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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

Mass flow requirements for LFC wing design

The problem of determining optimum suction mass flow requirements for LFC wings is addressed. Some previous methods for predicting the extent of laminar flow over swept wings with suction are briefly reviewed. These range from the purely empirical to those utilizing tabulated linear stability computations. The present method is described. This method solves the linear, incompressible stability equations by spectral techniques. The maximum temporal amplification of boundary layer crossflow and 2-D disturbances is determined for waves of a given frequency. Group velocities are used to integrate these amplification rates along the wing to yield the logarithmic amplitude ratio or 'N factor' of the disturbance. The 'N factor' calibration of a computer code utilizing this method is described, using experimentally determined transition data. The method is shown to be as consistent as previously used 'fixed wavelength' methods.

Srokowski, A. J.↗

A two-dimensional model of odd nitrogen in the thermosphere and mesosphere

Satellite measurements of the global nitric oxide distribution demonstrating the need for a two dimensional model of odd nitrogen photochemistry and transport in the thermosphere and mesosphere are reviewed. The main characteristics of a new code solving the transport equation for N(4S), N(2D), and N0 are given. This model extends from pole to pole between 75 and 275 km and reacts to the magnetic activity, the ultraviolet solar flux, and the neutral wind field. The effects of ionization and subsequent odd nitrogen production by high latitude particle precipitation are also included. Preliminary results are illustrated for a magnetically quiet solar minimum period with no neutral wind.

Gerard, J. C.↗

A forward error correction technique using a high-speed, high-rate single chip codec

The authors describe an error-correction coding approach that allows operation in either burst or continuous modes at data rates of multiple hundreds of megabits per second. Bandspreading is low since the code rate is 7/8 or greater, which is consistent with high-rate link operation. The encoder, along with a hard-decision decoder, fits on a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip. Soft-decision decoding is possible utilizing applique hardware in conjunction with the hard-decision decoder. Expected coding gain is a function of the application and is approximately 2.5 dB for hard-decision decoding at 10-5 bit-error rate with phase-shift-keying modulation and additive Gaussian white noise interference. The principal use envisioned for this technique is to achieve a modest amount of coding gain on high-data-rate, bandwidth-constrained channels. Data rates of up to 300 Mb/s can be accommodated by the codec chip. The major objective is burst-mode communications, where code words are composed of 32 n data bits followed by 32 overhead bits.

Boyd, R. W.↗

Benefits to the nation from astronomy and astrophysics

It is argued that astronomy makes unexpectantly large contributions to formal and informal science education, given the small number of research astronomers. Technology transfer and spin-offs from astronomy have important applications in medicine, industry, defence, environmental monitoring, and consumer products. Astronomy provides unusually promising opportunities for international cooperation. Other sciences benefit from synergistic interactions with astronomy. A review is given of astronomy education and teacher training. The role of astronomy in medicine, industry, defence, energy technology, the environment, and everyday life is reviewed.

Trimble, Virginia↗

Effect of InAlAs window layer on efficiency of indium phosphide solar cells

Indium phosphide (InP) solar cell efficiencies are limited by surface recombination. The effect of a wide bandgap, lattice-matched indium aluminum arsenide (In(0.52)Al(0.48)As) window layer on the performance of InP solar cells was investigated by using the numerical code PC-1D. The p(+)n InP solar cell performance improved significantly with the use of the window layer. No improvement was seen for the n(+)p InP cells. The cell results were explained by the band diagram of the heterostructure and the conduction band energy discontinuity. The calculated current voltage and internal quantum efficiency results clearly demonstrated that In(0.52)Al(0.48)As is a very promising candidate for a window layer material for p(+)n InP solar cells.

Jain, Raj K.↗

Effect of InAlAs window layer on the efficiency of indium phosphide solar cells

Indium phosphide (InP) solar cell efficiencies are limited by surface recombination. The effect of a wide-bandgap lattice-matched indium aluminum arsenide (In0.52Al0.48As) window layer on the performance of InP solar cells was investigated using a numerical code PC-1D. The p(+)n InP solar cell performance improves significantly with the use of a window layer. No improvement is seen for n(+)p InP cells. Cell results are explained by the band diagram of the heterostructure and the conduction-band energy discontinuity. The calculated I-V and internal quantum efficiency results clearly demonstrate that In0.52Al0.48As is a promising candidate as a window layer material for p(+)n InP solar cells.

Jain, R. K.↗

Pressurization of cryogens - A review of current technology and its applicability to low-gravity conditions

A review of technology, history, and current status for pressurized expulsion of cryogenic tankage is presented. Use of tank pressurization to expel cryogenic fluid will continue to be studied for future spacecraft applications over a range of operating conditions in the low-gravity environment. The review examines experimental test results and analytical model development for quiescent and agitated conditions in normal-gravity followed by a discussion of pressurization and expulsion in low-gravity. Validated, 1-D, finite difference codes exist for the prediction of pressurant mass requirements within the range of quiescent normal-gravity test data. To date, the effects of liquid sloshing have been characterized by tests in normal-gravity, but analytical models capable of predicting pressurant gas requirements remain unavailable. Efforts to develop multidimensional modeling capabilities in both normal and low-gravity have recently occurred. Low-gravity cryogenic fluid transfer experiments are needed to obtain low-gravity pressurized expulsion data. This data is required to guide analytical model development and to verify code performance.

Van Dresar, N. T.↗

Modifications of the Griesmer bound

The Griesmer bound is a classical technique (developed in 1960) for estimating the minimum length n required for a binary linear code with a given dimension k and minimum distance d. In this article, a unified derivation of the Griesmer bound and two new variations on it are presented. The first variation deals with linear codes which contain the all-ones vector; such codes are quite common and are useful in practice because of their 'transparent' properties. The second variation deals with codes that are constrained to contain a word of weight greater than or equal to M. In both cases these constraints (the all-ones word or a word of high weight) can increase the minimum length of a code with given k and d.

Mceliece, R. J.↗

On the design of turbo codes

In this article, we design new turbo codes that can achieve near-Shannon-limit performance. The design criterion for random interleavers is based on maximizing the effective free distance of the turbo code, i.e., the minimum output weight of codewords due to weight-2 input sequences. An upper bound on the effective free distance of a turbo code is derived. This upper bound can be achieved if the feedback connection of convolutional codes uses primitive polynomials. We review multiple turbo codes (parallel concatenation of q convolutional codes), which increase the so-called 'interleaving gain' as q and the interleaver size increase, and a suitable decoder structure derived from an approximation to the maximum a posteriori probability decision rule. We develop new rate 1/3, 2/3, 3/4, and 4/5 constituent codes to be used in the turbo encoder structure. These codes, for from 2 to 32 states, are designed by using primitive polynomials. The resulting turbo codes have rates b/n (b = 1, 2, 3, 4 and n = 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and include random interleavers for better asymptotic performance. These codes are suitable for deep-space communications with low throughput and for near-Earth communications where high throughput is desirable. The performance of these codes is within 1 dB of the Shannon limit at a bit-error rate of 10(exp -6) for throughputs from 1/15 up to 4 bits/s/Hz.

Divsalar, D.↗

Pilot Injector Redesign to Reduce N+3 Cycle Emissions for a Gas-Turbine Combustor

An overview is given of an effort for the use of CFD analysis to complement design and configuration definition of third generation Lean-Direct Injection combustion concepts (LDI-3) for NASA’s N+3 program. The National Combustion Code (OpenNCC) was used to perform non-reacting and two-phase reacting flow computations for a three-cup, nineteen-element flame tube array with redesigned pilot injectors to improve spray and emissions characteristics when compared to a previous LDI-3 design. All computations were performed with a consistent approach to mesh-generation, spray modeling, ignition and kinetics modeling for a ‘medium-power’ cycle condition. Computational predictions of the aerodynamics of a new pre-filming pilot injector were used to arrive at an optimized aerothermal design that meets effective area and fuel-air mixing criteria. The newly designed pilot injectors were shown to provide considerable improvements in aerodynamic stability, flame-tube pattern factor and NOx emissions, when compared to the original design.

nitrogen oxides injectors↗

Toward Transition Modeling in a Hypersonic Boundary Layer at Flight Conditions

An accurate physics-based transition prediction method integrated with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solvers is pursued for hypersonic boundary layer flows over slender hypersonic vehicles at flight conditions. The geometry and flow conditions are selected to match relevant trajectory locations from the ascent phase of the HIFiRE-1 flight experiment, namely, a 7-degree half-angle cone with 2.5 mm nose radius, freestream Mach numbers in the range of 3.8 – 5.5 and freestream unit Reynolds numbers in the range of 3.3 × 10(exp 6) – 21.4 × 10(exp 6) m(exp -1). Earlier research had shown that the onset of transition during the HIFiRE-1 flight experiment correlated with an amplification factor of N ≈ 13.5 for the planar Mack modes. However, to incorporate the N-factor correlations into a CFD code, we investigate surrogate models for disturbance amplification that avoid the direct computation of stability characteristics. A commonly used approach for low-speed flows is based on an a priori database of stability characteristics for locally similar profiles. However, the results presented in this paper demonstrate that the application of this approach to hypersonic boundary layers over blunt spherical nose-tip cones leads to large, unacceptable errors in the predictions of amplification factors, mainly due to its failure in accounting for the effects of the entropy layer on the boundary-layer profiles along the length of the model. We propose and demonstrate an alternate approach that employs the stability computations for a canonical set of blunt cone configurations to train a physics-informed convolutional neural network model that is shown to provide substantially improved transition predictions for hypersonic flow configurations with entropy-layer effects. Furthermore, the excellent performance of the neural network model is also confirmed for cone configurations with nose radius and half-angle values that do not correspond to those used to build the database. Finally, the convolutional neural network model is shown to outperform the linear stability calculations for underresolved basic states.

Pedro Paredes↗

Estimating the size of Huffman code preambles

Data compression via block-adaptive Huffman coding is considered. The compressor consecutively processes blocks of N data symbols, estimates source statistics by computing the relative frequencies of each source symbol in the block, and then synthesizes a Huffman code based on these estimates. In order to let the decompressor know which Huffman code is being used, the compressor must begin the transmission of each compressed block with a short preamble or header file. This file is an encoding of the list n = (n(sub 1), n(sub 2)....,n(sub m)), where n(sub i) is the length of the Hufffman codeword associated with the ith source symbol. A simple method of doing this encoding is to individually encode each n(sub i) into a fixed-length binary word of length log(sub 2)l, where l is an a priori upper bound on the codeword length. This method produces a maximum preamble length of mlog(sub 2)l bits. The object is to show that, in most cases, no substantially shorter header of any kind is possible.

Mceliece, R. J.↗

LDPC Codes with Minimum Distance Proportional to Block Size

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes characterized by minimum Hamming distances proportional to block sizes have been demonstrated. Like the codes mentioned in the immediately preceding article, the present codes are error-correcting codes suitable for use in a variety of wireless data-communication systems that include noisy channels. The previously mentioned codes have low decoding thresholds and reasonably low error floors. However, the minimum Hamming distances of those codes do not grow linearly with code-block sizes. Codes that have this minimum-distance property exhibit very low error floors. Examples of such codes include regular LDPC codes with variable degrees of at least 3. Unfortunately, the decoding thresholds of regular LDPC codes are high. Hence, there is a need for LDPC codes characterized by both low decoding thresholds and, in order to obtain acceptably low error floors, minimum Hamming distances that are proportional to code-block sizes. The present codes were developed to satisfy this need. The minimum Hamming distances of the present codes have been shown, through consideration of ensemble-average weight enumerators, to be proportional to code block sizes. As in the cases of irregular ensembles, the properties of these codes are sensitive to the proportion of degree-2 variable nodes. A code having too few such nodes tends to have an iterative decoding threshold that is far from the capacity threshold. A code having too many such nodes tends not to exhibit a minimum distance that is proportional to block size. Results of computational simulations have shown that the decoding thresholds of codes of the present type are lower than those of regular LDPC codes. Included in the simulations were a few examples from a family of codes characterized by rates ranging from low to high and by thresholds that adhere closely to their respective channel capacity thresholds; the simulation results from these examples showed that the codes in question have low error floors as well as low decoding thresholds. As an example, the illustration shows the protograph (which represents the blueprint for overall construction) of one proposed code family for code rates greater than or equal to 1.2. Any size LDPC code can be obtained by copying the protograph structure N times, then permuting the edges. The illustration also provides Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) hardware performance simulations for this code family. In addition, the illustration provides minimum signal-to-noise ratios (Eb/No) in decibels (decoding thresholds) to achieve zero error rates as the code block size goes to infinity for various code rates. In comparison with the codes mentioned in the preceding article, these codes have slightly higher decoding thresholds.

Divsalar, Dariush↗

High temperature transport properties of air - N-O interaction energies and collision integrals

Potential curves for the higher-lying states of NO are used together with a general scattering code to compute accurate values of transport collision integrals for N(4S/0/)-O(3P) interactions. It is found that the major contribution to the collision integrals comes from these higher-lying states of NO. New values of the collision integrals for N(4S/0/)-N(4S/0/) and O(3P)-O(3P) interactions are computed as well. The tabulations of the collision integrals cover a broad range of temperatures from 250 to 100,000 K and can be used to determine transport properties such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, and the diffusion coefficient to the second order.

Levin, E.↗

The fast decoding of Reed-Solomon codes using high-radix fermat theoretic transforms

Fourier-like transforms over GF(F sub n), where F sub n = 2(2n) + 1 is a Fermat prime, are applied in decoding Reed-Solomon codes. It is shown that such transforms can be computed using high-radix fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithms requiring considerably fewer multiplications than the more usual radix 2 FFT algorithm. A special 256-symbol, 16-symbol-error-correcting, Reed-Solomon (RS) code for space communication-link applications can be encoded and decoded using this high-radix FFT algorithm over GF(F sub 3).

Liu, K. Y.↗

The 13th Technology of Deep Space One

On October 24th, 1998, the Deep Space One (DS-1) spacecraft launched aboard a Delta II rocket as the first step towards the bold task of testing and validating 12 new technologies for future missions. This launch also represented yet another thrilling event; namely, the successful test and validation of a 13th heretofore undisclosed technology: model-base-code-generation of the spacecraft's system-level fault-protection (FP) software from behavioral state diagrams and structural models.

model-based-code-generation↗