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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 163 records · Page 9
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2007

Electron-Molecule Col1isions: Quantitative Approaches, and the Legacy of Aaron Temkin

This article, on electron-molecule collisions, is dedicated to the legacy of my good friend and sometime collaborator, Aaron Temkin on his retirement from the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center after many years of work at the highest intellectual level in the theoretical treatment of electron-atom and electron-molecule scattering. Aaron's contributions to the manner in which we think about electron-molecule collisions is clear to all of us who have worked in this field. I doubt that the great progress that has occurred in the computational treatment of such complex collision problems could have happened without these contributions. For a brief historical account, see the discussion of Temkin's contribution to electron-molecule scattering in the first article of this volume by Dr. A. K. Bhatia. In this article, I will concentrate on the application of the so called, non-adiabatic R-matrix theory, to vibrational excitation and dissociative attachment, although I will also present some results applying the Linear Algebraic and Kohn-Variational methods to vibrational excitation. As a starting point for almost all computationally effective approaches to electron-molecule collisions, is the fixed nuclei approximation. That is, one recognizes, just as one does with molecular bound states, that there is a separation of electronic(fast) and nuclear(s1ow) degrees of freedom. This separation makes it possible to "freeze" the nuclei in space, calculate the collision parameters for the frozen molecule and then, somehow to add back the vibrations and rotations. The manner in which this is done, depends on the details of the collision problem. It is the work of Aaron and a number of other researchers that has provided the guidance necessary to resolve these issues.

Schneider, B.I.↗
NASA NTRS2022

Building a Transdisciplinary, Exascale-Capable Workforce for Geospace Science

Key Points: ●First-principles, self-consistent geospace modeling will require at least exascale-level computing capabilities; however, the technical skills necessary to develop such simulation codes are not taught as part of Heliophysics training/PhD programs. ●Developing exascale Heliophysics codes will require transdisciplinary collaborations between physicists, computer scientists, software engineers, data scientists, and applied mathematics. Such teams must be persistent and formed around specific skills, not specific problems. ●We must have stable, positive long-term career outcomes for Heliophysics scientific developers in order to retain knowledge of and promote future innovation in scientific algorithm development and advanced computing techniques. One such way to do this is by funding long-term scientific programming groups, akin to Heliophysics DRIVE Centers. ●We must have a balance between promoting innovation via funding short-term closed-source development and allowing the open-source community to benefit from and build on the newest scientific modeling techniques.

C Bard↗
NASA NTRS1999

Developing an Advanced Environment for Collaborative Computing

Knowledge management in general tries to organize and make available important know-how, whenever and where ever is needed. Today, organizations rely on decision-makers to produce "mission critical" decisions that am based on inputs from multiple domains. The ideal decision-maker has a profound understanding of specific domains that influence the decision-making process coupled with the experience that allows them to act quickly and decisively on the information. In addition, learning companies benefit by not repeating costly mistakes, and by reducing time-to-market in Research & Development projects. Group-decision making tools can help companies make better decisions by capturing the knowledge from groups of experts. Furthermore, companies that capture their customers preferences can improve their customer service, which translates to larger profits. Therefore collaborative computing provides a common communication space, improves sharing of knowledge, provides a mechanism for real-time feedback on the tasks being performed, helps to optimize processes, and results in a centralized knowledge warehouse. This paper presents the research directions. of a project which seeks to augment an advanced collaborative web-based environment called Postdoc, with workflow capabilities. Postdoc is a "government-off-the-shelf" document management software developed at NASA-Ames Research Center (ARC).

Becerra-Fernandez, Irma↗
NASA NTRS2005

NASA Johnson Space Center Usability Testing and Analysis facility (UTAF) Overview

The Usability Testing and Analysis Facility (UTAF) is part of the Space Human Factors Laboratory at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The facility performs research for NASA's HumanSystems Integration Program, under the HumanSystems Research and Technology Division. Specifically, the UTAF provides human factors support for space vehicles, including the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, and the forthcoming Crew Exploration Vehicle. In addition, there are ongoing collaborative research efforts with external corporations and universities. The UTAF provides human factors analysis, evaluation, and usability testing of crew interfaces for space applications. This includes computer displays and controls, workstation systems, and work environments. The UTAF has a unique mix of capabilities, with a staff experienced in both cognitive human factors and ergonomics. The current areas of focus are: human factors applications in emergency medical care and informatics; control and display technologies for electronic procedures and instructions; voice recognition in noisy environments; crew restraint design for unique microgravity workstations; and refinement of human factors processes and requirements. This presentation will provide an overview of ongoing activities, and will address how the UTAF projects will evolve to meet new space initiatives.

Whitmore, Mihriban↗
NASA NTRS2018

Robonaut 2 and Watson: Cognitive Dexterity for Future Exploration

Future exploration missions will dictate a level of autonomy never before experienced in human spaceflight. Mission plans involving the uncrewed phases of complex human spacecraft in deep space will require a coordinated autonomous capability to be able to maintain the spacecraft when ground control is not available. One promising direction involves embedding intelligence into the system design both through the employment of state-of-the-art system engineering principles as well as through the creation of a cognitive network between a smart spacecraft or habitat and embodiments of cognitive agents. The work described here details efforts to integrate IBM's Watson and other cognitive computing services into NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC)'s Robonaut 2 (R2) anthropomorphic robot. This paper also discusses future directions this work will take. A cognitive spacecraft management system that is able to seamlessly collect data from subsystems, determine corrective actions, and provide commands to enable those actions is the end goal. These commands could be to embedded spacecraft systems or to a set of robotic assets that are tied into the cognitive system. An exciting collaboration with Woodside provides a promising Earth-bound testing analog, as controlling and maintaining not normally manned off-shore platforms have similar constraints to the space missions described.

Badger, Julia M.↗
NASA NTRS2001

Segment Alignment Maintenance System for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in collaboration with Blue Line Engineering of Colorado Springs, Colorado, is developing a Segment Alignment Maintenance System (SAMS) for McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). The SAMS shall sense motions of the 91 primary mirror segments and send corrections to HET's primary mirror controller as the mirror segments misalign due to thermo -elastic deformations of the mirror support structure. The SAMS consists of inductive edge sensors. All measurements are sent to the SAMS computer where mirror motion corrections are calculated. In October 2000, a prototype SAMS was installed on a seven-segment cluster of the HET. Subsequent testing has shown that the SAMS concept and architecture are a viable practical approach to maintaining HET's primary mirror figure, or the figure of any large segmented telescope. This paper gives a functional description of the SAMS sub-array components and presents test data to characterize the performance of the subarray SAMS.

Rakoczy, John↗
NASA NTRS1995

PATHFINDER: Probing Atmospheric Flows in an Integrated and Distributed Environment

PATHFINDER is a software effort to create a flexible, modular, collaborative, and distributed environment for studying atmospheric, astrophysical, and other fluid flows in the evolving networked metacomputer environment of the 1990s. It uses existing software, such as HDF (Hierarchical Data Format), DTM (Data Transfer Mechanism), GEMPAK (General Meteorological Package), AVS, SGI Explorer, and Inventor to provide the researcher with the ability to harness the latest in desktop to teraflop computing. Software modules developed during the project are available in the public domain via anonymous FTP from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The address is ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu, and the directory is /SGI/PATHFINDER.

Wilhelmson, R. B.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Transition to Operations Support at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center

The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) is a multi-agency partnership, which aims at the creation of next generation space weather models. The goal of the CCMC is to support the research and developmental work necessary to substantially increase the present-day modeling capability for space weather purposes, and to provide models for transition to the rapid prototyping centers at the space weather forecast centers. This goal requires close collaborations with and substantial involvement of the research community. The physical regions to be addressed by CCMC-related activities range from the solar atmosphere to the Earth's upper atmosphere. The CCMC is an integral part of the National Space Weather Program Implementation Plan, of NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) initiative, and of the Department of Defense Space Weather Transition Plan. CCMC includes a facility at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as distributed computing facilities provided by the US Air Force. CCMC also provides, to the research community, access to state-of-the-art space research models. This paper will focus on a status report on CCMC activities in support of model transition to operations at US space weather forecasting centers. In particular, an update will be given on past and present transition activities, on developments that address operational needs, and on future opportunities for transition-to-operations support.

Hesse, M.↗
NASA NTRS2005

Space Weather Modeling at the Community Coordinated Modeling Center

The Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) is a multi-agency partnership, which aims at the creation of next generation space weather models. The goal of the CCMC is to support the research and developmental work necessary to substantially increase the present-day modeling capability for space weather purposes, and to provide models for transition to the rapid prototyping centers at the space weather forecast centers. This goal requires dose collaborations with and substantial involvement of the research community. The physical regions to be addressed by CCMC-related activities range from the solar atmosphere to the Earth's upper atmosphere. The CCMC is an integral part of the National Space Weather Program Implementation Plan, of NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) initiative, and of the Department of Defense Space Weather Transition Plan. CCMC includes a facility at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, as well as distributed computing facilities provided by the US Air Force. CCMC also provides, to the research community, access to state-of-the-art space research models. In this paper we will provide updates on CCMC status, on current plans, research and development accomplishments and goals, and on the model testing and validation process undertaken as part of the CCMC mandate. Special emphasis will be on solar and heliospheric models currently residing at CCMC, and on plans for validation and verification.

Hesse M.↗
NASA NTRS1999

Software Development Processes Applied to Computational Icing Simulation

The development of computational icing simulation methods is making the transition form the research to common place use in design and certification efforts. As such, standards of code management, design validation, and documentation must be adjusted to accommodate the increased expectations of the user community with respect to accuracy, reliability, capability, and usability. This paper discusses these concepts with regard to current and future icing simulation code development efforts as implemented by the Icing Branch of the NASA Lewis Research Center in collaboration with the NASA Lewis Engineering Design and Analysis Division. With the application of the techniques outlined in this paper, the LEWICE ice accretion code has become a more stable and reliable software product.

Levinson, Laurie H.↗
NASA NTRS1998

NASA's Participation in the National Computational Grid

Over the last several years it has become evident that the character of NASA's supercomputing needs has changed. One of the major missions of the agency is to support the design and manufacture of aero- and space-vehicles with technologies that will significantly reduce their cost. It is becoming clear that improvements in the process of aerospace design and manufacturing will require a high performance information infrastructure that allows geographically dispersed teams to draw upon resources that are broader than traditional supercomputing. A computational grid draws together our information resources into one system. We can foresee the time when a Grid will allow engineers and scientists to use the tools of supercomputers, databases and on line experimental devices in a virtual environment to collaborate with distant colleagues. The concept of a computational grid has been spoken of for many years, but several events in recent times are conspiring to allow us to actually build one. In late 1997 the National Science Foundation initiated the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) which is built around the idea of distributed high performance computing. The Alliance lead, by the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA), and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), lead by the San Diego Supercomputing Center, have been instrumental in drawing together the "Grid Community" to identify the technology bottlenecks and propose a research agenda to address them. During the same period NASA has begun to reformulate parts of two major high performance computing research programs to concentrate on distributed high performance computing and has banded together with the PACI centers to address the research agenda in common.

Feiereisen, William J.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA/ONERA Collaboration on Small Hovering Rotor Broadband Noise Prediction using Lattice-Boltzmann and Structured Navier-Stokes Solvers

This work compares two lattice-Boltzmann method solvers, PowerFLOW and ProLB, and two structured Navier-Stokes solvers, OVERFLOW2 and FAST, used by NASA and ONERA, respectively, for the broadband noise prediction of an ideally twisted rotor as part of Implementing Arrangement number FR-0685-0, ‘Comparing Computational Fluid Dynamics Solvers for Broadband Noise Prediction.’ Predicted results are evaluated against measured data from both smooth and rough blade sets acquired in the Small Hover Anechoic Chamber at the NASA Langley Research Center. Aerodynamic thrust predictions are seen to agree more favorably with the rough-blade measurements, whereas torque predictions agree better with the smooth-blade measurements. A tonal noise comparison shows better agreement to the measured data with the two structured Navier-Stokes solvers than with the two lattice-Boltzmann solvers, which is thought to be caused by the different geometric discretization associated with each solver paradigm. Broadband noise comparisons show that both lattice-Boltzmann method solvers trend well with the smooth-blade measurements, with the exception of an overprediction by ProLB between 4 kHz and 15 kHz. OVERFLOW2 is seen to capture the measured nondeterministic tonal content between 3 kHz and 8 kHz on a narrowband spectral basis and FAST agrees well with the rough blades on a one-third octave band basis.

Christopher S. Thurman↗
NASA NTRS1995

Center for Modeling of Turbulence and Transition: Research Briefs, 1995

This research brief contains the progress reports of the research staff of the Center for Modeling of Turbulence and Transition (CMOTT) from July 1993 to July 1995. It also constitutes a progress report to the Institute of Computational Mechanics in Propulsion located at the Ohio Aerospace Institute and the Lewis Research Center. CMOTT has been in existence for about four years. In the first three years, its main activities were to develop and validate turbulence and combustion models for propulsion systems, in an effort to remove the deficiencies of existing models. Three workshops on computational turbulence modeling were held at LeRC (1991, 1993, 1994). At present, CMOTT is integrating the CMOTT developed/improved models into CFD tools which can be used by the propulsion systems community. This activity has resulted in an increased collaboration with the Lewis CFD researchers.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2006

A History of High-Performance Computing

Faster than most speedy computers. More powerful than its NASA data-processing predecessors. Able to leap large, mission-related computational problems in a single bound. Clearly, it s neither a bird nor a plane, nor does it need to don a red cape, because it s super in its own way. It's Columbia, NASA s newest supercomputer and one of the world s most powerful production/processing units. Named Columbia to honor the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia crewmembers, the new supercomputer is making it possible for NASA to achieve breakthroughs in science and engineering, fulfilling the Agency s missions, and, ultimately, the Vision for Space Exploration. Shortly after being built in 2004, Columbia achieved a benchmark rating of 51.9 teraflop/s on 10,240 processors, making it the world s fastest operational computer at the time of completion. Putting this speed into perspective, 20 years ago, the most powerful computer at NASA s Ames Research Center, home of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division (NAS), ran at a speed of about 1 gigaflop (one billion calculations per second). The Columbia supercomputer is 50,000 times faster than this computer and offers a tenfold increase in capacity over the prior system housed at Ames. What s more, Columbia is considered the world s largest Linux-based, shared-memory system. The system is offering immeasurable benefits to society and is the zenith of years of NASA/private industry collaboration that has spawned new generations of commercial, high-speed computing systems.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS2010

Stennis Space Center Salinity Drifter Project. A Collaborative Project with Hancock High School, Kiln, MS

Presentation topics include: importance of salinity of coastal waters, habitat switching algorithm, habitat switching module, salinity estimates from Landsat for Sabine Calcasieu Basin, percent of time inundated in 2006, salinity data, prototyping the system, system as packaged for field tests, salinity probe and casing, opening for water flow, cellular antenna used to transmit data, preparing to launch, system is launched in the Pearl River at Stennis Space Center, data are transmitted to Twitter by cell phone modem every 15 minutes, Google spreadsheet I used to import the data from the Twitter feed and to compute salinity (from conductivity) and display charts of salinity and temperature, results are uploaded to NASA's Applied Science and Technology Project Office Webpage.

Kalcic, Maria↗
NASA NTRS1999

Computational and Experimental Study of Energetic Material in a Counterflow Microgravity Environment

Ground based (normal gravity) combustion studies can provide important information on the processes by which monopropellants and composite systems burn. The effects of gravitational forces, however, can often complicate the interpretation of the models and the implementation of experiments designed to help elucidate complex issues. We propose to utilize a combined computational/experimental approach in a microgravity environment to understand the interaction of oxidizer-binder diffusion flames in composite propellants. By operating under microgravity conditions we will be able to increase the length scales and suppress the gravitational forces on melting binders such that increased resolution of both major and minor species will be possible thus reducing the demands placed on both the computational and diagnostic tools. Results of a detailed transport/finite rate chemistry model will be compared with nonintrusive optical diagnostic measurements of the structure and extinction of diffusion flames in which oxidizers such as ammonium perchlorate (AP) and ammonium dinitramide (ADN) are counterflowed against realistic binders such as hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB) and 3,3-bis(azidomethyl)oxetane (BAMO). The work proposed herein represents a collaborative effort among the research groups at Yale University, Princeton University and the Combustion Diagnostics Laboratory at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, CA.

Smooke, Mitchell D.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Annual Research Briefs, 2002: Center for Turbulence Research

Turbulent combustion remains the largest component of the CTR's core program. This program and several related activities at CTR are supported by NASA's Ultra Efficient Engine Technology Program. It is also intimately connected with the Department of Energy's ASCI program at Stanford which develops the technology for numerical simulation of realistic aircraft engines using state of the art massively parallel computers. In combustion modeling the attention has been directed to the modeling of higher levels of complexity such as spray dynamics, radiation and soot formation. Major aircraft engine manufacturers have shown considerable interest in this program; in particular, a significant active collaboration exists between CTR and the Pratt & Whitney Corporation. CTR's combustion program is essentially based on the large-eddy simulation technique, LES, which is actively being pursued at CTR for this and many other applications. Important accomplishments in LES included simulations with three-dimensional filters which result in grid independent calculations (that is why we call it "true" LES), and the development of the methodology for integration of LES and Reynolds Averaged computations. Optimization techniques are being studied and used for the important problem of wall boundary conditions for LES as well as for optimal shape design for aeroacoustic and aerodynamic performance gains.

ULTRA EFFICIENT ENGINE TECHNOLOGY↗
NASA NTRS2001

Demonstration of a Segment Alignment Maintenance System on a Seven-Segment Sub-Array of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in collaboration with Blue Line Engineering of Colorado Springs, Colorado, is developing a Segment Alignment Maintenance System (SAMS) for McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). The SAMS shall sense motions of the 91 primary mirror segments and send corrections to HET's primary mirror controller as the mirror segments misalign due to thermo-elastic deformations of the mirror support structure. The SAMS consists of inductive edge sensors supplemented by inclinometers for global radius of curvature sensing. All measurements are sent to the SAMS computer where mirror motion corrections are calculated. In October 2000, a prototype SAMS was installed on a seven-segment cluster of the HET. Subsequent testing has shown that the SAMS concept and architecture are a viable practical approach to maintaining HET's primary mirror figure, or the figure of any large segmented telescope. This paper gives a functional description of the SAMS sub-array components and presents test data to characterize the performance of the sub-array SAMS.

Rakoczy, John↗