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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2019

Discrete Lattice Material Vacuum Airship

Vacuum airships fueled by renewable energy would reduce reliance on fossil fuel-based modes of transport, lessen the need for limited and non-renewable lifting gases, and can be achieved using novel manufacturing techniques for ultra-light, discrete lattice material systems.The Discrete Lattice Material Vacuum Airships (DLMVA) system combines novel material science and manufacturing technologies for new modes of mass transportation, resulting in a disruptive approach to reduce national resource consumption and emissions. Through the use of high performance building block elements, modular, scalable and extensible aircraft can be rapidly assembled into positive net-buoyancy systems utilizing a vacuum instead of a lifting gas. By using architected lattice material principles, show that lattice materials can overcome stability limitations of previous vacuum balloon designs. Additionally, we show that lattice vacuum balloons are strength limited, rather than stability limited. As a result,airborne infrastructure can be developed to support the proliferation of modern systems such as e-commerce and distributed communications, while simultaneously reducing dependence on finite, non-renewable, emission-heavy resources.

Jenett, Benjamin E.↗
NASA NTRS1998

Building and managing high performance, scalable, commodity mass storage systems

The NAS Systems Division has recently embarked on a significant new way of handling the mass storage problem. One of the basic goals of this new development are to build systems at very large capacity and high performance, yet have the advantages of commodity products. The central design philosophy is to build storage systems the way the Internet was built. Competitive, survivable, expandable, and wide open. The thrust of this paper is to describe the motivation for this effort, what we mean by commodity mass storage, what the implications are for a facility that performs such an action, and where we think it will lead.

Lekashman, John↗
NASA NTRS2020

Robotic Specialization in Autonomous Robotic Structural Assembly

Robotic in-space assembly of large space structures is a long-term NASA goal to reduce launch costs and enable larger scale missions. Recently, researchers have proposed using discrete lattice building blocks and co-designed robots to build high-performance, scalable primary structure for various on-orbit and surface applications. These robots would locomote on the lattice and work in teams to build and reconfigure building-blocks into functional structure. However, the most reliable and efficient robotic system architecture, characterized by the number of different robotic 'species' and the allocation of functionality between species, is an open question. To address this problem, we decompose the robotic building-block assembly task into functional primitives and, in simulation, study the performance of the the variety of possible resulting architectures. For a set consisting of five process types (move self, move block, move friend, align bock, fasten block), we describe a method of feature space exploration and ranking based on energy and reliability cost functions. The solution space is enumerated, filtered for unique solutions, and evaluated against energy and reliability cost functions for various simulated build sizes. We find that a 2 species system, dividing the five mentioned process types between one unit cell transport robot and one fastening robot, results in the lowest energy cost system, at some cost to reliability. This system enables fastening functionality to occupy the build front while reducing the need for that functional mass to travel back and forth from a feed station. Because the details of a robot design affect the weighting and final allocation of functionality, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to evaluate the effect of changing mass allocations on architecture performance. Future systems with additional functionalities such as repair, inspection, and others may use this process to analyze and determine alternative robot architectures.

Bernus, Borbala↗
NASA NTRS2013

Controlling Tensegrity Robots Through Evolution

Tensegrity structures (built from interconnected rods and cables) have the potential to offer a revolutionary new robotic design that is light-weight, energy-efficient, robust to failures, capable of unique modes of locomotion, impact tolerant, and compliant (reducing damage between the robot and its environment). Unfortunately robots built from tensegrity structures are difficult to control with traditional methods due to their oscillatory nature, nonlinear coupling between components and overall complexity. Fortunately this formidable control challenge can be overcome through the use of evolutionary algorithms. In this paper we show that evolutionary algorithms can be used to efficiently control a ball-shaped tensegrity robot. Experimental results performed with a variety of evolutionary algorithms in a detailed soft-body physics simulator show that a centralized evolutionary algorithm performs 400 percent better than a hand-coded solution, while the multi-agent evolution performs 800 percent better. In addition, evolution is able to discover diverse control solutions (both crawling and rolling) that are robust against structural failures and can be adapted to a wide range of energy and actuation constraints. These successful controls will form the basis for building high-performance tensegrity robots in the near future.

Robot↗
NASA NTRS2016

Development of Liquid Propulsion Systems Testbed at MSFC

As NASA, the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry in general strive to develop capabilities to explore near-Earth, Cis-lunar and deep space, the need to create more cost effective techniques of propulsion system design, manufacturing and test is imperative in the current budget constrained environment. The physics of space exploration have not changed, but the manner in which systems are developed and certified needs to change if there is going to be any hope of designing and building the high performance liquid propulsion systems necessary to deliver crew and cargo to the further reaches of space. To further the objective of developing these systems, the Marshall Space Flight Center is currently in the process of formulating a Liquid Propulsion Systems testbed, which will enable rapid integration of components to be tested and assessed for performance in integrated systems. The manifestation of this testbed is a breadboard engine configuration (BBE) with facility support for consumables and/or other components as needed. The goal of the facility is to test NASA developed elements, but can be used to test articles developed by other government agencies, industry or academia. Joint government/private partnership is likely the approach that will be required to enable efficient propulsion system development. MSFC has recently tested its own additively manufactured liquid hydrogen pump, injector, and valves in a BBE hot firing. It is rapidly building toward testing the pump and a new CH4 injector in the BBE configuration to demonstrate a 22,000 lbf, pump-fed LO2/LCH4 engine for the Mars lander or in-space transportation. The value of having this BBE testbed is that as components are developed they may be easily integrated in the testbed and tested. MSFC is striving to enhance its liquid propulsion system development capability. Rapid design, analysis, build and test will be critical to fielding the next high thrust rocket engine. With the maturity of the BBE testbed, MSFC propulsion engineering will bring forward a national capability that enables growth of both commercial and government interests.

Alexander, Reginald↗
NASA NTRS1977

Configuration development study of the X-24C hypersonic research airplane, phase 3

The conclusion evolved from the three phased study on the configuration development of the X-24C Hypersonic Research Airplane makes it evident that it is practical to design and build the high performance National Hypersonic Flight Research Facility airplane with today's state of the art within the cost and operational constraints established by NASA. The vehicle launched at 31.75 Mg from the B-52 can cruise for 40 seconds at Mach 6.78 on scramjets. Without scramjets it can approach Mach 8 with a 453.6 Kg payload or do 70 seconds of cruise at Mach 6 with a 2.27 Mg payload. Reduction in cost is possible with a vehicle scaled to a lesser mass and capability.

Combs, H. G.↗
NASA NTRS1989

A fast lightstripe rangefinding system with smart VLSI sensor

The focus of the research is to build a compact, high performance lightstripe rangefinder using a Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) smart photosensor array. Rangefinding, the measurement of the three-dimensional profile of an object or scene, is a critical component for many robotic applications, and therefore many techniques were developed. Of these, lightstripe rangefinding is one of the most widely used and reliable techniques available. Though practical, the speed of sampling range data by the conventional light stripe technique is severely limited. A conventional light stripe rangefinder operates in a step-and-repeat manner. A stripe source is projected on an object, a video image is acquired, range data is extracted from the image, the stripe is stepped, and the process repeats. Range acquisition is limited by the time needed to grab the video images, increasing linearly with the desired horizontal resolution. During the acquisition of a range image, the objects in the scene being scanned must be stationary. Thus, the long scene sampling time of step-and-repeat rangefinders limits their application. The fast range sensor proposed is based on the modification of this basic lightstripe ranging technique in a manner described by Sato and Kida. This technique does not require a sampling of images at various stripe positions to build a range map. Rather, an entire range image is acquired in parallel while the stripe source is swept continuously across the scene. Total time to acquire the range image data is independent of the range map resolution. The target rangefinding system will acquire 1,000 100 x 100 point range images per second with 0.5 percent range accuracy. It will be compact and rugged enough to be mounted on the end effector of a robot arm to aid in object manipulation and assembly tasks.

Gruss, Andrew↗
NASA NTRS1998

Automated Fabrication Technologies for High Performance Polymer Composites

New fabrication technologies are being exploited for building high graphite-fiber-reinforced composite structure. Stitched fiber preforms and resin film infusion have been successfully demonstrated for large, composite wing structures. Other automatic processes being developed include automated placement of tacky, drapable epoxy towpreg, automated heated head placement of consolidated ribbon/tape, and vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding. These methods have the potential to yield low cost high performance structures by fabricating composite structures to net shape out-of-autoclave.

Shuart , M. J.↗
NASA NTRS2014

SpaceCube v2.0 Space Flight Hybrid Reconfigurable Data Processing System

This paper details the design architecture, design methodology, and the advantages of the SpaceCube v2.0 high performance data processing system for space applications. The purpose in building the SpaceCube v2.0 system is to create a superior high performance, reconfigurable, hybrid data processing system that can be used in a multitude of applications including those that require a radiation hardened and reliable solution. The SpaceCube v2.0 system leverages seven years of board design, avionics systems design, and space flight application experiences. This paper shows how SpaceCube v2.0 solves the increasing computing demands of space data processing applications that cannot be attained with a standalone processor approach.The main objective during the design stage is to find a good system balance between power, size, reliability, cost, and data processing capability. These design variables directly impact each other, and it is important to understand how to achieve a suitable balance. This paper will detail how these critical design factors were managed including the construction of an Engineering Model for an experiment on the International Space Station to test out design concepts. We will describe the designs for the processor card, power card, backplane, and a mission unique interface card. The mechanical design for the box will also be detailed since it is critical in meeting the stringent thermal and structural requirements imposed by the processing system. In addition, the mechanical design uses advanced thermal conduction techniques to solve the internal thermal challenges.The SpaceCube v2.0 processing system is based on an extended version of the 3U cPCI standard form factor where each card is 190mm x 100mm in size The typical power draw of the processor card is 8 to 10W and scales with application complexity. The SpaceCube v2.0 data processing card features two Xilinx Virtex-5 QV Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), eight memory modules, a monitor FPGA with analog monitoring, Ethernet, configurable interconnect to the Xilinx FPGAs including gigabit transceivers, and the necessary voltage regulation. The processor board uses a back-to-back design methodology for common parts that maximizes the board real estate available. This paper will show how to meet the IPC 6012B Class 3A standard with a 22-layer board that has two column grid array devices with 1.0mm pitch. All layout trades such as stack-up options, via selection, and FPGA signal breakout will be discussed with feature size results. The overall board design process will be discussed including parts selection, circuit design, proper signal termination, layout placement and route planning, signal integrity design and verification, and power integrity results. The radiation mitigation techniques will also be detailed including configuration scrubbing options, Xilinx circuit mitigation and FPGA functional monitoring, and memory protection.Finally, this paper will describe how this system is being used to solve the extreme challenges of a robotic satellite servicing mission where typical space-rated processors are not sufficient enough to meet the intensive data processing requirements. The SpaceCube v2.0 is the main payload control computer and is required to control critical subsystems such as autonomous rendezvous and docking using a suite of vision sensors and object avoidance when controlling two robotic arms.

Xilinx FPGA↗
NASA NTRS1985

Advanced Digital SAR Processor (ADSP)

The objectives are to develop the technology required to meet the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) processing needs for missions in the late 1980's, and to build and demonstrate a high performance engineering model flexible enough to be easily adapted to a wide variety of SAR processing tasks and capable of real-time or near real-time throughput rates. Information on the Advanced Digital SAR Processor is given in the form of outlines, carts and diagrams.

Bicknell, Tom↗
NASA NTRS1984

The role of scientists in developing Hubble Space Telescope

The objective of the Hubble Space Telescope Program is to build and operate a high-performance, fully-instrumented and long-lived optical observatory in earth orbit. Key Program elements are (1) a logistic strategy of Shuttle launch/maintenance and TDRSS communications, (2) overall responsibility at the MSFC Project for developing both the flight and ground systems, and (3) scientific participation in ST development and responsibility after launch for conducting the observing program. The ST Project is a management structure with a budget and schedule for delivering an ST system capable of achieving its established scientific objectives. The Project distributes through contracts the responsibility for supplying particular components, but retains the responsibility for system-level integrity. Scientists have set the performance objectives and now support the Project during the development stage by providing (1) PI management of the five Science Instruments, (2) continuing translations of scientific requirements into engineering specifications, (3) oversight of designs and performance tests, and (4) specific expertise on technical concerns.

Brown, R. A.↗
NASA NTRS1998

Modeling, Simulation and Analysis of Public Key Infrastructure

Security is an essential part of network communication. The advances in cryptography have provided solutions to many of the network security requirements. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is the foundation of the cryptography applications. The main objective of this research is to design a model to simulate a reliable, scalable, manageable, and high-performance public key infrastructure. We build a model to simulate the NASA public key infrastructure by using SimProcess and MatLab Software. The simulation is from top level all the way down to the computation needed for encryption, decryption, digital signature, and secure web server. The application of secure web server could be utilized in wireless communications. The results of the simulation are analyzed and confirmed by using queueing theory.

Liu, Yuan-Kwei↗
NASA NTRS1996

Key Topics for High-Lift Research: A Joint Wind Tunnel/Flight Test Approach

Future high-lift systems must achieve improved aerodynamic performance with simpler designs that involve fewer elements and reduced maintenance costs. To expeditiously achieve this, reliable CFD design tools are required. The development of useful CFD-based design tools for high lift systems requires increased attention to unresolved flow physics issues. The complex flow field over any multi-element airfoil may be broken down into certain generic component flows which are termed high-lift building block flows. In this report a broad spectrum of key flow field physics issues relevant to the design of improved high lift systems are considered. It is demonstrated that in-flight experiments utilizing the NASA Dryden Flight Test Fixture (which is essentially an instrumented ventral fin) carried on an F-15B support aircraft can provide a novel and cost effective method by which both Reynolds and Mach number effects associated with specific high lift building block flows can be investigated. These in-flight high lift building block flow experiments are most effective when performed in conjunction with coordinated ground based wind tunnel experiments in low speed facilities. For illustrative purposes three specific examples of in-flight high lift building block flow experiments capable of yielding a high payoff are described. The report concludes with a description of a joint wind tunnel/flight test approach to high lift aerodynamics research.

Fisher, David↗
NASA NTRS1989

Vibration isolation versus vibration compensation on multiple payload platforms

There are many future science instruments with high performance pointing (sub microradian) requirements. To build a separate spacecraft for each payload is prohibitively expensive, especially as not all instruments need to be in space for a long duration. Putting multiple payloads on a single basebody that supplies power, communications, and orbit maintenance is cheaper, easier to service, and allows for the spacecraft bus to be reused as new instruments become available to replace old instruments. Once several payloads are mounted together, the articulation of one may disturb another. The situation is even more extreme when the basebody serves multiple purposes, such as space station which has construction, satellite servicing, and man motion adding to the disturbance environment. The challenge then is to maintain high performance at low cost in a multiple payload environment. The goal is to supply many future science instruments with high performance pointing (sub microradian). The options are independent spacecraft for each payload (expensive); or multiple payloads on a single basebody (cheaper, easier to service, basebody reusable for several short duration payloads). The problems are one payload can disturb another, and other activities create large disturbances (construction, satellite servicing, and man motion).

Sirlin, S. W.↗
NASA NTRS2013

Silicon Micromachining for Terahertz Component Development

Waveguide component technology at terahertz frequencies has come of age in recent years. Essential components such as ortho-mode transducers (OMT), quadrature hybrids, filters, and others for high performance system development were either impossible to build or too difficult to fabricate with traditional machining techniques. With micromachining of silicon wafers coated with sputtered gold it is now possible to fabricate and test these waveguide components. Using a highly optimized Deep Reactive Ion Etching (DRIE) process, we are now able to fabricate silicon micromachined waveguide structures working beyond 1 THz. In this paper, we describe in detail our approach of design, fabrication, and measurement of silicon micromachined waveguide components and report the results of a 1 THz canonical E-plane filter.

Filter↗
NASA NTRS1992

High performance storable propellant resistojet

From 1965 until 1985 resistojets were used for a limited number of space missions. Capability increased in stages from an initial application using a 90 W gN2 thruster operating at 123 sec specific impulse (Isp) to a 830 W N2H4 thruster operating at 305 sec Isp. Prior to 1985 fewer than 100 resistojets were known to have been deployed on spacecraft. Building on this base NASA embarked upon the High Performance Storable Propellant Resistojet (HPSPR) program to significantly advance the resistojet state-of-the-art. Higher performance thrusters promised to increase the market demand for resistojets and enable space missions requiring higher performance. During the program three resistojets were fabricated and tested. High temperature wire and coupon materials tests were completed. A life test was conducted on an advanced gas generator.

Vaughan, C. E.↗
NASA NTRS2014

Design and Construction Documents Associated with N232, Sustainability Base

This request comprehensively covers documents associated with the design and construction of Sustainability Base, N232. The intent of this project specifically envisioned broad dissemination of these materials to others undertaking the design and construction of high-performing energy- and resource-efficient buildings in comparable climate zones.

architectural↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

TPSAS-NF1676L-20739-DND

Overview of LaRC's Comprehensive Digital Transformation strategy. Includes foundational items such as modeling & simulation, big data analytics, high performance computing, and advanced information technology. Builds upon the foundation to recommend advanced "virtual capabilities," such as a virtual flight test capability to complement flight testing and wind tunnels.

Ed McLarney↗