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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 1,315 records · Page 73
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2013

New Whole-House Solutions Case Study: Affordable Cold Climate Infill Housing with Hybrid Insulation Approach, Wyandotte, Michigan

Even builders who are relatively new to energy-efficient construction can consistently reach a target whole house airtightness of 1.5 air changes per hour at 50 Pascals (ACH50) with high R-value enclosures that use a hybrid insulation approach. In 2010, the City of Wyandotte, Michigan, started construction to build affordable, energy-efficient homes on lots in existing neighborhoods. A goal was to engage local builders in energy-efficient construction and be able to deliver the new houses for less than $100/ft2. By the end of 2012, approximately 25 new houses were built by five local builders under this program. To help builders consistently achieve the airtightness target, a local architect worked with researchers from Building Science Corporation, a Building America team, to develop a technology specification with several key pieces. A high R-value wall and roof assembly made use of 2 ×6 advanced framing and a hybrid insulation approach that included insulating sheathing to control thermal bridging and closed cell spray polyurethane foam insulation (ccSPF) for its airtightness and vapor control benefits. This approach allows the air barrier to be completed and tested before any finishing work occurs, ensuring that problems are spotted and corrected early in the construction process.

BSC↗
DOE OSTI2016

A Window into Longer Lasting Batteries

There’s a new tool in the push to engineer rechargeable batteries that last longer and charge more quickly. An X-ray microscopy technique recently developed at Berkeley Lab has given scientists the ability to image nanoscale changes inside lithium-ion battery particles as they charge and discharge. The real-time images provide a new way to learn how batteries work, and how to improve them. The method was developed at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, by a team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Berkeley Lab, Stanford University, and other institutions.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2019

The National Energy Technology Laboratory’s New Unit Process Template Design - LCAXIX

This work was presented at the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment 2019 Conference (LCAXIX) in Tucson, AZ on September 25, 2019. The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) maintains a large unit process (UP) library which holds all documentation for each unit process created by the NETL Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) team. Each NETL unit process includes a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing calculations and an accompanying PDF, which thoroughly documents the calculations, parameters, and underlying reasoning and assumptions contained in the Excel file. However, as more and larger public data sources become available, the NETL LCA team has incorporated more data science techniques into their unit process development. NETL is demonstrating a new template which will allow for more flexible and advanced calculation and documentation methods. The new template will support NETL’s dedication to transparency by continuing to provide all information necessary to replicate the UPs.

Krynock, Michelle↗
NASA NTRS1999

Spacecraft Software Maintenance: An Effective Approach to Reducing Costs and Increasing Science Return

Flight software is a mission critical element of spacecraft functionality and performance. When ground operations personnel interface to a spacecraft, they are typically dealing almost entirely with the capabilities of onboard software. This software, even more than critical ground/flight communications systems, is expected to perform perfectly during all phases of spacecraft life. Due to the fact that it can be reprogrammed on-orbit to accommodate degradations or failures in flight hardware, new insights into spacecraft characteristics, new control options which permit enhanced science options, etc., the on- orbit flight software maintenance team is usually significantly responsible for the long term success of a science mission. Failure of flight software to perform as needed can result in very expensive operations work-around costs and lost science opportunities. There are three basic approaches to maintaining spacecraft software--namely using the original developers, using the mission operations personnel, or assembling a center of excellence for multi-spacecraft software maintenance. Not planning properly for flight software maintenance can lead to unnecessarily high on-orbit costs and/or unacceptably long delays, or errors, in patch installations. A common approach for flight software maintenance is to access the original development staff. The argument for utilizing the development staff is that the people who developed the software will be the best people to modify the software on-orbit. However, it can quickly becomes a challenge to obtain the services of these key people. They may no longer be available to the organization. They may have a more urgent job to perform, quite likely on another project under different project management. If they havn't worked on the software for a long time, they may need precious time for refamiliarization to the software, testbeds and tools. Further, a lack of insight into issues related to flight software in its on-orbit environment, may find the developer unprepared for the challenges. The second approach is to train a member of the flight operations team to maintain the spacecraft software. This can prove to be a costly and inflexible solution. The person assigned to this duty may not have enough work to do during a problem free period and may have too much to do when a problem arises. If the person is a talented software engineer, he/she may not enjoy the limited software opportunities available in this position; and may eventually leave for newer technology computer science opportunities. Training replacement flight software personnel can be a difficult and lengthy process. The third approach is to assemble a center of excellence for on-orbit spacecraft software maintenance. Personnel in this specialty center can be managed to support flight software of multiple missions at once. The variety of challenges among a set of on-orbit missions, can result in a dedicated, talented staff which is fully trained and available to support each mission's needs. Such staff are not software developers but are rather spacecraft software systems engineers. The cost to any one mission is extremely low because the software staff works and charges, minimally on missions with no current operations issues; and their professional insight into on-orbit software troubleshooting and maintenance methods ensures low risk, effective and minimal-cost solutions to on-orbit issues.

Shell, Elaine M.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Identification and Classification of Common Risks in Space Science Missions

Due to the highly constrained schedules and budgets that NASA missions must contend with, the identification and management of cost, schedule and risks in the earliest stages of the lifecycle is critical. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) it is the concurrent engineering teams that first address these items in a systematic manner. Foremost of these concurrent engineering teams is Team X. Started in 1995, Team X has carried out over 1000 studies, dramatically reducing the time and cost involved, and has been the model for other concurrent engineering teams both within NASA and throughout the larger aerospace community. The ability to do integrated risk identification and assessment was first introduced into Team X in 2001. Since that time the mission risks identified in each study have been kept in a database. In this paper we will describe how the Team X risk process is evolving highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. The paper will especially focus on the identification and classification of common risks that have arisen during Team X studies of space based science missions.

Risk Identification↗
DOE OSTI2021

FY21 NNSA-IAEC Science Area V, Environmental ISR, Waste Management and Subsurface Science (Final Report)

The FY21 NNSA NA-22 Final Report represents the progress achieved over the past year (FY21) by the research team for Topic Area 3, Waste Management & Subsurface Science (WM3), and Topic Area 7, Radiation and Thermal Effects on Bituminous Rocks (WM7). WM3 and WM7 are part of Science Area V (Subsurface Science and Waste Management) in the NNSA-IAEC Science and Technology Working Group. The project was initiated four years ago (2017) with an MOU agreement between the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) to evaluate the feasibility of geological subsurface disposal of radioactive waste in Israel. The core WM3 and WM7 teams are comprised of scientists and engineers from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Geologic Survey of Israel (GSI), and the Nuclear Research Center - Negev (NRCN), with a close collaboration to the teams from Sandia National Laboratory (SNL) and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2015

UWBG GC EAB Report

The EAB commends the UWBG GC team for its noteworthy progress in the first year of a bold, high-risk LDRD project. The board remains unaware of any comparable effort in the U.S., and the project clearly benefits mission needs relevant to Sandia and the Nation. The GC goals remain ambitious and potentially transformative. The GC team presented development of world-class science and technology (S&T) capabilities as well as a promising vertical diode prototype demonstration. The board applauds the GC team for increased engagements leading to spinoff work with Sandia’s nuclear weapons (NW) customer and enhanced awareness of Sandia’s unique value proposition with external collaborators and potential end-users.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Bhutan Agriculture II: Creating a Graphical User Interface, Crop Mask, and Data Collection Protocol for Analysis of Rice Crop in Bhutan Using Remotely Sensed Data

Agriculture is an important sector in Bhutan, accounting for 19.63% of Bhutan’s GDP in 2020 (World Bank) while also providing livelihoods for approximately 57% of the population (World Bank, 2017). The Department of Agriculture (DoA) in Bhutan still relies on in-field reporting for crop monitoring, which is time-consuming and labour intensive. To promote efficiency in these efforts, the team partnered with the DoA, the Bhutan Foundation, and the Ugyen Wangchuck Institute of Conservation and Environmental Research (UWICER). The team, with the help of the science advisors from NASA SERVIR, expanded the crop mask created in the previous term to the whole country of Bhutan and streamlined the sampling protocols for applicability to any available crop data. The team also created a graphical user interface (GUI) which provided a visual representation of current trends and rice distribution across Bhutan. The team utilized NASA Earth observations, including Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM), Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), as well as other Earth observations including Sentinel-1 C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (C-SAR). This project refined the previous term’s methodology to help supplement crop monitoring and increase the frequency of data collected to aid decision-making processes with the use of remote sensing data.

Wangdrak Dorji​↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Lunar Instrument Data Integration Into the Virtual Reality Mission Simulation System for Decision Communication and Situational Awareness

In situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies are a key advancement required to make human habitation on the Moon and Mars viable. The upcoming Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission will provide crucial correlations between volatiles and lunar geology to understand the water content available for ISRU on the moon. The mission will require the coordination of multi-disciplinary teams across the country making real time decisions based on rover instrument data. The virtual reality Mission Simulation System (vMSS) is a virtual reality platform designed at MIT by the Resource Exploration and Science of our Cosmic Environment (RESOURCE) team to provide teams with a collaboration interface for planetary missions like VIPER. Herein we determine the integration pathway for analog based datasets that are examples of VIPER's two main instruments, the near-infrared volatile spectrometer subsystem (NIRVSS) and the neutron spectrometer subsystem (NSS), into vMSS to provide the most valuable visualization tools. Focusing on improving situational awareness, decision making, reducing task load and incorporating comments from scientists working previous analogs and on the current VIPER mission, we recommend critical elements to implement into vMSS and the best approaches for data visualization. We present a review of relevant analogs and state of the art mission software. We have developed a design concept and path to flight of analysed instrument data integrated with data maps that allow for virtual manipulation and annotation between non-co-located team members. We focus on pre-mission mapping of a priori data for improved situational awareness, layering of analysed instrument data, correlative mapping and interactive capabilities for in-mission decision making, as well as archiving and annotation tools for post-mission analysis. Finally, we lay out the roadmap for the future development of immersive sample site visualization capabilities and the use of integrated instrument data in vMSS with automated temporal and geospatial planning.

Cody Alison Paige↗
DOE OSTI2024

Wind Energy Instrumentation Development Roadmap

The current instrumentation for observing the complex flow fields in and around wind plants struggles to match the fidelity of existing simulation tools. As a result, these measurement limitations create a hurdle for validating and assessing the quality of the wind plant numerical models. This roadmap for instrumentation development recommendations was created to offer guidance on narrowing the gap between measurement and simulation fidelity. A process was established to identify where gaps in instrumentation exist for wind energy test campaigns by analyzing the capabilities of instrumentation for capturing the various important phenomena at the necessary resolution for both the science goal and validation objectives. To this end, a multi-disciplinary team of experts on instrumentation, wind energy, and atmospheric science was assembled to identify these significant instrumentation needs. A recommendation for instrumentation to be developed is provided, and the framework developed through this process is expected to be useful to the design of future test campaigns. The mapping tools developed for this process will be distributed as part of a future International Energy Agency Wind Technology Collaboration Program task on instrumentation development.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
NASA NTRS2018

Analysis and Review of NASA Earth Science Metadata: How Automation Plays a Role

The Analysis and Review of the Common Metadata Repository (CMR ARC) Team reviews all EOSDIS metadata. The team’s objective is to achieve consistency, correctness, and completeness for all metadata records in the CMR, as well as improve the discoverability of NASA's Earth Science data within the CMR framework. This work is currently being completed at Marshall Space Flight Center. CMR makes a single discovery point possible for NASA's Earth Science data users. The CMR team, in collaboration with three other core metadata teams, contributes to the stewardship of NASA's Earth Science data through a process of continual curation and the ongoing development of the Unified Metadata Model (UMM). A key tool now used in the curation process, referred to as the NASA CMR Dashboard, is an online curation dashboard developed in collaboration with software development company, Element 84. This tool facilitates the review of Earth Science metadata records and subsequent stakeholder collaboration on the resolution of identified issues. A key capability of the new tool is a suite of automated compliance checks written in Python 3.6 that verify the integrity of various metadata elements across multiple standards.

Staton, Patrick↗
NASA NTRS2000

Planning and Processing Space Science Observations Using NASA's SPICE System

The Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) team, acting under the directions of NASA's Office of Space Science, has built a data system-named SPICE, to assist scientists in planning and interpreting scientific observations from space-borne instruments. The principal objective of this data system is that it will provide geometric and other ancillary data used to plan space science missions and subsequently recover the full value of science instrument data returned from these missions, including correlation of individual instrument data sets with data from other instruments on the same or other spacecraft. SPICE is also used to support a host of mission engineering functions, such as telecommunications system analysis and operation of NASA's Deep Space Network antennas. This paper describes the SPICE system, including where and how it is used. It also touches on possibilities for further development and invites participation it this endeavor.

Acton, Charles H.↗
DOE OSTI2014

Combustion Science for Cleaner Fuels

Musahid Ahmed discusses how he and his team use the Advanced Light Source (ALS) to study combustion chemistry at our '8 Big Ideas' Science at the Theater event on October 8th, 2014, in Oakland, California.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
NASA NTRS2019

Planetary Protection Technologies for Planetary Science Instruments, Spacecraft, and Missions: Report of the NASA Planetary Protection Technology Definition Team (PPTDT)

Planetary bodies like Mars, Europa, and Enceladus pose the question, "How to study them without contaminating them and destroying future prospects to detect life, if it is there?" The natural trade-off, of course, is that the cleaner your spacecraft, the more you can explore such a body without risk of contaminating it. As chartered by NASA Headquarters, the Planetary Protection Technology Definition Team (PPTDT) was asked to provide a report covering six different areas related to the engineering and technology challenges of implementing planetary protection requirements on solar system exploration missions, including: Assessment of technical and engineering challenges to applying available microbial-reduction methods, including recontamination prevention, to spacecraft hardware and instruments, to meet current NASA requirements on preventing the forward contamination of potentially habitable worlds by future spacecraft missions (orbiters, atmospheric missions, landers, penetrators, and drills); Identification of spacecraft and instrument materials known to be compatible with existing planetary protection protocols; Planetary protection protocols/processes available or which appear promising, and areas ripe for technological development; The technical and engineering challenges in ensuring that spacecraft hardware and instruments can meet organic cleanliness requirements needed to ensure high confidence in differentiating Earth contamination from extraterrestrial signals to avoid false negative as well as false positive results; Approaches for mitigating the identified challenges that would allow instruments to be flown successfully at the required levels of cleanliness and microbial reduction, beginning with identification of commonly used materials and spacecraft hardware that are compatible (or particularly vulnerable) to planetary protection protocols; Engineering, technology, and scientific research and development that could be funded by NASA to provide future capabilities to field scientific instruments and spacecraft on missions that require either subsystem or system-level microbial reduction and recontamination prevention.

John D. Rummel↗
DOE OSTI2017

Complexity Science: A Mechanism for Strategic Foresight and Resiliency in National Security Decision-Making.

Most national policy decisions are complex with a variety of stakeholders, disparate interests and the potential for unintended consequences. While a number of analytical tools exist to help decision makers sort through the mountains of data and myriad of options, decision support teams are increasingly turning to complexity science for improved analysis and better insight into the potential impact of policy decisions. While complexity science has great potential, it has only proven useful in limited case s and when properly applied. In advance of more widespread use, a national - level effort to refine complexity science and more rigorously establish its technical underpinnings is recommended.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1998

SOHO Mission Interruption Joint NASA/ESA Investigation Board

Contact with the SOlar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft was lost in the early morning hours of June 25, 1998, Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), during a planned period of calibrations, maneuvers, and spacecraft reconfigurations. Prior to this the SOHO operations team had concluded two years of extremely successful science operations. A joint European Space Agency (ESA)/National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) engineering team has been planning and executing recovery efforts since loss of contact with some success to date. ESA and NASA management established the SOHO Mission Interruption Joint Investigation Board to determine the actual or probable cause(s) of the SOHO spacecraft mishap. The Board has concluded that there were no anomalies on-board the SOHO spacecraft but that a number of ground errors led to the major loss of attitude experienced by the spacecraft. The Board finds that the loss of the SOHO spacecraft was a direct result of operational errors, a failure to adequately monitor spacecraft status, and an erroneous decision which disabled part of the on-board autonomous failure detection. Further, following the occurrence of the emergency situation, the Board finds that insufficient time was taken by the operations team to fully assess the spacecraft status prior to initiating recovery operations. The Board discovered that a number of factors contributed to the circumstances that allowed the direct causes to occur. The Board strongly recommends that the two Agencies proceed immediately with a comprehensive review of SOHO operations addressing issues in the ground procedures, procedure implementation, management structure and process, and ground systems. This review process should be completed and process improvements initiated prior to the resumption of SOHO normal operations.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2015

The Social Science and Engineering of Research Practice.

The verdict is in: the methods of science can significantly enhance the effectiveness of creative teams. Just ask employers like Google and Facebook who are applying ideas from the social sciences to improve the performance of their organizations.1 Over the last few decades, social scientists, including psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, have made important strides in developing a scientific understanding of how creative individuals and creative communities operate.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗