Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Field Procedures”

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 1,333 records · Page 74

Spectral induced polarization (SIP) measurements across a PFAS-contaminated source zone

There is a pressing need for the development of field-scale, in situ screening technologies for assessing variations in aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) concentrations in soils at former fire training and storage sites. Field-scale Spectral Induced Polarization (SIP) geophysical measurements were acquired on a transect crossing an AFFF source zone. Soil samples were acquired from ten locations and used to determine variations in poly- and per-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) concentrations in soils and soil texture. These samples were also used to create triplicate soil columns for laboratory-grade SIP measurements. Field and laboratory observations provide evidence that SIP measurements are sensitive to the concentration of AFFF constituents associated with the pore surface in soils. The phase of the SIP measurements on the laboratory samples was linearly correlated with total soil-sorbed PFAS concentration. The phase from the field SIP measurements was highest over the location of maximum PFAS concentration measured on the laboratory samples, although a significant correlation between field-measured phase and laboratory-measured total PFAS concentration was not established. The sensitivity of the SIP response to the removal of soil PFAS using a methanol wash procedure (total PFAS concentration drop of 366 ppb) adds evidence for the case for SIP characterization of AFFF source zones. The results of these studies suggest that SIP might be developed into a field-scale technology for rapid, indirect assessment of AFFF source zones. Such a technology could improve the effectiveness of AFFF source zone characterization at reduced costs.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Artifact-Free Coring Procedures for Removing Samples from Photovoltaic Modules for Microscopic Analysis

An important step in producing more reliable and efficient photovoltaic modules is to establish a relationship between the microscopic properties of modules deployed in the field for many years and efficiency-related parameters. The first step in accomplishing this task is to be able to identify and remove small areas from these modules without causing any damage to these samples. In this work, we will describe two different procedures to core small areas of deployed and stressed solar panels produced with different materials (Si, CIGS, and CdTe), and we will prove that these processes did not damage the cored material. We will also show that the coring procedure changes for different types of photovoltaic modules.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Nasa Records Disposition Handbook: Procedures Governing the Retention, Retirement, and Destruction of Agency Records

This handbook sets forth the disposition of official records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Its provisions are applicable to NASA Headquarters and all field installations. This revised edition has been enlarged in scope and re-titled to provide guidance in all aspects of records retirements, transfers, destruction, and retrievals from Federal Records Centers. New records control schedules have been added and others revised. Also included are procedures for making recommendations for improved coverage of records categories by additions or revisions. The NASA Records Control Schedules are issued under authority of the NASA Records Management Officer in accordance with Section 101-11.406, Federal Property Management Regulations. They were approved for NASA use by the National Archives and Records Service, the General Accounting Office, and by the Joint Committee on the Disposition of Executive Papers, U.S. Congress.

Source record↗

Geologic analysis of averaged magnetic satellite anomalies

To investigate relative advantages and limitations for quantitative geologic analysis of magnetic satellite scalar anomalies derived from arithmetic averaging of orbital profiles within equal-angle or equal-area parallelograms, the anomaly averaging process was simulated by orbital profiles computed from spherical-earth crustal magnetic anomaly modeling experiments using Gauss-Legendre quadrature integration. The results indicate that averaging can provide reasonable values at satellite elevations, where contributing error factors within a given parallelogram include the elevation distribution of the data, and orbital noise and geomagnetic field attributes. Various inversion schemes including the use of equivalent point dipoles are also investigated as an alternative to arithmetic averaging. Although inversion can provide improved spherical grid anomaly estimates, these procedures are problematic in practice where computer scaling difficulties frequently arise due to a combination of factors including large source-to-observation distances ( 400 km), high geographic latitudes, and low geomagnetic field inclinations.

Goyal, H. K.↗

Integration of Heat Transfer, Stress, and Particle Trajectory Simulation

Calabazas Creek Research, Inc. developed and currently markets Beam Optics Analyzer (BOA) in the United States and abroad. BOA is a 3D, charged particle optics code that solves the electric and magnetic fields with and without the presence of particles. It includes automatic and adaptive meshing to resolve spatial scales ranging from a few millimeters to meters. It is fully integrated with CAD packages, such as SolidWorks, allowing seamless geometry updates. The code includes iterative procedures for optimization, including a fully functional, graphical user interface. Recently, time dependent, particle in cell capability was added, pushing particles synchronically under quasistatic electromagnetic fields to obtain particle bunching under RF conditions. A heat transfer solver was added during this Phase I program. Completed tasks include: (1) Added a 3D finite element heat transfer solver with adaptivity; (2) Determined the accuracy of the linear heat transfer field solver to provide the basis for development of higher order solvers in Phase II; (3) Provided more accurate and smoother power density fields; and (4) Defined the geometry using the same CAD model, while maintaining different meshes, and interfacing the power density field between the particle simulator and heat transfer solvers. These objectives were achieved using modern programming techniques and algorithms. All programming was in C++ and parallelization in OpenMP, utilizing state-of-the-art multi-core technology. Both x86 and x64 versions are supported. The GUI design and implementation used Microsoft Foundation Class.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

(2 + δ)-dimensional theory of the electromechanics of lipid membranes: Electrostatics

The coupling of electric fields to the mechanics of lipid membranes gives rise to intriguing electromechanical behavior, as, for example, evidenced by the deformation of lipid vesicles in external electric fields. Electromechanical effects are relevant for many biological processes, such as the propagation of action potentials in axons and the activation of mechanically gated ion channels. Currently, a theoretical framework describing the electromechanical behavior of arbitrarily curved and deforming lipid membranes does not exist. Purely mechanical models commonly treat lipid membranes as two-dimensional surfaces, ignoring their finite thickness. While holding analytical and numerical merit, this approach cannot describe the coupling of lipid membranes to electric fields and is thus unsuitable for electromechanical models. In a sequence of articles, we derive an effective surface theory of the electromechanics of lipid membranes, called the (2 + δ)-dimensional theory, which has the advantages of surface descriptions while accounting for finite thickness effects. The present article proposes a generic dimension reduction procedure relying on low-order spectral expansions. This procedure is applied to the electrostatics of lipid membranes to obtain the (2 + δ)-dimensional theory that captures potential differences across and electric fields within lipid membranes. Finally, this model is tested on different geometries relevant for lipid membranes, showing good agreement with the corresponding three-dimensional electrostatics theory.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Towards a unified nonlocal, peridynamics framework for the coarse-graining of molecular dynamics data with fractures

Molecular dynamics (MD) has served as a powerful tool for designing materials with reduced reliance on laboratory testing. However, the use of MD directly to treat the deformation and failure of materials at the mesoscale is still largely beyond reach. In this work, we propose a learning framework to extract a peridynamics model as a mesoscale continuum surrogate from MD simulated material fracture data sets. Firstly, we develop a novel coarse-graining method, to automatically handle the material fracture and its corresponding discontinuities in the MD displacement data sets. Inspired by the weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme, the key idea lies at an adaptive procedure to automatically choose the locally smoothest stencil, then reconstruct the coarse-grained material displacement field as the piecewise smooth solutions containing discontinuities. Then, based on the coarse-grained MD data, a two-phase optimization-based learning approach is proposed to infer the optimal peridynamics model with damage criterion. In the first phase, we identify the optimal nonlocal kernel function from the data sets without material damage to capture the material stiffness properties. Then, in the second phase, the material damage criterion is learnt as a smoothed step function from the data with fractures. As a result, a peridynamics surrogate is obtained. As a continuum model, our peridynamics surrogate model can be employed in further prediction tasks with different grid resolutions from training, and hence allows for substantial reductions in computational cost compared with MD. We illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach with several numerical tests for the dynamic crack propagation problem in a single-layer graphene. Our tests show that the proposed data-driven model is robust and generalizable, in the sense that it is capable of modeling the initialization and growth of fractures under discretization and loading settings that are different from the ones used during training.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Spectrophotometric Determination of Tris(2-Chloroethyl)Amine Using Acid Dyes

Methods of extraction-spectrophotometric determination of tris(2-chloroethyl)amine using nine acid dyes from the groups of sulfonephthaleins, sulfonated anthraquinones, and azo dyes have been developed. These procedures are based on the formation of the ion associates of the reactants and their extraction into chloroform. The conditions of the determination were optimized to determine the optimal pH for extraction from the water phase, the optimal excess of the dye, and the time needed for the extraction. The limits of detection and determination, the molar absorptivities of ion associates, extraction efficiency, distribution ratio, and conditional extraction constants for the separate procedures of determination were calculated. Of the studied acid dyes, the most suitable agents for determining the analyte were bromothymol blue and Acid Blue 129. These procedures are relatively undemanding in terms of time and instruments required and can be applied in field analysis of nitrogen mustards.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Electrocoagulation in Water Treatment: Targeted Contaminant Removal and Laboratory Best Practices

Electrocoagulation for water treatment offers many advantages over traditional treatment technologies, including improved energy efficiency and modularity. One challenge with electrocoagulation is the lack of standardization in the methodology and reporting. This review provides a novel contribution by examining the past literature using a uniform metric (charge loading) as a basis for comparison, highlighting the importance of uniform reporting practices in this field. Furthermore, this review provides practical guidance for experimentalists in standardizing the electrocoagulation design and operating procedures. First, we present a comprehensive overview of contaminant-specific electrocoagulation as an electrochemical treatment technology for processing industrial, municipal, and agricultural water, with a focus on aluminum and iron electrocoagulation. We detail the fundamental mechanisms that allow for constituent removal during pretreatment. Specifically, we highlight electrocoagulation’s potential for organics, metalloids, microbes, and hardness remediation, examining the optimal removal conditions in terms of charge loading and current density. We conclude this work with some experimental best practices for lab-scale electrocoagulation experiments.

aluminum↗

Lifetime and universal distribution of seed runaway electrons

The lifetime of pre-existing runaway electrons determines how likely the runaways will undergo avalanche multiplication. We estimate the lifetime of runaway electrons via kinetic analysis. We show that the rate of runaway decay depends on the combination of parameters α≡(Z+1)/$\sqrt{{\bar{τ}}_{rad}}$ (where $τ_{rad}$ is the synchrotron timescale normalized to the collisional timescale and Z is the ion charge) compared to the electric field. We identify two cases where the decay rate is slow enough to enable a quasi-steady shape of the runaway distribution function. This distribution and its lifetime represent the eigenfunction and the lowest eigenvalue of the kinetic equation. In one case, α$\ll$1: the field required to sustain the pre-existing runaways is barely larger than the Connor-Hastie critical value. In the same manner as by Aleynikov and Breizman [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 155001 (2015)], we solve the kinetic equation perturbatively but extend the work to demonstrate that the lifetime grows exponentially with the field at a rate that depends on α. Finally, in the second case, α$\gg$1: the sustainment field is much greater than the Connor-Hastie value, and the largeness of the field in this case enables us to universalize the kinetic equation via the re-scaling procedure.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Influence of Coulomb effects on the resolving power of multireflection mass-spectrometer systems

General theoretical approaches to the modelling of Coulomb effects in short ion bunches, developed previously by the authors, are applied in this paper to the calculation of multireflection mass-spectrometer systems. A separate module of the MASIM 3D applied software package is designed. An adaptive computational procedure for calculating the 'mirror potential' induced by an ion bunch on the surface of field-forming electrodes is proposed. The dynamics of ion bunches in a time-of-flight reflectron-type mass analyser is calculated and the limitations on the resolving power, caused by resonant Coulomb effects of self-bunching and coalescence in the groups of particles with close masses, are revealed on the basis of numerical experiments. (laser applications and other topics in quantum electronics)

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Three-Forms, Supersymmetry and String Compactifications

We review a duality procedure that relates standard matter-coupled N=1 supergravity to dual formulations in which auxiliary fields are replaced by field-strengths of gauge three-forms. As examples, we consider the dualization of the rigid Polonyi model and of effective field theories associated with Type IIA string compactifications with fluxes in supergravity.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Survey of fracture toughness test methods

Comprehensive survey presents current methods of fracture toughness testing that are based on linear elastic fracture mechanics. General principles of the basic two dimensional crack stress field model are discussed in relation to real three dimensional specimens. Methods of test instrumentation and procedure are described.

Brown, W. F., Jr.↗

Engineering support activities for the Apollo 17 Surface Electrical Properties Experiment.

Description of the engineering support activities which were required to ensure fulfillment of objectives specified for the Apollo 17 SEP (Surface Electrical Properties) Experiment. Attention is given to procedural steps involving verification of hardware acceptability to the astronauts, computer simulation of the experiment hardware, field trials, receiver antenna pattern measurements, and the qualification test program.

Cubley, H. D.↗

A visual display system approach for an advanced spaceflight simulator.

Future training and procedures simulators for advanced spacecraft will require that visual attachments provide forward, side and overhead window field of view capability. This paper presents an approach to high resolution, full color simulation of visual cues over the field of view offered by these crew station windows. Baseline requirements along with supporting rationale are presented. Candidate visual display hardware is identified and trade study results discussed. The display system approach presented is the result of studies which investigated the applicability of Apollo simulator visual display and image generation hardware to advanced spaceflight simulation.

Hock, E. A.↗

Investigation of resonance integrals occurring in cosmic ray diffusion theory

Critical assessment of two versions of a procedure for calculating the pitch angle diffusion coefficient for cosmic rays in a static random magnetic field using the 'resonance integral' method of Hasselmann and Wiberenz (1968) and Jokipii (1972). One of these versions is shown to represent the physics of the situation more accurately than the other.

Jones, F. C.↗

Evaluation of S190A radiometric exposure test data

The S190A preflight radiometric exposure test data generated as part of preflight and system test of KM-002 Sequence 29 on flight camera S/N 002 was analyzed. The analysis was to determine camera system transmission using available data which included: (1) films exposed to a calibrated light source subject; (2) filter transmission data; (3) calibrated light source data; (4) density vs. log10 exposure curves for the films; and (5) spectral sensitometric data for the films. The procedure used is outlined, and includes the data and a transmission matrix as a function of field position for nine measured points on each station-film-filter-aperture-shutter speed combination.

Lockwood, H. E.↗