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At least 1,495 records · Page 83

Variable-beamwidth monopulse antennas

The merits of nine methods for zooming microwave amplitude-sensing monopulse antenna patterns are discussed. Of these, six are directly related to the TDRSS (Tracking Data Relay Satellite System) and are compatible with a deployable-mesh pseudo-paraboloidal main reflector. The remaining three methods utilize radically different geometrical configurations that depart considerably from the TDRSS parameters existing at this time. Preservation of the monopulse postulates is considered to be of prime importance for any variable-beamwidth candidate, however, it is allowed that approximate satisfaction of the postulates should be accepted for practical reasons. All of the methods discussed admit free choice of the polarization state, and the zooming function is never predicated on polarization. Exploration of the zooming techniques was carried out almost entirely by means of the Kirchhoff-Kottler vector diffraction program. The program generates electric and magnetic field intensity, associated phase, and time-average Poynting vector power flow in the intermediate near-field and far-field zones in both receive and transmit modes of operation. A few of the concepts have been verified experimentally with excellent agreement between theory and practice.

Schmidt, R. F.↗

The use of digital techniques to examine the intermittent region of a turbulent jet

Voltage signals, sampled at a high rate in the intermittent region of a round jet, are analyzed to provide instantaneous velocity vector information and measures of the vorticity and dissipation scales. A clustering routine to assess the feasibility of using the voltage readings to define the vortical, nonvortical state of the flow is also utilized. The results indicate that the clustering routine is partially successful; more sophisticated discrimination techniques will be required for a complete specification.

Foss, J. F.↗

Numerical solutions of the complete Navier-Stokes equations

Using ideas from the kinetic theory, the Navier-Stokes equations are modified in such a way that they can be cast as a set of first order hyperbolic equations. This is achieved by incorporating time dependent terms into the definition of the stress tensor and the heat flux vectors. The boundary conditions are then determined from the theory of characteristics. Because the resulting equations reduce to the traditional Navier-Stokes equations when the steady state is reached, the present approach provides a straightforward scheme for the determination of inflow and outflow boundary conditions. The method is validated by comparing its predictions with known exact solutions of the steady Navier-Stokes equations.

Hassan, H. A.↗

Boundary conditions for the Navier-Stokes equations

Using ideas from kinetic theory, the Navier-Stokes equations are modified in such a way that they can be cast as a set of first order hyperbolic equations. This is achieved by incorporating time dependent terms into the definition of the stress tensor and the heat flux vectors. The boundary conditions are then determined from the theory of characteristics. Because the resulting equations reduce to the traditional Navier-Stokes equations when the steady state is reached, the present approach provides a straightforward scheme for the determination of inflow and outflow boundary conditions. The method is validated by comparing its predictions with exact and numerical solutions of the steady Navier-Stokes equations.

Rudisill, Edgar N., Jr.↗

A two-dimensional, time-dependent, near-earth magnetotail

A kinetic approach is presented for obtaining slowly time-dependent, self-consistent plasma, and magnetic field configurations for this region, using anisotropic particle distributions. At present, a 2D configuration is used. The time variation of the plasma/field configuration is assumed to be driven by a slowly varying, externally imposed electric field (representing, for example, a change in solar wind conditions). The numerical approach involves solving a 2D nonlinear Poisson equation for the magnetic vector potential at each time step. The local current density is calculated from particle velocity distributions under the assumption of adiabatic particle motion. The obtained equations of state are compared with those of double-adiabatic theory. Numerical examples of self-consistent responses of the near-earth plasma and field to an externally imposed electric field pulse are presented.

Whipple, Elden↗

Design and test of a high power electromechanical actuator for thrust vector control

NASA-Marshall is involved in the development of electromechanical actuators (EMA) for thrust-vector control (TVC) system testing and implementation in spacecraft control/gimballing systems, with a view to the replacement of hydraulic hardware. TVC system control is furnished by solid state controllers and power supplies; a pair of resolvers supply position feedback to the controller for precise positioning. Performance comparisons between EMA and hydraulic TVC systems are performed.

Cowan, J. R.↗

Control of Initialized Fractional-Order Systems

Fractional-Order systems, or systems containing fractional derivatives and integrals, have been studied by many in the engineering area. Additionally, very readable discussions, devoted specifically to the subject, are presented by Oldham and Spanier, Miller and Ross, and Pudlubny (1999a). It should be noted that there are a growing number of physical systems whose behavior can be compactly described using fractional system theory. Of specific interest to electrical engineers are long lines, electrochemical processes, dielectric polarization, colored noise, viscoelastic materials, and chaos. With the growing number of applications, it is important to establish a theory of control for these fractional-order systems, and for the potential use of fractional-order systems as feedback compensators. This topic is addressed in this paper. The first section discusses the control of fractional-order systems using a vector space representation, where initialization is included in the discussion. It should be noted that Bagley and Calico and Padovan and Sawicki both present a fractional state-space representation, which do not include the important historic effects. Incorporation of these effects based on the initialized fractional calculus is presented . The control methods presented in this paper are based on the initialized fractional order system theory. The second section presents an input-output approach. Some of the problems encountered in these sections are: a) the need to introduce a new complex plane to study the dynamics of fractional-order systems, b) the need to properly define the Laplace transform of the fractional derivative, and c) the proper inclusion of the initialization response in the system and control formulation. Following this, the next section generalizes the proportional-plus-integral-control (PI-control) and PID-control (PI-plus- derivative) concepts using fractional integrals. This is then further generalized using general fractional- order compensators. Finally the compensator concept is generalized by the use of a continuum of fractions in the compensator via the concept of order-distributions. The last section introduces fractional feedback in discrete-time.

Hartley, Tom T.↗

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in High-Dimensional Flight Data Using Convolutional Variational Auto-Encoder

The modern National Airspace System (NAS) is an extremely safe system and the aviation industry has experienced a steady decrease in fatalities over the years. This can be attributed to both improved flight critical systems with redundant hardware and software protections, as well as an increased focus on active monitoring and response to real time and historically identified vulnerabilities by implementing more resilient procedures and protocols. The main approach for identifying vulnerabilities in operations leverages domain expertise using knowledge about how the system should behave within the expected tolerances to known safety margins. This approach works well when the system has a well-defined operating condition. However, the operations in the NAS can be highly complex with various nuances that render it difficult to clearly pre-define all known safety vulnerabilities. With the advancement of data science and machine learning techniques, the potential to automatically identify emerging vulnerabilities in the observed operations has become more practical in recent years. The state-of-the-art anomaly detection approaches in aerospace data usually rely on supervised or semi-supervised learning. However, in many real-world problems such as flight safety, creating labels for the data requires huge amount of effort and is largely impractical. To address this challenge, we developed a Convolutional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE), which is an unsupervised learning approach for anomaly detection in high-dimensional heterogeneous time-series data. We validate performance of CVAE compared to the state-of-the-art supervised learning approach as well as unsupervised clustering-based approach using KMeans++ and kernel-based approach using One-Class Support Vector Machine (OC-SVM) on Yahoo!'s benchmark time series anomaly detection data. Finally, we showcase performance of CVAE on a case study of identifying anomalies in the first 60 seconds of commercial flights' take-offs using Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA) data.

Memarzadeh, Milad↗

The Determination of the Rotational State and Interior Structure of Venus with VERITAS

Understanding the processes that led Venus to its current state and will drive its future evolution is a major objective of the next generation of orbiters. In this work we analyze the retrieval of the spin vector, the tidal response and the moment of inertia of Venus with VERITAS, a NASA Discovery-class mission. By simulating a systematic joint analysis of Doppler tracking data and tie points provided by the onboard synthetic aperture radar we show that VERITAS will provide accuracies (3σ) in the estimates of the tidal Love number k_2 to 4.6×10^(-4), its tidal phase lag to 0.05°, and the moment of inertia factor to 9.8×10^(-4) (0.3% of the expected value). Applying these results to recent models of the Venus interior, we show that VERITAS will provide much improved constraints on the interior structure of the planet.

G Cascioli↗

A Physics-Based Work-Energy Formulation for Real-Time Trajectory Guidance of A Lunar Lander

Throughout the years, many researchers have calculated and optimized trajectory solutions for lunar landing systems by employing sophisticated mathematical methods, that include: Hamilton’s Principle of Variation, Pontryagin’s maximum principle, and well known convex-optimization techniques among others. Many of these approaches typically require expensive computational resources to achieve convergence in the solution. In an effort to reduce complexity and the computational load required to obtain real-time guidance commands, a simple physics-based work-energy approach has been formulated. This approach is based on the dissipation of the mechanical energy of the vehicle to its final desired energy state required to achieve a safe landing. The rocket engine(s) employed during landing (among other maneuvers) dissipates mechanical energy by both doing work against the velocity vector of the vehicle (thus defining the trajectory path), and by jettisoning mass. Therefore, by solving the energy dissipation problem at every step of the maneuver, a much simpler formulation that naturally and quickly attains convergence is obtained. This formulation is not limited to approach, landing, and divert maneuvers, but in principle it can be employed during de-orbiting, braking burn, ascent, as well as orbit insertion.

Guidance↗

A Physics-Based Work-Energy Formulation for Real-Time Trajectory Guidance of a Lunar Lander

Throughout the years, many researchers have calculated and optimized trajectory solutions for lunar landing systems by employing sophisticated mathematical methods, that include: Hamilton’s Principle of Variation, Pontryagin’s maximum principle, and well known convex-optimization techniques among others. Many of these approaches typically require expensive computational resources to achieve convergence in the solution. In an effort to reduce complexity and the computational load required to obtain real-time guidance commands, a simple physics-based work-energy approach has been formulated. This approach is based on the dissipation of the mechanical energy of the vehicle to its final desired energy state required to achieve a safe landing. The rocket engine(s) employed during landing (among other maneuvers) dissipates mechanical energy by both doing work against the velocity vector of the vehicle (thus defining the trajectory path), and by jettisoning mass. Therefore, by solving the energy dissipation problem at every step of the maneuver, a much simpler formulation that naturally and quickly attains convergence is obtained. This formulation is not limited to approach, landing, and divert maneuvers, but in principle it can be employed during de-orbiting, braking burn, ascent, as well as orbit insertion.

Guidance↗

A Knowledge Graph Framework for Organizing Heterogeneous Datasets for Utilization in Classical and Quantum Computing: Current Challenges and Future Directions

"The escalating impact of climate change induced extreme weather events in urban, suburban, and rural environments demands a rethink of how we have been using the single event-based or use-case-based knowledge graph models. The lack of representation in interaction within environmental variables found in literature led to the development of a novel framework that reflects the true nature of the interconnectedness in our environment. We propose an Environmental Interaction Knowledge Graph (EIKG) framework. This general EIKG framework works as the basis for interconnected environmental events by knitting interrelated events such as hurricanes leading to storm surges, which lead to flood events that could cause mudslides, landslides, etc., The cascading nature of one event leading to another related event in the environment requires an adequate understanding of each event using contextual information before conducting any data-driven analytics. This vision paper showcases how the EIKG:floods, EIKG:wildfire EIKG:landslides, etc, can be derived from a base case framework of EIKG as those individual events are interconnected with some common denominator variables. As an example, the precipitation variable is used in the flood case study as well as in the wildfire case study, as excessive precipitation levels lead to floods, and lack of precipitation leads to droughts and wildfires. We identify the precipitation variable as a “common-denominator-variable” in extreme weather events that play a key role in modeling the environment leading to different extreme weather events based on the variability of that variable (varying values where low precipitation leads to drought, and high values lead to floods). We use the insights gained from EIKG to conduct classical and Quantum Machine Learning (QML) based data analysis on the research questions developed. Our preliminary study shows how the Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) and Quantum Support Vector Classifier (QSVC) are used along with the classical machine learning models to compare the model accuracies. Our study elaborates on how a quantitative analysis uses state-of-the-art machine learning techniques that include implementing both classical and quantum machine learning models and developing the knowledge graph. The EIKG is used to organize heterogeneous datasets and integrate the relations to case-specific extreme weather events such as floods. The study uses datasets such as county-to-country residential mobility data, socioeconomic datasets from the US Census Bureau, climate and weather-related Earth Observational data from NASA, and critical infrastructure data from the Homeland Infrastructure datasets."

Knowledge Graphs, Quantum Computing, Heterogenous ↗

Circuit arrangement and technique for setting matrix values in three-terminal memory cells

A method for programming substantially simultaneously more than one of the three-terminal memory cells that represent the values of a matrix to be multiplied by a vector is disclosed. Programming may be achieved by controlling the gate-drain voltage for more than one cell simultaneously to change each such cell's physical state and hence its effective resistance. Illustratively, the gates of each row of the cells corresponding to the matrix are coupled together and each coupled row is coupled to a respective controllable voltage source while the drains of each column of the cells of the matrix are coupled together and each coupled column is coupled to a respective controllable voltage source. The controllable voltage sources are arranged so that at the intersection of a row and a column, a cell experiences one of three conditions: increase effective resistance, decrease effective resistance, or substantially no change.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Measurements of polarization and spin correlation and observation of entanglement in top quark pairs using lepton + jets events from proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{𝑠}$ = 13 TeV

Measurements of the polarization and spin correlation in top quark pairs ($t\bar{t}$) are presented using events with a single electron or muon and jets in the final state. The measurements are based on proton-proton collision data from the LHC at $\sqrt{𝑠}$ =13 TeV collected by the CMS experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb −1 . All coefficients of the polarization vectors and the spin correlation matrix are extracted simultaneously by performing a binned likelihood fit to the data. The measurement is performed inclusively and in bins of additional observables, such as the mass of the $t\bar{t}$ system and the top quark scattering angle in the $t\bar{t}$ rest frame. The measured polarization and spin correlation are in agreement with the standard model. From the measured spin correlation, conclusions on the $t\bar{t}$ spin entanglement are drawn by applying the Peres-Horodecki criterion. The standard model predicts entangled spins for $t\bar{t}$ states at the production threshold and at high masses of the $t\bar{t}$ system. Entanglement is observed for the first time in events at high $t\bar{t}$ mass, where a large fraction of the $t\bar{t}$ decays are spacelike separated, with an expected and observed significance of above 5 standard deviations.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Vibration responses of h-BN sheet to charge doping and external strain

Based on density functional theory and density functional perturbation theory calculations, we systematically investigate the vibration responses of h-BN sheet to charge doping and external strains. It is found that under hole doping, the phonon frequencies of the ZO and TO branches at different wave vector q shift linearly with different slopes. Under electron doping, although the phonon frequencies shift irregularly, the shifting values are different at different phonon wave vectors. Interestingly, we find that external strain can restrain the irregular vibration responses of h-BN sheet to electron doping. The critical factor is revealed to be the relative position of the nearly free electron and boron p{sub z} states of h-BN sheet. Under external strains, the vibration responses of h-BN sheet are also found to be highly dependent on the phonon branches. Different vibration modes at different q points are revealed to be responsible for the vibration responses of h-BN sheet to charge doping and external strain. Our results point out a new way to detect the doping or strain status of h-BN sheet by measuring the vibration frequencies at different wave vector.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

A Chaos Theoretic Approach to Animal Activity Recognition

Animal activity is a descriptor that can be potentially used to track the health and well-being, which is obviously very important to improve the management process and productivity of farms. This paper deals with an animal behavior recognition problem using a chaos theory approach where we adopt such a technique for automatic classification of calves behavioral states. Two main mutually exclusive behaviors are of interest, namely, lying and standing/walking with six possible activities: feeding, drinking water, drinking milk, playing, rumination, and neutral. The time series generated by ear-tags with a 3D-accelerometer after a wavelet denoising transformation and frequency stabilization are treated as representations of the nonlinear dynamical system. The dynamical system of a certain animal state exhibits specific strange attractor in a phase space. A characterization of such an attractor is performed through metric, dynamic, and topological invariants including Lyapunov exponent, correlation dimension, length of a phase trajectory, sum of edges forming a convex hull and others. These measures are used as a feature vector for the subsequent classification. In a cross validation scheme, six classifiers are built on each training set, and the hyper-parameters are optimized using an inner validation set. The classifier that reaches the highest accuracy on the inner validation set is used to classify the outer validation set. It is shown that this approach can be useful at predicting activity states as an alternative methodology for the animal behavior state recognition problem with acceptable classification accuracy. Furthermore it is possible to include this procedure as part of an ensemble method in machine learning where a combination of different models is used.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Search for the Higgs boson in lepton, tau and jets final states

We present a search for the standard model Higgs boson in final states with an electron or muon and a hadronically decaying tau lepton in association with two or more jets using 9.7 fb –1 of Run II Fermilab Tevatron Collider data collected with the D0 detector. The analysis is sensitive to Higgs boson production via gluon fusion, associated vector boson production, and vector boson fusion, followed by the Higgs boson decay to tau lepton pairs or to W boson pairs. The ratios of 95% C.L. upper limits on the cross section times branching ratio to those predicted by the standard model are obtained for orthogonal subsamples that are enriched in either H → ττ decays or H → WW decays, and for the combination of these subsample limits. As a result, the observed and expected limit ratios for the combined subsample at a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV are 11.3 and 9.0, respectively.

experiment-HEP↗

Search for single production of vector-like quarks decaying to a Z boson and a top or a bottom quark in proton-proton collisions at $ \sqrt{s}=13 $ TeV

A search for single production of vector-like quarks, T and B, decaying into a Z boson and a top or a bottom quark, respectively, is presented. The search is performed using data collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at $ \sqrt{s}=13 $ TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 2.3fb$^{−1}$. An exotic T quark production mode through the decay of a heavy Z′ resonance is also considered. The search is performed in events with a Z boson decaying leptonically, accompanied by a bottom or a top quark decaying hadronically. No excess of events is observed over the standard model background expectation. Products of production cross section and branching fraction for T and B quarks from 1.26 and 0.13 pb are excluded at 95% confidence level for the range of resonance mass considered, which is between 0.7 and 1.7 TeV. Limits on the product of the Z′ boson production cross section and branching fraction, with the Z′ boson decaying to the Tt final state, are set between 0.31 and 0.13 pb, for Z′ boson masses in the range from 1.5 to 2.5 TeV. This is the first search at 13 TeV for single production of vector-like quarks in events with a Z boson decaying leptonically accompanied by boosted jets.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗