the corresponding source subspaces to construct the joint subspaces. Subsequently, one-versus-rest support vector machine classifiers are trained using the data samples belonging to the same joint subspaces and applied to unlabeled data in the target domain. We evaluate the proposed method on two widely used datasets: 1) object recognition dataset for computer vision tasks and 2) sentiment classification dataset for natural language processing tasks. Comparison results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the comparison methods on both datasets.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Use of adaptive walls in 2D tests

A new method for computing the wall effects gives precise answers to some questions arising in adaptive wall concept applications: length of adapted regions, fairings with up and downstream regions, residual misadjustments effects, reference conditions. The acceleration of the iterative process convergence and the development of an efficient technology used in CERT T2 wind tunnels give in a single run the required test conditions. Samples taken from CAST 7 tests demonstrate the efficiency of the whole process to obtain significant results with considerations of tridimensional case extension.

Archambaud, J. P.↗

A sampling procedure to guide the collection of narrow-band, high-resolution spatially and spectrally representative reflectance data

A multistage sampling procedure using image processing, geographical information systems, and analytical photogrammetry is presented which can be used to guide the collection of representative, high-resolution spectra and discrete reflectance targets for future satellite sensors. The procedure is general and can be adapted to characterize areas as small as minor watersheds and as large as multistate regions. Beginning with a user-determined study area, successive reductions in size and spectral variation are performed using image analysis techniques on data from the Multispectral Scanner, orbital and simulated Thematic Mapper, low altitude photography synchronized with the simulator, and associated digital data. An integrated image-based geographical information system supports processing requirements.

Brand, R. R.↗