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At least 199 records · Page 11

Effects of Compression, Staging, and Braid Angle on Braided Rope Seal Performance

Future turbine engines and industrial systems will be operating at increased temperatures to achieve more demanding efficiency and performance goals. In the highest temperature sections of the engine new material systems such as ceramics and intermetallics are being considered to withstand the harsh thermal environment. Components constructed of these low expansion-rate materials experience thermal strains and a resulting reduction of life when rigidly attached to high expansion-rate, superalloy support structures. Seals are being designed to both seal and to serve as compliant mounts allowing for relative thermal growths between high temperature but brittle primary structures and the surrounding support structures. Previous seal research yielded several braided rope seal designs which demonstrated the ability to both seal and serve as a compliant mount. The hybrid seal was constructed of an all-ceramic (alumina-silica) core overbraided with a superalloy wire sheath (cobalt based superalloy). The all ceramic seal was constructed of an all-ceramic (alumina-silica) core overbraided with multiple ceramic (alumina-silica) sheath layers. Program goals for braided rope seals are to improve flow resistance and/or seal resilience. To that end, the current report studies the test results of: baseline and modified hybrid seals; two stage hybrid and two stage all-ceramic seal configurations; and single stage hybrid and single stage all-ceramic seal configurations for a range of seal crush conditions. Hybrid seal modifications include increasing the sheath braid angle and core coverage. For the same percent seal cross-sectional crush, results show that increasing the hybrid seal braid angle increased seal stiffness and seal unit load, resulting in flows approximately one third of the baseline hybrid seal flows. For both hybrid and all-ceramic seals, two stage seal configurations significantly outperformed single stage configurations. Two stage seal flows were at least 30% less than the single stage seal flows for the same seal crush. Furthermore, test results of single stage seals indicate that for both all-ceramic and hybrid seals, a specific seal crush condition exists at which minimum flows are achieved (i.e. increasing seal crush beyond a certain point does not result in better flow performance). Flow results are presented for a range of pressures and temperatures from ambient to 1300 F, before and after scrubbing. Compression tests results show that for both all-ceramic and hybrid seals, seal preload and stiffness increase with seal crush, but residual seal interference remains constant.

Steinetz, Bruce M.↗

Turbulent mixing in supercritical jets: effect of compressibility factor and inflow condition

Fuel injection and turbulent mixing at supercritical pressures determines ignition and combustion in numerous engineering applications. Flow evolution under such conditions is characterized by strong non-linear coupling between dynamics, transport coefficients, and thermodynamics. Experimental studies observe that the jets injected at supercritical pressures exhibit significantly different dynamics from the jets at subcritical conditions, owing to the lack of distinct liquid and gas phases in supercritical state. Thus, the averaged flow quantities such as the potential core length, jet spatial growth rate and velocity decay profiles differ in the two conditions, resulting in different mixed-fluid distributions. In this study, turbulent jet direct numerical simulations (DNS) are performed to examine the variations in flow statistics between injection of Nitrogen (N₂) in Nitrogen (N₂) at both subcritical (perfect-gas) and supercritical conditions. In all cases, isothermal round jets at Reynolds number (Re_{D}), based on jet diameter (D) and jet orifice velocity (U₀), of 5000 are considered. For mixing analyses, a passive scalar transported with the flow is examined.

Sharan, Nek↗

A Numerical Study of Resistivity and Hall Effects for a Compressible MHD Model

The effect of resistive, Hall, and viscous terms on the flow structure compared with compressible ideal MHD is studied numerically for a one-fluid non-ideal MHD model. The goal of the present study is to shed some light on the emerging area of non-ideal MHD modeling and simulation. Numerical experiments are performed on a hypersonic blunt body flow with future application to plasma aerodynamics flow control in reentry vehicles. Numerical experiments are also performed on a magnetized time-developing mixing layer with possible application to magnetic/turbulence mixing.

Yee, H. C.↗

Lossless Astronomical Image Compression and the Effects of Random Noise

In this paper we compare a variety of modern image compression methods on a large sample of astronomical images. We begin by demonstrating from first principles how the amount of noise in the image pixel values sets a theoretical upper limit on the lossless compression ratio of the image. We derive simple procedures for measuring the amount of noise in an image and for quantitatively predicting how much compression will be possible. We then compare the traditional technique of using the GZIP utility to externally compress the image, with a newer technique of dividing the image into tiles, and then compressing and storing each tile in a FITS binary table structure. This tiled-image compression technique offers a choice of other compression algorithms besides GZIP, some of which are much better suited to compressing astronomical images. Our tests on a large sample of images show that the Rice algorithm provides the best combination of speed and compression efficiency. In particular, Rice typically produces 1.5 times greater compression and provides much faster compression speed than GZIP. Floating point images generally contain too much noise to be effectively compressed with any lossless algorithm. We have developed a compression technique which discards some of the useless noise bits by quantizing the pixel values as scaled integers. The integer images can then be compressed by a factor of 4 or more. Our image compression and uncompression utilities (called fpack and funpack) that were used in this study are publicly available from the HEASARC web site.Users may run these stand-alone programs to compress and uncompress their own images.

Pence, William↗

The upper-branch stability of compressible boundary layer flows

The upper-branch linear and nonlinear stability of compressible boundary layer flows is studied using the approach of Smith and Bodonyi (1982) for a similar incompressible problem. Both pressure gradient boundary layers and Blasius flow are considered with and without heat transfer, and the neutral eigenrelations incorporating compressibility effects are obtained explicitly. The compressible nonlinear viscous critical layer equations are derived and solved numerically and the results indicate some solutions with positive phase shift across the critical layer. Various limiting cases are investigated including the case of much larger disturbance amplitudes and this indicates the structure for the strongly nonlinear critical layer of the Benney-Bergeon (1969) type. It is also shown how a match with the inviscid neutral inflexional modes arising from the generalized inflexion point criterion, is achieved.

Gajjar, J. S. B.↗

Use of potential flow theory to evaluate subsonic inlet data from a simulator-powered nacelle at cruise conditions

Incompressible potential flow theory corrected for compressibility effects, using the Lieblein-Stockman compressibility correction, was used to predict surface and flow field static pressures for a subsonic inlet at cruise conditions. The calculated internal and external surface static pressures were in good agreement with data at most conditions. The analysis was used to determine the capture stream-tube location and static-pressure distribution. Additive drag coefficients obtained from these results were consistently higher than those obtained using one-dimensional compressible flow theory. Increasing the distance between the inlet and boattail increased the cowl drag force. The effect of the boundary layer on internal and external surface static-pressure distributions was small at the design cruise condition. The analytical results may be used as an aid to data reduction and for predicting inlet mass flow, stagnation point location, and inlet additive drag.

Bober, L. J.↗

Anisotropic Nanomechanics of Boron Nitride Nanotubes: Nanostructured "Skin" Effect

The stiffness and plasticity of boron nitride nanotubes are investigated using generalized tight-binding molecular dynamics and ab-initio total energy methods. Due to boron-nitride BN bond buckling effects, compressed zigzag BN nanotubes are found to undergo novel anisotropic strain release followed by anisotropic plastic buckling. The strain is preferentially released towards N atoms in the rotated BN bonds. The tubes buckle anisotropically towards only one end when uniaxially compressed from both. A "skin-effect" model of smart nanocomposite materials is proposed which will localize the structural damage towards the 'skin' or surface side of the material.

Srivastava, Deepak↗

Flow visualization studies of the Mach number effects on the dynamic stall of an oscillating airfoil

Compressibility effects on the dynamic stall of a NACA 0012 airfoil undergoing sinusoidal oscillatory motion were studied using a stroboscopic schlieren system. Schlieren pictures and some quantitative data derived from them are presented and show the influence of free-stream Mach number and reduced frequency on the dynamic-stall vortex. This study shows that a dynamic stall vortex always forms near the leading edge and convects on the airfoil upper surface at approximately 0.3 times the free stream velocity for all cases studied. The results also demonstrate that initiation of the dynamic stall vortex is delayed to higher angles of attack with increased reduced frequency, but that dynamic stall occurs at lower angles of incidence with increasing Mach numbers.

Chandrasekhara, M. S.↗

Method using a electrostatic generator/motor rotor electrode system suitable for installation on the outer surface of an EMB rotor

Electrostatic generator electrodes mounted on the outer surface of a fiber-composite rotor. The conducting strips are mounted with a slight tilt in angle such that the electrodes will experience no tension or compression effects as the rotor spins up or slows down. The compression would come about from effects associated with the Poisson Ratio. This change can eliminate any metal fatigue or loss of bonding that might have arisen if the electrodes were to be aligned with the axis.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Shear strength measurements and hydrostatic compression of rhenium diboride under high pressures

Shear strength measurements have been carried out on rhenium diboride, ReB 2 , to a pressure of 74 GPa using a Radial X-ray Diffraction (R-XRD) technique in a diamond anvil cell using platinum as an internal x-ray pressure standard. The R-XRD result has provided a unique insight into the deformation of hexagonal crystal lattice under non-hydrostatic compression and variation of shear strength with increasing pressure. From R-XRD data, we have estimated hydrostatic component of compression to determine an equation of state of rhenium diboride yielding a bulk modulus of K 0 = 366 ± 25 GPa with a pressure derivative $K^{'}_{0}$ = 4.3 ± 0.5 in good agreement with hydrostatic density functional theory calculations. Here, the average lower bound of shear strength (τ) from various diffraction planes was then calculated using the measured interplanar d-spacing (d m ) and hydrostatic component of d-spacing (d p ) to be shown to approach 6.7 ± 0.4 GPa at 70 GPa. Our results show that the anisotropic compression effects observed in ReB 2 under hydrostatic compression are correlated to electronic structure changes under compression as predicted by theoretical calculations.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Three-dimensional airflow and hydrometeor trajectory calculation with applications

Numerical codes developed to model potential flows about three-dimensional bodies and applied to examining the flowfields around aircraft nose probes for gathering hydrometeor data are described. The potential flow code accounts for lifting or nonlifting surfaces, the effects of lift vorticity, inlet flows, and compression effects. Particle trajectories are calculated using particle equations of motion, with note taken of conditions in both the far- and near-fields of the flow. Graphic projections of the trajectories can be made from any view angle using another code. The codes also contain routines for handling flow velocities around arrays of spatial locations, trajectory arrays, and the effects of flow distortion on the particle flux.

Norment, H. G.↗

Description of Panel Method Code ANTARES

Panel method code ANTARES was developed to compute wall interference corrections in a rectangular wind tunnel. The code uses point doublets to represent blockage effects and line doublets to represent lifting effects of a wind tunnel model. Subsonic compressibility effects are modeled by applying the Prandtl-Glauert transformation. The closed wall, open jet, or perforated wall boundary condition may be assigned to a wall panel centroid. The tunnel walls can be represented by using up to 8000 panels. The accuracy of panel method code ANTARES was successfully investigated by comparing solutions for the closed wall and open jet boundary condition with corresponding Method of Images solutions. Fourier transform solutions of a two-dimensional wind tunnel flow field were used to check the application of the perforated wall boundary condition. Studies showed that the accuracy of panel method code ANTARES can be improved by increasing the total number of wall panels in the circumferential direction. It was also shown that the accuracy decreases with increasing free-stream Mach number of the wind tunnel flow field.

Ulbrich, Norbert↗

Low-Noise Rotorcraft Blades

Blades of helicopter rotors, tilt rotors, and like reshaped to reduce noise, according to proposal. Planform features combination of rearward and forward sweep. Forward sweep over large outer portion of blade constitutes primary noise-reduction feature. Relieves some of compressive effect in tip region, with consequent reduction of noise from compressive sources. Performance at high advance ratio improved. Cabin vibration and loading noise reduced by load-averaging effect of double-sweep planform. Aft-swept section provides balancing of aerodynamic and other dynamic forces on blade along 1/4-chord line of straight inboard section and along projection of line to outermost blade radius. Possible for hub-hinge forces and moments to remain within practical bounds. Provides stabilizing blade forces and moments to counteract any instability caused by forward sweep.

Brooks, Thomas F.↗

Thermal Effects on the Compressive Behavior of IM7/PET15 Laminates

The effect of changing operating temperature on the compressive response of IM7/PETI5 composite laminates is investigated within this paper. The three temperatures evaluated for this study were 129 C, 21 C, and 177 C, a spectrum from cryogenic to an elevated operating temperature. Laminate compressive strength property testing was conducted using the Wyoming Combined Load Compression fixture to generate strength data at the three operating temperatures of interest for several lay-ups. A three-dimensional finite element analysis model of a [90/0]8s composite laminate subject to compressive loading is developed. The model is used to study the key attributes of the laminate that significantly influence the state of stress in the laminate. Both the resin rich layer located between lamina and the thermal residual stresses present in the laminate due to curing are included in the analysis model. For the laminate modeled, the effect of modeling temperature dependent material properties was determined to be insignificant for the operating temperatures studied. Simply using the material properties measured at the operating temperature of interest was sufficient for predicting stresses accurately in a linear analysis for the current problem. The three-dimensional analysis results revealed that the application of an applied compressive axial load in the 0-degree direction decreased the interlaminar stresses present in the laminate initially due to curing. Therefore, failure was concluded not be attributable to the interlaminar stresses in the composite laminate being studied when a compressive load is applied. The magnitude of the measured laminate compressive strength change with a change in temperature is concluded to be dominated by the change in the lamina compressive axial strength with a change in temperature.

Walker, Sandra Polesky↗