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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 1,423 records · Page 79
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1989

Modeling growth of fatigue cracks which originate at rivet holes

When a structural component is subjected to repeated stress cycles, it can fail at stresses which are well below the tensile strength of the material. The processes leading to this failure are termed fatigue. Instances of fatigue failure in aircraft have become an increasing concern. The crack leading to failure often originate at rivet holes and then grow in response to stress cycles which occur during the operation of the aircraft. A necessary step to preventing failures in todays fleet of aging aircraft is to increase the frequency and quality of inspections; steps were already taken in this direction. There is also a need for modeling of fatigue crack growth in the aircraft structures so that improvements in design can be established and predictions of the life of the components can be made. The purpose is to provide a method to accurately predict the growth of fatigue cracks and to use this method to make predictions about the life of aircraft structural components. The method relies on the formulation and numerical solution of a singular integral equation(s) for an arbitrarily shaped crack(s) which propagate in response to the applied loading. Of special interest to the aging aircraft studies are cracks which originate at circular holes (i.e., rivet holes), but other crack geometries can be treated equally as well.

Mear, Mark E.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Smart built-in test

The work which built-in test (BIT) is asked to perform in today's electronic systems increases with every insertion of new technology or introduction of tighter performance criteria. Yet the basic purpose remains unchanged -- to determine with high confidence the operational capability of that equipment. Achievement of this level of BIT performance requires the management and assimilation of a large amount of data, both realtime and historical. Smart BIT has taken advantage of advanced techniques from the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to meet these demands. The Smart BIT approach enhances traditional functional BIT by utilizing AI techniques to incorporate environmental stress data, temporal BIT information and maintenance data, and realtime BIT reports into an integrated test methodology for increased BIT effectiveness and confidence levels. Future research in this area will incorporate onboard fault-logging of BIT output, stress data and Smart BIT decision criteria in support of a singular, integrated and complete test and maintenance capability. The state of this research is described along with a discussion of directions for future development.

Richards, Dale W.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Guidance and control strategies for aerospace vehicles

The first part of the report concerns broadly the summary of the work done in the areas of singular perturbations and time scales (SPaTS), aerobraking technology, guidance and aerocruise. The synergistic plane change problem connected with orbital transfer employing aeroassist technology, is addressed. The mission involves transfer from high Earth orbit to low Earth orbit with plane change being performed within the atmosphere. The complete mission consists of a deorbit phase, atmospheric phase, and finally reorbit phase. The atmospheric maneuver is composed of an entry mode, a cruise mode, and finally an exit mode. During the cruise mode, constant altitude and velocity are maintained by means of bank angle control with constant thrust or thrust control with constant bank angle. Comparisons between these two control strategies bring out some interesting features.

Hibey, Joseph L.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Strain energy release rate analysis of delamination in a tapered laminate subjected to tension load

A tapered composite laminate subjected to tension load was analyzed using the finite-element method. The glass/epoxy laminate has a (+ or - 45)sub 3 group of plies dropped in three distinct steps, each 20 ply-thicknesses apart, thus forming a taper angle of 5.71 degrees. Steep gradients of interlaminar normal and shear stress on a potential delamination interface suggest the existence of stress singularities at the points of material and geometric discontinuities created by the internal plydrops. The delamination was assumed to initiate at the thin end of the taper on a -45/+45 interface and the delamination growth was simulated in both directions, i.e., along the taper and into the thin region. The strain-energy-release rate for a delamination growing into the thin laminate consisted predominantly of mode I (opening) component. For a delamination growing along the tapered region, the strain-energy-release rate was initially all mode I, but the proportion of mode I decreased with increase in delamination size until eventually total G was all mode II. The total G for both delamination tips increased with increase in delamination size, indicating that a delamination initiating at the end of the taper will grow unstably along the taper and into the thin laminate simultaneously.

Salpekar, S. A.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Resolution of seven-axis manipulator redundancy: A heuristic issue

An approach is presented for the resolution of the redundancy of a seven-axis manipulator arm from the AI and expert systems point of view. This approach is heuristic, analytical, and globally resolves the redundancy at the position level. When compared with other approaches, this approach has several improved performance capabilities, including singularity avoidance, repeatability, stability, and simplicity.

Chen, I.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Development and testing of methodology for evaluating the performance of multi-input/multi-output digital control systems

A Controller Performance Evaluation (CPE) methodology for multi-input/multi-output digital control systems was developed and tested on an aeroelastic wind-tunnel model. Modern signal processing methods were used to implement control laws and to acquire time domain data of the whole system (controller and plant) from which appropriate transfer matrices of the control system could be generated. Matrix computational procedures were used to calculate singular values of return-difference matrices at the plant input and output points to evaluate the performance of the control system. The CPE procedures effectively identified potentially destabilizing controllers and confirmed the satisfactory performance of stabilizing ones.

Pototzky, Anthony S.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Magnetic properties of high-T(sub c) superconductors: Rigid levitation, flux pinning, thermal depinning, and fluctuation

The levitation of high-T(sub c) superconductors is quite conspicuous: Above magnets of low symmetry a disk of these ceramics floats motionless, without vibration or rotation; it has a continuous range of stable positions and orientations as if it were stuck in sand. Some specimens may even be suspended above or below the same magnet. This fascinating stability, inherent to no other type of levitation, is caused by the pinning of magnetic flux lines by inhomogeneities inside these extreme type-2 superconductors. The talk deals with pinning of magnetic flux in these materials, with flux flow, flux creep, thermally activated depinning, and the thermal fluctuation of the vortex positions in the flux line lattice (often called flux lattice melting). Also discussed are the fluctuations of the (nearly periodic) magnetic field inside these superconductors which are caused by random pinning sites and by the finite temperature. These fluctuations broaden the van-Hove singularities observed in the density of the magnetic field by nuclear magnetic resonance and by muon spin rotation.

Brandt, E. H.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Robust eigensystem assignment for second-order estimators

An approach for the robust eigensystem assignment of flexible structures using full state or output feedback is developed. Using the second-order dynamic equations, the approach can assign the eigenvalues of the system via velocity and displacement feedbacks, or acceleration and velocity feedbacks. The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the system are assigned, via the second-order eigenvalue problem for the structural system, in two steps. First, an orthonormal basis spanning the attainable closed-loop eigenvector space corresponding to each desired closed-loop eigenvalue is generated using the Singular Value or QR decompositions. Second, a sequential procedure is used to choose a set of closed-loop eigenvectors that are as close as possible to the column space of a well-conditioned target matrix. Among the possible choices of the target matrix, the closest unitary matrix to the open-loop eigenvector matrix appears to be a suitable choice. A numerical example is given to illustrate the proposed algorithm.

Juang, Jer-Nan↗
NASA NTRS1990

Green's functions for dislocations in bonded strips and related crack problems

Green's functions are derived for the plane elastostatics problem of a dislocation in a bimaterial strip. Using these fundamental solutions as kernels, various problems involving cracks in a bimaterial strip are analyzed using singular integral equations. For each problem considered, stress intensity factors are calculated for several combinations of the parameters which describe loading, geometry and material mismatch.

Ballarini, R.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Preliminary study of a serial-parallel redundant manipulator

The manipulator design discussed here results from the examination of some of the reasons why redundancy is necessary in general purpose manipulation systems. A spherical joint design actuated in-parallel, having the many advantages of parallel actuation, is described. In addition, the benefits of using redundant actuators are discussed and illustrated in the design by the elimination of loci of singularities from the usable workspace with the addition of only one actuator. Finally, what is known by the authors about space robotics requirements is summarized and the relevance of the proposed design matched against these requirements. The design problems outlined here are viewed as much from the mechanical engineering aspect as from concerns arising from the control and the programming of manipulators.

Hayward, Vincent↗
NASA NTRS1989

Nonlinear evolution of interacting oblique waves on two-dimensional shear layers

The effects of critical layer nonlinearity are considered on spatially growing oblique instability waves on nominally two-dimensional shear layers between parallel streams. The analysis shows that three-dimensional effects cause nonlinearity to occur at much smaller amplitudes than it does in two-dimensional flows. The nonlinear instability wave amplitude is determined by an integro-differential equation with cubic type nonlinearity. The numerical solutions to this equation are worked out and discussed in some detail. The numerical solutions always end in a singularity at a finite downstream distance.

Goldstein, M. E.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Dynamic grid refinement for partial differential equations on parallel computers

The fast adaptive composite grid method (FAC) is an algorithm that uses various levels of uniform grids to provide adaptive resolution and fast solution of PDEs. An asynchronous version of FAC, called AFAC, that completely eliminates the bottleneck to parallelism is presented. This paper describes the advantage that this algorithm has in adaptive refinement for moving singularities on multiprocessor computers. This work is applicable to the parallel solution of two- and three-dimensional shock tracking problems.

Mccormick, S.↗
NASA NTRS1989

A simplified approach to strain energy release rate computations for interlaminar fracture of composites

A simple approach for the strain energy release rate computations based on the finite element method and a singular fitting model is presented. The model uses the stress and displacement distributions at the delamination front. The method is applied to a mixed-mode double cracked-lap-shear composite configuration. The strain energy release rate components predicted by the model are compared with the finite element crack-closure method. The effect of the mesh size on the stress and displacement distribution is isolated. The strain energy release rates predicted by relatively coarse mesh sizes are in good agreement with the finite element crack closure method.

Armanios, Erian A.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Stress-intensity factors for small surface and corner cracks in plates

Three-dimensional finite-element and finite-alternating methods were used to obtain the stress-intensity factors for small surface and corner cracked plates subjected to remote tension and bending loads. The crack-depth-to-crack-length ratios (a/c) ranged from 0.2 to 1 and the crack-depth-to-plate-thickness ratios (a/t) ranged from 0.05 to 0.2. The performance of the finite-element alternating method was studied on these crack configurations. A study of the computational effort involved in the finite-element alternating method showed that several crack configurations could be analyzed with a single rectangular mesh idealization, whereas the conventional finite-element method requires a different mesh for each configuration. The stress-intensity factors obtained with the finite-element-alternating method agreed well (within 5 percent) with those calculated from the finite-element method with singularity elements.

Raju, Ivatury S.↗
NASA NTRS1990

PARC Navier-Stokes code upgrade and validation for high speed aeroheating predictions

Applications of the PARC full Navier-Stokes code for hypersonic flowfield and aeroheating predictions around blunt bodies such as the Aeroassist Flight Experiment (AFE) and Aeroassisted Orbital Transfer Vehicle (AOTV) are evaluated. Two-dimensional/axisymmetric and three-dimensional perfect gas versions of the code were upgraded and tested against benchmark wind tunnel cases of hemisphere-cylinder, three-dimensional AFE forebody, and axisymmetric AFE and AOTV aerobrake/wake flowfields. PARC calculations are in good agreement with experimental data and results of similar computer codes. Difficulties encountered in flowfield and heat transfer predictions due to effects of grid density, boundary conditions such as singular stagnation line axis and artificial dissipation terms are presented together with subsequent improvements made to the code. The experience gained with the perfect gas code is being currently utilized in applications of an equilibrium air real gas PARC version developed at REMTECH.

Liver, Peter A.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Cracking of coated materials under transient thermal stresses

The crack problem for a relatively thin layer bonded to a very thick substrate under thermal shock conditions is considered. The effect of surface cooling rate is studied by assuming the temperature boundary condition to be a ramp function. Among the crack geometries considered are the edge crack in the coating layer, the broken layer, the edge crack going through the interface, the undercoat crack in the substrate and the embedded crack crossing the interface. The primary calculated quantity is the stress intensity factor at various singular points and the main variables are the relative sizes and locations of cracks, the time, and the duration of the cooling ramp. The problem is solved and rather extensive results are given for two material pairs, namely a stainless steel layer welded on a ferritic medium and a ceramic coating on a steel substrate.

Rizk, A. A.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Robust eigensystem assignment for second-order dynamic systems

A novel approach for the robust eigensystem assignment of flexible structures using full state or output feedback is developed. Using the second-order dynamic equations, the approach can assign the eigenvalues of the system via velocity and displacement feedbacks, or acceleration and velocity feedbacks. The eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the system are assigned, via the second-order eigenvalue problem for the structural system, in two steps. First, an orthonormal basis spanning the attainable closed-loop eigenvector space corresponding to each desired closed-loop eigenvalue is generated using the Singular Value or QR decompositions. Second, a sequential procedure is used to choose a set of closed-loop eigenvectors that are as close as possible to the column space of a well-conditioned target matrix. Among the possible choices of the target matrix, the closest unitary matrix to the open-loop eigenvector matrix appears to be a suitable choice. A numerical example is given to illustrate the proposed algorithm.

Juang, Jer-Nan↗
NASA NTRS1990

Improved solution for system identification equations by Epsilon-Decomposition

Matrix eigenvalue theory is used to examine the source of ill-conditioning in linear algebraic equations. This approach highlights the crucial role played by the zero and near-zero eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of poorly conditioned systems. Insight gained from this approach is used to significantly improve a recently developed solution procedure called Epsilon-Decomposition (E-D). E-D is an efficient alternative to Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for ill-conditioned systems arising in parameter estimation and system identification studies. The efficiency of the improved E-D over SVD resides in the need to only obtain the zero and near-zero eigenvalues of the coefficient matrix as opposed to all of its eigenvalues and vectors (as required by SVD). Thus, the efficiency of E-D is significant for large matrices with small rank deficiency.

Ojalvo, Irving U.↗