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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

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NASA NTRS1984

Study of utilization of advanced composites in fuselage structures of large transports

The effort required by the transport aircraft manufacturers to support the introduction of advanced composite materials into the fuselage structure of future commercial and military transport aircraft is investigated. Technology issues, potential benefits to military life cycle costs and commercial operating costs, and development plans are examined. The most urgent technology issues defined are impact dynamics, acoustic transmission, pressure containment and damage tolerance, post-buckling, cutouts, and joints and splices. A technology demonstration program is defined and a rough cost and schedule identified. The fabrication and test of a full-scale fuselage barrel section is presented. Commercial and military benefits are identified. Fuselage structure weight savings from use of advanced composites are 16.4 percent for the commercial and 21.8 percent for the military. For the all-composite airplanes the savings are 26 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Commercial/operating costs are reduced by 5 percent for the all-composite airplane and military life cycle costs by 10 percent.

Jackson, A. C.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Ozone Treatment For Cooling Towers

Report presents results of study of cooling tower in which water treated with ozone instead of usual chemical agents. Bacteria and scale reduced without pollution and at low cost. Operating and maintenance costs with treatment about 30 percent of those of treatment by other chemicals. Corrosion rates no greater than with other chemicals. Advantage of ozone, even though poisonous, quickly detected by smell in very low concentrations.

Blackwelder, Rick↗

NASA NTRS1990

SE and I system testability: The key to space system FDIR and verification testing

The key to implementing self-diagnosing design is a systems engineering task focused on design for testability concurrent with design for functionality. The design for testability process described here is the product of several years of DOD study and experience. Its application to the space station has begun on Work Package II under NASA and McDonnell direction. Other work package teams are being briefed by Harris Corporation with the hope of convincing them to embrace the process. For the purpose of this discussion the term testability is used to describe the systems engineering process by which designers can assure themselves and their reviewers that their designs are TESTABLE, that is they will support the downstream process of determining their functionality. Due to the complexity and density of present-day state-of-the-art designs, such as pipeline processors and high-speed integrated circuit technology, testability feature design is a critical requirement of the functional design process. A systematic approach to Space systems test and checkout as well as fault detection fault isolation reconfiguration (FDFIR) will minimize operational costs and maximize operational efficiency. An effective design for the testability program must be implemented by all contractors to insure meeting this objective. The process is well understood and technology is here to support it.

Barry, Thomas↗

NASA NTRS1991

Design of a turbofan powered regional transport aircraft

The majority of the market for small commercial transport aircraft is dominated by high-efficiency, propeller-driven aircraft of non-U.S. manufacture. During the past year design teams responded to a Request For Proposal (RFP) for a regional transport aircraft. The RFP development identified promising world markets and their needs. Aircraft are designed with ranges of up to 1500 nautical miles and passenger loads between 50 and 90. During the design project, special emphasis was placed upon keeping acquisition cost and direct operating costs at a low level while providing passengers with superior comfort levels. This paper describes the background that led to this effort, and a brief description of some of the designs.

Weisshaar, Terrence A.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Design of a turbofan powered regional transport aircraft

The majority of the market for small commercial transport aircraft is dominated by high efficiency propeller driven aircraft of non-U.S. manufacture. During the past year, an aircraft was designed with ranges of up to 1500 nautical miles and passenger loads between 50 and 90. Special emphasis was placed upon keeping acquisition cost and direct operating costs at a low level while providing passengers with quality comfort levels. Several designs are presented which place a high premium on design innovation.

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NASA NTRS1991

Design of a turbofan powered regional transport aircraft

The majority of the market for small commercial transport aircraft is dominated by high-efficiency, propeller-driven aircraft of non-U.S. manufacture. During the past year senior student design teams at Purdue developed and then responded to a Request For Proposal (RFP) for a regional transport aircraft. The RFP development identified promising world markets and their needs. The students responded by designing aircraft with ranges of up to 1500 n.m. and passenger loads of 50 to 90. During the design project, special emphasis was placed upon keeping acquisition cost and direct operating costs at a low level while providing passengers with quality comfort levels. Twelve student teams worked for one semester developing their designs. Several of the more successful designs and those that placed a high premium on innovation are described. The depth of detail and analysis in these student efforts are also illustrated.

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NASA NTRS1994

The associate principal astronomer telescope operations model

This paper outlines a new telescope operations model that is intended to achieve low operating costs with high operating efficiency and high scientific productivity. The model is based on the existing Principal Astronomer approach used in conjunction with ATIS, a language for commanding remotely located automatic telescopes. This paper introduces the notion of an Associate Principal Astronomer, or APA. At the heart of the APA is automatic observation loading and scheduling software, and it is this software that is expected to help achieve efficient and productive telescope operations. The purpose of the APA system is to make it possible for astronomers to submit observation requests to and obtain resulting data from remote automatic telescopes, via the Internet, in a highly-automated way that minimizes human interaction with the system and maximizes the scientific return from observing time.

Drummond, Mark↗

NASA NTRS1999

Application of Reconfigurable Avionics for the Bantam Launch Vehicle

The modern aerospace market is placing increasing pressure on launch costs. This is particularly true for small university science payloads, where the cost of the experiment itself is relatively low, and the launch frequency is potentially very high. It is the stated goal of NASA's Bantam Program to reduce dramatically the costs of launching this class of payloads to the order of $1,000,000 per launch for a single 200 pound payload. The envisioned Bantam vehicle is a multi-stage reusable launch system. Meeting the Program's goal for this versatile type of vehicle requires reductions in production cost, maintenance cost, and the operation cost. However, the cost of avionics is a relatively small fraction of the overall cost of launching a payload, and a simple reduction in the avionics costs will not achieve the Bantam goal. Only by reducing weight, volume, and power, while enhancing computational capability can the avionics be used to address the system-level cost reduction requirements.

Wallace, Kevin Shawn↗

NASA NTRS2002

Telescience Resource Kit

The Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) is a PC based ground control system. It can be used by a single individual or in a group environment to monitor and control spacecraft systems and payloads. Capabilities include data receipt, data processing, data storage, data management, and data transmission. Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and software have been employed to reduce development costs, operations and maintenance costs, and to effectively take advantage of new commercial products as they become available. The TReK system is currently being used to monitor and control payloads aboard the International Space Station. It is located at sites around the world.

Schneider, Michelle↗

NASA NTRS2011

Lowering the Cost of Mission Operations: JPL's Mission Infrastructure Service

No abstract available

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NASA NTRS2015

Multi-Shock Shield Performance at 15 MJ for Catalogued Debris

While orbital debris of ten centimeters or more are tracked and catalogued, the difficulty of finding and accurately accounting for forces acting on the objects near the ten centimeter threshold results in both uncertainty of their presence and location. These challenges result in difficult decisions for operators balancing potential costly operational approaches with system loss risk. In this paper, the assessment of the feasibility of protecting a spacecraft from this catalogued debris is described using numerical simulations and a test of a multi-shock shield system against a cylindrical projectile impacting normal to the surface with approximately 15 MJ of kinetic energy. The hypervelocity impact test has been conducted at the Arnold Engineering Development Complex (AEDC) with a 598 g projectile at 6.905 km/s on a NASA supplied multi-shock shield. The projectile used is a hollow aluminum and nylon cylinder with an outside diameter of 8.6 cm and length of 10.3 cm. Figure 1 illustrates the multi-shock shield test article, which consisted of five separate bumpers, four of which are fiberglass fabric and one of steel mesh, and two rear walls, each consisting of Kevlar fabric. The overall length of the test article was 2.65 m. The test article was a 5X scaled-up version of a smaller multi-shock shield previously tested using a 1.4 cm diameter aluminum projectile for an inflatable module project. The distances represented by S1 and S1/2 in the figure are 61 cm and 30.5 cm, respectively. Prior to the impact test, hydrodynamic simulations indicated that some enhancement to the standard multi-shock system is needed to address the effects of the cylindrical shape of the projectile. Based on the simulations, a steel mesh bumper has been added to the shield configuration to enhance the fragmentation of the projectile. The AEDC test occurred as planned, and the modified NASA multi-shock shield successfully stopped 598 g projectile using 85.6 kg/m(exp 2). The fifth bumper layer remained in tact, although it was torn free from its support structure and thrown into the first rear wall. The outer Kevlar layer of the first rear wall tore likely from the impact of the fifth bumper's support structure, but the back of the rear wall was intact. No damage occurred to the second rear wall, or to the witness plate behind the target.

Miller, J. E.↗

NASA NTRS2014

Multi-shock Shield Performance at 16.5 MJ for Catalogued Debris

Miller, J. E.↗

NASA NTRS2017

Cooling of Electric Motors Used for Propulsion on SCEPTOR

NASA is developing a suite of hybrid-electric propulsion technologies for aircraft. These technologies have the benefit of lower emissions, diminished noise, increased efficiency, and reduced fuel burn. These will provide lower operating costs for aircraft operators. Replacing internal combustion engines with distributed electric propulsion is a keystone of this technology suite, but presents many new problems to aircraft system designers. One of the problems is how to cool these electric motors without adding significant aerodynamic drag, cooling system weight or fan power. This paper discusses the options evaluated for cooling the motors on SCEPTOR (Scalable Convergent Electric Propulsion Technology and Operations Research): a project that will demonstrate Distributed Electric Propulsion technology in flight. Options for external and internal cooling, inlet and exhaust locations, ducting and adjustable cowling, and axial and centrifugal fans were evaluated. The final design was based on a trade between effectiveness, simplicity, robustness, mass and performance over a range of ground and flight operation environments.

Propulsion↗

NASA NTRS2017

Giovanni in the Cloud: Earth Science Data Exploration in Amazon Web Services

Giovanni is an exploration tool at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data Information Services Center (GES DISC), providing 22 analysis and visualization services for over 1600 Earth Science data variables. Owing to its popularity, Giovanni has experienced a consistent growth in overall demand, with periodic usage spikes attributed to trainings by education organizations, extensive data analysis in response to natural disasters, preparations for science meetings, etc. Furthermore, the new generation of spaceborne sensors and high resolution models have resulted in an exponential growth in data volume with data distributed across the traditional boundaries of data centers. Seamless exploration of data (without users having to worry about data center boundaries) has been a key recommendation of the GES DISC User Working Group. These factors have required new strategies for delivering acceptable performance. The cloud-based Giovanni, built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), evaluates (1) AWS native solutions to provide a scalable, serverless architecture; (2) open standards for data storage in the Cloud; (3) a cost model for operations; and (4) end-user performance. Our preliminary findings indicate that the use of serverless architecture has a potential to significantly reduce development and operational cost of Giovanni. The combination of using AWS managed services, storage of data in open standards, and schema-on-read data access strategy simplifies data access and analytics, in addition to making data more accessible to the end users of Giovanni through popular programming languages.

Giovanni↗

NASA NTRS2016

Lunar COTS: Using the Moon's Resources to Enable An Economical and Sustainable Pathway to Mars and Beyond

To support NASAs goal of sending humans to Mars, a new plan was constructed to develop and demonstrate cislunar capabilities and services in partnership with commercial industry using the well-proven Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program acquisition model. The NASA COTS Program was a very successful program that developed and demonstrated cost-effective commercial cargo transportation services to the International Space Station (ISS). As a result of NASAs COTS program, two new launch vehicles and spacecraft were developed and have been successfully performing cargo transportation missions to the ISS since 2012. The COTS acquisition strategy utilized a new model than normally accepted in traditional procurement practices. This new model used Space Act Agreements where NASA entered into partnerships with industry to jointly share cost, development and operational risks to demonstrate new capabilities for mutual benefit. This model proved to be very beneficial to both NASA and its industry partners as NASA saved significantly in development and operational costs, as much as tenfold, while industry partners successfully expanded their market share of the global launch transportation business for significant economic benefit. Using the COTS acquisition model as a basis, a new plan, notionally referred to as Lunar Commercial Orbital Transfer Services (or Lunar COTS), has been developed to determine the potential benefits and challenges of a new Lunar COTS plan[1]. The proposed plan includes low-cost, commercial-enabled missions to prospect for resources, determine the economic viability of extracting those resources and assess the value proposition of using these resources in future exploration architectures such as Mars. These missions would be accomplished in partnership with industry to meet these exploration goals but will also have the capability to carry payloads to meet science goals as well.

Zuniga, Allison↗

NASA NTRS1986

Prospects for advanced rocket-powered launch vehicles

The potential for advanced rocket-powered launch vehicles to meet the challenging cost, operational, and performance demands of space transportation in the early 21st century is examined. Space transportation requirements from recent studies underscoring the need for growth in capacity in support of an increasing diversity of space activities and the need for significant reductions in operational and life-cycle costs are reviewed. Fully reusable rocket powered concepts based on moderate levels of evolutionary advanced technology are described. These vehicles provide a broad range of attractive concept alternatives with the potential to meet demanding operational and cost goals and the flexibility to satisfy a variety of vehicle architecture, mission, vehicle concept, and technology options.

Eldred, C. H.↗

NASA NTRS1977

The Potential for Helicopter Passenger Service in Major Urban Areas

An interurban helicopter cost model having the capability of selecting an efficient helicopter network for a given city in terms of service and total operating costs was developed. This model which is based upon the relationship between total and direct operating costs and the number of block hours of helicopter operation is compiled in terms of a computer program which simulates the operation of an intracity helicopter fleet over a given network. When applied to specific urban areas, the model produces results in terms of a break-even air passenger market penetration rate, which is the percent of the air travelers in each of those areas that must patronize the helicopter network to make it break even commercially. A total of twenty major metropolitan areas are analyzed and are ranked initially according to cost per seat mile and then according to break-even penetration rate.

Dajani, J. S.↗

NASA NTRS1971

Integrated operations/payloads/fleet analysis. Volume 3: System costs. Appendix A: Program direct costs

Individualized program direct costs for each satellite program are presented. This breakdown provides the activity level dependent costs for each satellite program. The activity level dependent costs, or, more simply, program direct costs, are comprised of the total payload costs (as these costs are strictly program dependent) and the direct launch vehicle costs. Only those incremental launch vehicle costs associated directly with the satellite program are considered. For expendable launch vehicles the direct costs include the vehicle investment hardware costs and the launch operations costs. For the reusable STS vehicles the direct costs include only the launch operations, recovery operations, command and control, vehicle maintenance, and propellant support. The costs associated with amortization of reusable vehicle investment, RDT&E range support, etc., are not included.

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