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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 1,297 records · Page 72

NASA Tech Briefs, May 1989

This issue contains a special feature on the flight station of the future, discussing future enhancements to Aircraft cockpits. Topics include: Electronic Components and Circuits. Electronic Systems, Physical Sciences, Materials, Computer Programs, Mechanics, Machinery, Fabrication Technology, and Mathematics and Information Sciences.

Source record↗

NASA Tech Briefs, November 1991

Topics include: Electronic Components & and Circuits. Electronic Systems, Physical Sciences, Materials, Computer Programs, Mechanics, Machinery, Fabrication Technology, and Mathematics and Information Sciences,

Source record↗

Large-scale experimental validation of thermochemical water-splitting oxides discovered by defect graph neural networks

Thermochemical water-splitting (TCH) based on 2-step thermal redox cycles in metal oxides is a promising approach to generating H 2 , but state-of-the-art (SOTA) CeO 2 has several practical limitations, which has motivated continued materials discovery efforts in this field. Here, in this study, we improve upon a SOTA defect graph neural network (dGNN) surrogate model's oxygen vacancy predictions and combine them with materials project phase diagrams to down-select and discover structurally diverse, experimentally known metal oxides whose TCH performance was previously unknown. Amongst twelve candidates selected based on our high-throughput screening and down-selection criteria, we achieved ∼80% accuracy in identifying materials with stable redox cycling and hydrogen production in stagnation flow reactor water-splitting experiments. Closer to 100% accuracy can be achieved if higher-accuracy, hybrid DFT-predicted vacancy formation energies were computed and used in lieu of the most uncertain dGNN-based screening predictions, as they correct false positives to true negatives. Notably, two discovered candidates, Sr 3 PrMn 2 O 8 and Ba 2 Fe 2 O 5 , display hydrogen yields greater than CeO 2 under specific redox conditions. In conclusion, these results demonstrate our ability to computationally predict and experimentally validate promising candidate TCH materials that have the potential to compete with CeO 2 .

08 HYDROGEN↗

The hierarchical growth of bright central galaxies and intracluster light as traced by the magnitude gap

Using a sample of 2800 galaxy clusters identified in the Dark Energy Survey across the redshift range 0.20 < z < 0.60, we characterize the hierarchical assembly of bright central galaxies (BCGs) and the surrounding intracluster light (ICL). To quantify hierarchical formation we use the stellar mass–halo mass (SMHM) relation, comparing the halo mass, estimated via the mass–richness relation, to the stellar mass within the BCG + ICL system. Moreover, we incorporate the magnitude gap (M14), the difference in brightness between the BCG (measured within 30 kpc) and fourth brightest cluster member galaxy within 0.5 $R_{200,c}$, as a third parameter in this linear relation. The inclusion of M14, which traces BCG hierarchical growth, increases the slope and decreases the intrinsic scatter, highlighting that it is a latent variable within the BCG + ICL SMHM relation. Moreover, the correlation with M14 decreases at large radii. However, the stellar light within the BCG + ICL transition region (30 –80 kpc) most strongly correlates with halo mass and has a statistically significant correlation with M14. Since the transition region and M14 are independent measurements, the transition region may grow due to the BCG’s hierarchical formation. Additionally, as M14 and ICL result from hierarchical growth, we use a stacked sample and find that clusters with large M14 values are characterized by larger ICL and BCG + ICL fractions, which illustrates that the merger processes that build the BCG stellar mass also grow the ICL. Furthermore, this may suggest that M14 combined with the ICL fraction can identify dynamically relaxed clusters.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Modeling Data Flows with Network Calculus in Cyber-Physical Systems: Enabling Feature Analysis for Anomaly Detection Applications

The electric grid is becoming increasingly cyber-physical with the addition of smart technologies, new communication interfaces, and automated grid-support functions. Because of this, it is no longer sufficient to only study the physical system dynamics, but the cyber system must also be monitored as well to examine cyber-physical interactions and effects on the overall system. To address this gap for both operational and security needs, cyber-physical situational awareness is needed to monitor the system to detect any faults or malicious activity. Techniques and models to understand the physical system (the power system operation) exist, but methods to study the cyber system are needed, which can assist in understanding how the network traffic and changes to network conditions affect applications such as data analysis, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and anomaly detection. In this paper, we examine and develop models of data flows in communication networks of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and explore how network calculus can be utilized to develop those models for CPSs, with a focus on anomaly and intrusion detection. This provides a foundation for methods to examine how changes to behavior in the CPS can be modeled and for investigating cyber effects in CPSs in anomaly detection applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Magnetohydrodynamics with physics informed neural operators

Abstract The modeling of multi-scale and multi-physics complex systems typically involves the use of scientific software that can optimally leverage extreme scale computing. Despite major developments in recent years, these simulations continue to be computationally intensive and time consuming. Here we explore the use of AI to accelerate the modeling of complex systems at a fraction of the computational cost of classical methods, and present the first application of physics informed neural operators (NOs) (PINOs) to model 2D incompressible magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations. Our AI models incorporate tensor Fourier NOs as their backbone, which we implemented with the TensorLY package. Our results indicate that PINOs can accurately capture the physics of MHD simulations that describe laminar flows with Reynolds numbers Re ⩽ 250 . We also explore the applicability of our AI surrogates for turbulent flows, and discuss a variety of methodologies that may be incorporated in future work to create AI models that provide a computationally efficient and high fidelity description of MHD simulations for a broad range of Reynolds numbers. The scientific software developed in this project is released with this manuscript.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Static Subspace Approximation for Random Phase Approximation Correlation Energies: Implementation and Performance

Developing theoretical understanding of complex reactions and processes at interfaces requires using methods that go beyond semilocal density functional theory to accurately describe the interactions between solvent, reactants and substrates. Methods based on many-body perturbation theory, such as the random phase approximation (RPA), have previously been limited due to their computational complexity. However, this is now a surmountable barrier due to the advances in computational power available, in particular through modern GPU-based supercomputers. In this work, we describe the implementation of RPA calculations within BerkeleyGW and show its favorable computational performance on large complex systems relevant for catalysis and electrochemistry applications. Our implementation builds off of the static subspace approximation which, by employing a compressed representation of the frequency dependent polarizability, enables the evaluation of the RPA correlation energy with significant acceleration and systematically controllable accuracy. We find that the computational cost of calculating the RPA correlation energy scales only linearly with system size for systems containing up to 50 thousand bands, and is expected to scale quadratically thereafter. We also show excellent strong scaling results across several supercomputers, demonstrating the performance and portability of this implementation.

algorithmic development↗

SYMBA: symbolic computation of squared amplitudes in high energy physics with machine learning

The cross section is one of the most important physical quantities in high-energy physics and the most time consuming to compute. While machine learning has proven to be highly successful in numerical calculations in high-energy physics, analytical calculations using machine learning are still in their infancy. In this work, we use a sequence-to-sequence model, specifically, a transformer, to compute a key element of the cross section calculation, namely, the squared amplitude of an interaction. We show that a transformer model is able to predict correctly 97.6% and 99% of squared amplitudes of quantum chromodynamics and quantum electrodynamics processes, respectively, at a speed that is up to orders of magnitude faster than current symbolic computation frameworks. We discuss the performance of the current model, its limitations and possible future directions for this work.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Space-Split Algorithm for Sensitivity Analysis of Discrete Chaotic Systems With Multidimensional Unstable Manifolds

Accurate approximations of the change of a system's output and its statistics with respect to the input are highly desired in computational dynamics. Ruelle's linear response theory provides breakthrough mathematical machinery for computing the linear response of chaotic dynamical systems. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for sensitivity analysis of discrete chaos with an arbitrary number of positive Lyapunov exponents. We combine the concept of perturbation space-splitting, which regularizes Ruelle's original expression, together with measure-based parameterization of the expanding subspace. We use these tools to rigorously derive trajectory-following recursive relations that converge exponentially fast, and construct a memory-efficient Monte Carlo scheme for derivatives of the output statistics. Thanks to the regularization and lack of simplifying assumptions on the system's behavior, our method is immune to the common problems of other popular methods such as the exploding tangent solutions and unphysical shadowing directions. Here, we provide a ready-to-use algorithm, analyze its complexity, and demonstrate several numerical examples of sensitivity computation using physically-inspired low-dimensional systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Physics-informed machine learning of the correlation functions in bulk fluids

The Ornstein–Zernike (OZ) equation is the fundamental equation for pair correlation function computations in the modern integral equation theory for liquids. In this work, machine learning models, notably physics-informed neural networks and physics-informed neural operator networks, are explored to solve the OZ equation. The physics-informed machine learning models demonstrate great accuracy and high efficiency in solving the forward and inverse OZ problems of various bulk fluids. The results highlight the significant potential of physics-informed machine learning for applications in thermodynamic state theory.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Leveraging graph clustering techniques for cyber‐physical system analysis to enhance disturbance characterisation

Abstract Cyber‐physical systems have behaviour that crosses domain boundaries during events such as planned operational changes and malicious disturbances. Traditionally, the cyber and physical systems are monitored separately and use very different toolsets and analysis paradigms. The security and privacy of these cyber‐physical systems requires improved understanding of the combined cyber‐physical system behaviour and methods for holistic analysis. Therefore, the authors propose leveraging clustering techniques on cyber‐physical data from smart grid systems to analyse differences and similarities in behaviour during cyber‐, physical‐, and cyber‐physical disturbances. Since clustering methods are commonly used in data science to examine statistical similarities in order to sort large datasets, these algorithms can assist in identifying useful relationships in cyber‐physical systems. Through this analysis, deeper insights can be shared with decision‐makers on what cyber and physical components are strongly or weakly linked, what cyber‐physical pathways are most traversed, and the criticality of certain cyber‐physical nodes or edges. This paper presents several types of clustering methods for cyber‐physical graphs of smart grid systems and their application in assessing different types of disturbances for informing cyber‐physical situational awareness. The collection of these clustering techniques provide a foundational basis for cyber‐physical graph interdependency analysis.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Operational and Mission Highlights: A Monthly Summary of Top Achievements September 2021

Laboratory personnel working on a years-long Confinement Vessel Disposition (CVD) Project at the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research (CMR) facility recently shipped its first vessel after closing the emptying and dispositioning portion of the project in 2020. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Laboratory conducted experiments that produced data used in computer modeling. Scientists used these models to evaluate the performance of nuclear weapons.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Quantum reservoir computing implementation on coherently coupled quantum oscillators

Quantum reservoir computing is a promising approach for quantum neural networks, capable of solving hard learning tasks on both classical and quantum input data. However, current approaches with qubits suffer from limited connectivity. We propose an implementation for quantum reservoir that obtains a large number of densely connected neurons by using parametrically coupled quantum oscillators instead of physically coupled qubits. We analyze a specific hardware implementation based on superconducting circuits: with just two coupled quantum oscillators, we create a quantum reservoir comprising up to 81 neurons. We obtain state-of-the-art accuracy of 99% on benchmark tasks that otherwise require at least 24 classical oscillators to be solved. Our results give the coupling and dissipation requirements in the system and show how they affect the performance of the quantum reservoir. Beyond quantum reservoir computing, the use of parametrically coupled bosonic modes holds promise for realizing large quantum neural network architectures, with billions of neurons implemented with only 10 coupled quantum oscillators.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Recipes for when physics fails: recovering robust learning of physics informed neural networks

Abstract Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have been shown to be effective in solving partial differential equations by capturing the physics induced constraints as a part of the training loss function. This paper shows that a PINN can be sensitive to errors in training data and overfit itself in dynamically propagating these errors over the domain of the solution of the PDE. It also shows how physical regularizations based on continuity criteria and conservation laws fail to address this issue and rather introduce problems of their own causing the deep network to converge to a physics-obeying local minimum instead of the global minimum. We introduce Gaussian process (GP) based smoothing that recovers the performance of a PINN and promises a robust architecture against noise/errors in measurements. Additionally, we illustrate an inexpensive method of quantifying the evolution of uncertainty based on the variance estimation of GPs on boundary data. Robust PINN performance is also shown to be achievable by choice of sparse sets of inducing points based on sparsely induced GPs. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed methods and compare the results from existing benchmark models in literature for time-dependent Schrödinger and Burgers’ equations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for PDE-Constrained Optimization and Control

The goal of optimal control is to determine a sequence of inputs for maximizing or minimizing a given performance criterion subject to the dynamics and constraints of the system under observation. This work introduces Control Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), which simultaneously learn both the system states and the optimal control signal in a single-stage framework that leverages the system’s underlying physical laws. While prior approaches often follow a two-stage process-modeling, the system first and then devising its control—the presented novel framework embeds the necessary optimality conditions directly into the network architecture and loss function. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the novel methodology by solving various open-loop optimal control problems governed by analytical, one-dimensional, and two-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Quantifying local and global mass balance errors in physics-informed neural networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINN) have recently become attractive for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) that describe physics laws. By including PDE-based loss functions, physics laws such as mass balance are enforced softly in PINN. This paper investigates how mass balance constraints are satisfied when PINN is used to solve the resulting PDEs. We investigate PINN’s ability to solve the 1D saturated groundwater flow equations (diffusion equations) for homogeneous and heterogeneous media and evaluate the local and global mass balance errors. We compare the obtained PINN’s solution and associated mass balance errors against a two-point finite volume numerical method and the corresponding analytical solution. We also evaluate the accuracy of PINN in solving the 1D saturated groundwater flow equation with and without incorporating hydraulic heads as training data. We demonstrate that PINN’s local and global mass balance errors are significant compared to the finite volume approach. Tuning the PINN’s hyperparameters, such as the number of collocation points, training data, hidden layers, nodes, epochs, and learning rate, did not improve the solution accuracy or the mass balance errors compared to the finite volume solution. Mass balance errors could considerably challenge the utility of PINN in applications where ensuring compliance with physical and mathematical properties is crucial.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗