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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 19 records

Uncertainty Modeling of Pollutant Transport in Atmosphere and Aquatic Route Using Soft Computing

Hazardous radionuclides are released as pollutants in the atmospheric and aquatic environment (ATAQE) during the normal operation of nuclear power plants. Atmospheric and aquatic dispersion models are routinely used to assess the impact of release of radionuclide from any nuclear facility or hazardous chemicals from any chemical plant on the ATAQE. Effect of the exposure from the hazardous nuclides or chemicals is measured in terms of risk. Uncertainty modeling is an integral part of the risk assessment. The paper focuses the uncertainty modeling of the pollutant transport in atmospheric and aquatic environment using soft computing. Soft computing is addressed due to the lack of information on the parameters that represent the corresponding models. Soft-computing in this domain basically addresses the usage of fuzzy set theory to explore the uncertainty of the model parameters and such type of uncertainty is called as epistemic uncertainty. Each uncertain input parameters of the model is described by a triangular membership function.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Ambient temperature modelling with soft computing techniques

This paper proposes a hybrid approach based on soft computing techniques in order to estimate monthly and daily ambient temperature. Indeed, we combine the back-propagation (BP) algorithm and the simple Genetic Algorithm (GA) in order to effectively train artificial neural networks (ANN) in such a way that the BP algorithm initialises a few individuals of the GA's population. Experiments concerned monthly temperature estimation of unknown places and daily temperature estimation for thermal load computation. Results have shown remarkable improvements in accuracy compared to traditional methods. (author)

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Soft Computing Application in Fault Detection of Induction Motor

The paper investigates the effectiveness of different patter classifier like Feed Forward Back Propagation (FFBPN), Radial Basis Function (RBF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for detection of bearing faults in Induction Motor. The steady state motor current with Park's Transformation has been used for discrimination of inner race and outer race bearing defects. The RBF neural network shows very encouraging results for multi-class classification problems and is hoped to set up a base for incipient fault detection of induction motor. SVM is also found to be a very good fault classifier which is highly competitive with RBF.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Characterizing Fractures in Geysers Geothermal Field by Micro-seismic Data, Using Soft Computing, Fractals, and Shear Wave Anisotropy

The ultimate objective of the project was to develop new methodologies to characterize the northwestern part of The Geysers geothermal reservoir (Sonoma County, California). The goal is to gain a better knowledge of the reservoir porosity, permeability, fracture size, fracture spacing, reservoir discontinuities (leaky barriers) and impermeable boundaries.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗

Mutual capacitance of liquid conductors in deformable tactile sensing arrays

Advances in highly deformable electronics are needed in order to enable emerging categories of soft computing devices ranging from wearable electronics, to medical devices, and soft robotic components. The combination of highly elastic substrates with intrinsically stretchable conductors holds the promise of enabling electronic sensors that can conform to curved objects, reconfigurable displays, or soft biological tissues, including the skin. Here, we contribute sensing principles for tactile (mechanical image) sensors based on very low modulus polymer substrates with embedded liquid metal microfluidic arrays. The sensors are fabricated using a single-step casting method that utilizes fine nylon filaments to produce arrays of cylindrical channels on two layers. The liquid metal (gallium indium alloy) conductors that fill these channels readily adopt the shape of the embedding membrane, yielding levels of deformability greater than 400%, due to the use of soft polymer substrates. We modeled the sensor performance using electrostatic theory and continuum mechanics, yielding excellent agreement with experiments. Using a matrix-addressed capacitance measurement technique, we are able to resolve strain distributions with millimeter resolution over areas of several square centimeters.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Advanced control strategies for heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and refrigeration systems—An overview: Part I: Hard control

A chronological overview of the advanced control strategies for heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and refrigeration (HVAC&R) is presented in this article. The overview focuses on hard-computing or control techniques, such as proportional-integral-derivative, optimal, nonlinear, adaptive, and robust; soft-computing or control techniques, such as neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms; and on the fusion or hybrid of hard- and soft-control techniques. Thus, it is to be noted that the terminology “hard” and “soft” computing/control has nothing to do with the “hardware” and “software” that is being generally used. Part I of a two-part series focuses on hard-control strategies, and Part II focuses on softand fusion-control in addition to some future directions in HVAC&R research. This overview is not intended to be an exhaustive survey on this topic, and any omission of other works is purely unintentional.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DETERMINING HEATING RATES IN RECONNECTION FORMED FLARE LOOPS OF THE M8.0 FLARE ON 2005 MAY 13

We analyze and model an M8.0 flare on 2005 May 13 observed by the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer and the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) to determine the energy release rate from magnetic reconnection that forms and heats numerous flare loops. The flare exhibits two ribbons in UV 1600 A emission. Analysis shows that the UV light curve at each flaring pixel rises impulsively within a few minutes, and decays slowly with a timescale longer than 10 minutes. Since the lower atmosphere (the transition region and chromosphere) responds to energy deposit nearly instantaneously, the rapid UV brightening is thought to reflect the energy release process in the newly formed flare loop rooted at the footpoint. In this paper, we utilize the spatially resolved (down to 1'') UV light curves and the thick-target hard X-ray emission to construct heating functions of a few thousand flare loops anchored at the UV footpoints, and compute plasma evolution in these loops using the enthalpy-based thermal evolution of loops model. The modeled coronal temperatures and densities of these flare loops are then used to calculate coronal radiation. The computed soft X-ray spectra and light curves compare favorably with those observed by RHESSI and by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite X-ray Sensor. The time-dependent transition region differential emission measure for each loop during its decay phase is also computed with a simplified model and used to calculate the optically thin C IV line emission, which dominates the UV 1600 A bandpass during the flare. The computed C IV line emission decays at the same rate as observed. This study presents a method to constrain heating of reconnection-formed flare loops using all available observables independently, and provides insight into the physics of energy release and plasma heating during the flare. With this method, the lower limit of the total energy used to heat the flare loops in this event is estimated to be 1.22 Multiplication-Sign 10{sup 31} erg, of which only 1.9 Multiplication-Sign 10{sup 30} erg is carried by beam-driven upflows during the impulsive phase, suggesting that the coronal plasmas are predominantly heated in situ.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Geometrically frustrated interactions drive structural complexity in amorphous calcium carbonate

Amorphous calcium carbonate is an important precursor for biomineralization in marine organisms. Key outstanding problems include understanding the structure of amorphous calcium carbonate and rationalizing its metastability as an amorphous phase. Here we report high-quality atomistic models of amorphous calcium carbonate generated using state-of-the-art interatomic potentials to help guide fits to X-ray total scattering data. Exploiting a recently developed inversion approach, we extract from these models the effective Ca∙∙∙Ca interaction potential governing the structure. This potential contains minima at two competing distances, corresponding to the two different ways that carbonate ions bridge Ca 2+ -ion pairs. We reveal an unexpected mapping to the Lennard-Jones–Gauss model normally studied in the context of computational soft matter. The empirical model parameters for amorphous calcium carbonate take values known to promote structural complexity. We thus show that both the complex structure and its resilience to crystallization are actually encoded in the geometrically frustrated effective interactions between Ca 2+ ions.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Examining the role of fluctuations in the early stages of homogenous polymer crystallization with simulation and statistical learning

Here, we propose a relationship between the dynamics in the amorphous and crystalline domains during polymer crystallization: the fluctuations of ordering-rate about a material-specific value in the amorphous phase drive those fluctuations associated with the increase in percent crystallinity. This suggests a differential equation that satisfies the three experimentally observed time regimes for the rate of crystal growth. To test this postulated expression, we applied a suite of statistical learning tools to molecular dynamics simulations to extract the relevant phenomenology. This study shows that the proposed relationship holds in the early time regime. It illustrates the effectiveness of soft computing tools in the analysis of coarse-grained simulations in which patterns exist, but may not easily yield to strict quantitative evaluation. This ability assists us in characterizing the critical early time molecular arrangement during the primary nucleation phase of polymer melt crystallization. In addition to supporting the validity of the proposed kinetics expression, the simulations show that (i) the classical nucleation and growth mechanism is active in the early stages of ordering; (ii) the number of nuclei and their masses grow linearly during this early time regime; and (iii) a fixed inter-nuclei distance is established.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Computational design of soft materials for the capture of Cs-137 in contaminated environments: From 2D covalent cucurbituril networks to 3D supramolecular materials

Using computational quantum chemistry methods we design novel 2D and 3D soft materials made of cucurbituril macrocycles covalently connected with each other via rigid linkers. Such covalent cucurbituril networks might be useful for the capture of radioactive Cs-137 (present as Cs{sup +}) in the contaminated environment.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Computation of the soft anomalous dimension matrix in coordinate space

We complete the coordinate space calculation of the three-parton correlation in the two-loop massive soft anomalous dimension matrix. The full answer agrees with the result found previously by a different approach. The coordinate space treatment of renormalized two-loop gluon exchange diagrams exhibits their color symmetries in a transparent fashion. We compare coordinate space calculations of the soft anomalous dimension matrix with massive and massless eikonal lines and examine its nonuniform limit at absolute threshold.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Whole program Adaptive Error Detection and Mitigation

Our project investigated methods to detect soft errors in computing systems. Such detection schemes must have low overheads and also generate no false positives. Our solutions focused on control-space error detection based on changing addressing schemes so that faults tend to cascade – rather than being masked. Our solutions also addressed data-space error detection by synthesizing error detectors based on rigorous floating-point error analysis.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Whole program Adaptive Error Detection and Mitigation

Our project investigated methods to detect soft errors in computing systems. Such detection schemes must have low overheads and also generate no false positives. Our solutions focused on control-space error detection based on changing addressing schemes so that faults tend to cascade – rather than being masked. Our solutions also addressed data-space error detection by synthesizing error detectors based on rigorous floating-point error analysis.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Prospects for strong coupling measurement at hadron colliders using soft-drop jet mass

We compute the soft-drop jet-mass distribution from pp collisions to NNLL accuracy while including nonperturbative corrections through a field-theory based formalism. Using these calculations, we assess the theoretical uncertainties on an αs precision measurement due to higher order perturbative effects, nonperturbative corrections, and PDF uncertainty. We identify which soft-drop parameters are well-suited for measuring αs, and find that higher-logarithmic resummation has a qualitatively important effect on the shape of the jet-mass distribution. We find that quark jets and gluon jets have similar sensitivity to αs, and emphasize that experimentally distinguishing quark and gluon jets is not required for an αs measurement. We conclude that measuring αs to the 10% level is feasible now, and with improvements in theory a 5% level measurement is possible. Getting down to the 1% level to be competitive with other state-of-the-art measurements will be challenging.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Development of Computer Tomography System for the Soft X-ray Microscope at Ritsumeikan University

A synchrotron-based full-field imaging soft x-ray microscope was tuned appropriately to perform computer tomography. The contrast and focal depth of the optical system were evaluated by using a Fresnel zone plate as a test object of variable spatial frequency. A focal depth of 15 {mu}m was obtained at the spatial frequency of 4.3 {mu}m{sup -1} according to Rayleigh's criterion. As a first trial of three-dimensional observation using this system, the cerebral cortex of the brain of a mouse, trimmed to a columnar shape by focused ion beam milling, was studied using a wavelength of 1.87-nm.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

PRESAGE: Protecting Structured Address Generation against Soft Errors

Modern computer scaling trends in pursuit of larger component counts and power efficiency have, unfortunately, lead to less reliable hardware and consequently soft errors escaping into application data ("silent data corruptions"). Techniques to enhance system resilience hinge on the availability of efficient error detectors that have high detection rates, low false positive rates, and lower computational overhead. Unfortunately, efficient detectors to detect faults during address generation (to index large arrays) have not been widely researched. We present a novel lightweight compiler-driven technique called PRESAGE for detecting bit-flips affecting structured address computations. A key insight underlying PRESAGE is that any address computation scheme that flows an already incurred error is better than a scheme that corrupts one particular array access but otherwise (falsely) appears to compute perfectly. Enabling the flow of errors allows one to situate detectors at loop exit points, and helps turn silent corruptions into easily detectable error situations. Our experiments using PolyBench benchmark suite indicate that PRESAGE-based error detectors have a high error-detection rate while incurring low overheads.

Sharma, Vishal C.↗

Computer-Aided Treatment Design of a Distal Upper Extremity Soft Tissue Tumor with Electron Beam Radiotherapy

We present here a novel approach for the planning and treatment of a distal upper extremity soft tissue tumor. Utilizing computed tomography (CT) based electron dose calculations, a customized compensating wax bolus was designed in order to deliver sufficient dose coverage to the tumor volume while sparing the draining lymphatics of the patient’s hand and digits. A clinical case is presented as well as the design and construction of the compensator. Outcome and clinical implications are discussed.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗