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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 199 records · Page 11

The application of digital computers to near-real-time processing of flutter test data

Procedures used in monitoring, analyzing, and displaying flight and ground flutter test data are presented. These procedures include three digital computer programs developed to process structural response data in near real time. Qualitative and quantitative modal stability data are derived from time history response data resulting from rapid sinusoidal frequency sweep forcing functions, tuned-mode quick stops, and pilot induced control pulses. The techniques have been applied to both fixed and rotary wing aircraft, during flight, whirl tower rotor systems tests, and wind tunnel flutter model tests. An hydraulically driven oscillatory aerodynamic vane excitation system utilized during the flight flutter test programs accomplished during Lockheed L-1011 and S-3A development is described.

Hurley, S. R.↗

Neonatal respiratory support strategies—short and long-term respiratory outcomes

Mechanical ventilation (MV), although life-saving, is associated with chronic respiratory morbidity in both preterm and term born infants. New ventilation modes have been developed with the aim of minimising lung injury. These include invasive and non-invasive respiratory support strategies, techniques for less invasive surfactant administration (LISA) and closed-loop automated oxygen control (CLAC) systems. Increasingly, newborn infants with signs of respiratory distress are stabilised on continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) and receive LISA. Early CPAP when compared to mechanical ventilation reduced the incidence of BPD and respiratory morbidity at 18 to 22 months corrected age. Nasal intermittent positive pressure ventilation reduced treatment failure rates compared to CPAP, but not bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD). LISA compared with intubation and surfactant delivery reduced BPD, but there is no evidence from randomised trials regarding long-term respiratory and neurodevelopmental outcomes. Synchronisation of positive pressure inflations with the infant's respiratory efforts used with volume targeting should be applied for infants requiring intubation as this strategy reduces BPD. A large RCT with long term follow up data demonstrated that prophylactic high frequency oscillatory ventilation (HFOV) improved respiratory and functional outcomes at school age, but those effects were not maintained after puberty. CLAC systems appear promising, but their effect on long term clinical outcomes has not yet been explored in randomised trials. Further studies are required to determine the role of newer ventilation modes such as neurally adjusted ventilator assist (NAVA). All such respiratory support strategies should be tested in randomised controlled trials powered to assess long-term outcomes.

Kaltsogianni, Ourania↗

Stability of a steady, large amplitude whistler wave.

Study of the behavior of weak electrostatic waves in a collisionless magnetoplasma supporting a steady large amplitude whistler wave. All waves are assumed to propagate parallel to a uniform background magnetic field B sub zero. In the presence of the whistler wave fields each particle executes an oscillatory motion parallel to B sub zero, in addition to a translation along B sub zero and transverse motions. This oscillation causes the Landau resonance to be replaced by a series of new resonances between particles and the electrostatic modes. A distribution function for the perturbed plasma is constructed by solving the Vlasov equation, linearized in the electrostatic wave amplitudes. A dispersion relation is obtained and solved approximately for the growth/damping rate of the perturbations. Growing electrostatic modes are found to be approximately uncoupled. Trapped particles have a strong influence on the stability of the system.

Palmadesso, P. J.↗

The effect of compositionally-generated elastic stresses on morphological instability during directional solidification

The effect of compositionally-generated elastic stresses on the conditions for morphological instability during directional solidification of a dilute, ideal binary alloy is investigated using the Gibbs-Thomson equations for an elastically-stressed solid with zero surface stress in equilibrium with a liquid. It is found that these stresses lead to a small stabilization of the Mullins and Sekerka cellular mode of instability. The steady mode is stabilized by a stress-induced modification to the interfacial concentration of the solid, which in turn alters the amount of solute rejected to inhibit the growth of perturbations. The presence of elastic stresses could generate a new oscillatory instability which is most likely to be found in experiments near absolute stability for materials with segregation coefficients near unity and large solute expansion coefficients.

Spencer, B. J.↗

Stability of hypersonic boundary-layer flows with chemistry

The effects of nonequilibrium chemistry and three dimensionality on the stability characteristics of hypersonic flows are discussed. In two-dimensional (2-D) and axisymmetric flows, the inclusion of chemistry causes a shift of the second mode of Mack to lower frequencies. This is found to be due to the increase in size of the region of relative supersonic flow because of the lower speeds of sound in the relatively cooler boundary layers. Although this shift in frequency is present in both the equilibrium and nonequilibrium air results, the equilibrium approximation predicts modes which are not observed in the nonequilibrium calculations (for the flight conditions considered). These modes are superpositions of incoming and outgoing unstable disturbances which travel supersonically relative to the boundary-layer edge velocity. Such solutions are possible because of the finite shock stand-off distance. Their corresponding wall-normal profiles exhibit an oscillatory behavior in the inviscid region between the boundary-layer edge and the bow shock. For the examination of three-dimensional (3-D) effects, a rotating cone is used as a model of a swept wing. An increase of stagnation temperature is found to be only slightly stabilizing. The correlation of transition location (N = 9) with parameters describing the crossflow profile is discussed. Transition location does not correlate with the traditional crossflow Reynolds number. A new parameter that appears to correlate for boundary-layer flow was found. A verification with experiments on a yawed cone is provided.

Reed, Helen L.↗

The Dynamics of Shock Dispersion and Interactions in Supersonic Freestreams with Counterflowing Jets

An active flow control concept using counterflowing jets to significantly modify the external flowfields and strongly weaken or disperse the shock-waves of supersonic and hypersonic vehicles to reduce the aerothermal loads and wave drag was investigated. Experiments were conducted in a trisonic blow-down wind-tunnel, complemented by pre-test computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis of a 2.6% scale model of Apollo capsule, with and without counterflowing jets, in Mach 3.48 and 4.0 freestreams, to assess the potential aerothermal and aerodynamic benefits of this concept. The model was instrumented with heat flux gauges, thermocouples and pressure taps, and employed five counterflowing jet nozzles (three sonic and other two supersonic with design Mach numbers of 2.44 and 2.94) and nozzle exit diameters ranging from 0.25 to 0.5 inch. Schlieren data show that at low jet flow rates of 0.05 and 0.1lb(sub m)/sec, the interactions result in a long penetration mode (LPM) jet, while the short penetration mode (SPM) jet is observed at flow rates greater than 0.1 lb(sub m)/sec., consistent with the pre-test CFD predictions. For the LPM, the jet appears to be nearly fully-expanded, resulting in a very unsteady and oscillatory flow structure in which the bow shock becomes highly dispersed such that it is no longer discernable. Higher speed camera Schlieren data reveal the shock to be dispersed into striations of compression waves, which suddenly coalesce to a weaker bow shock with a larger standoff distance as the flow rate reached a critical value. The pronounced shock dispersion could significantly impact the aerodynamic performance (L/D) and heat flux reduction of spacecraft in atmospheric entry and re-entry, and could also attenuate the entropy layer in hypersonic blunt body flows. For heat transfer, the results show significant reduction in heat flux, even giving negative heat flux for some of the SPM interactions, indicating that the flow wetting the model is cooling, instead of heating the model, which could significantly impact the requirements and design of thermal protection system. These findings strongly suggest that the application of counterflowing jets as active flow control could have strong impact on supersonic and hypersonic vehicle design and performance.

Daso, Endwell O.↗

A flight investigation of oscillating air forces: Equipment and technique

The equipment and techniques are described which are to be used in a project aimed at measuring oscillating air forces and dynamic aeroelastic response of a swept wing airplane at high subsonic speeds. Electro-hydraulic inertia type shakers installed in the wing tips will excite various elastic airplane modes while the related oscillating chordwise pressures at two spanwise wing stations and the wing mode shapes are recorded on magnetic tape. The data reduction technique, following the principle of a wattmeter harmonic analyzer employed by Bratt, Wight, and Tilly, utilizes magnetic tape and high speed electronic multipliers to record directly the real and imaginary components of oscillatory data signals relative to a simple harmonic reference signal. Through an extension of this technique an automatic flight-flutter-test data analyzer is suggested in which vector plots of mechanical admittance or impedance would be plotted during the flight test.

Reed, W. H., III↗

Sunspot dynamics

This report describes recent results of our theoretical and observational work on dynamical phenomena in sunspots. The overall goal of this research has been a better understanding of the various oscillatory, transient, and steady motions in a sunspot and their relation to the basic structure of the sunspot. The principal topics of the research reported here are the following: (1) sunspot seismology, i.e., the study of the interaction of solar p-modes with a sunspot as a probe of the subsurface structure of a sunspot; (2) local sources of acoustic waves in the solar photosphere; and (3) siphon flows in isolated magnetic flux tubes and their relation to the photospheric Evershed flow and to intense magnetic elements outside of sunspots.

Thomas, John H.↗

Numerical Analysis of Flow Evolution in a Helium Jet Injected into Ambient Air

A computational model to study the stability characteristics of an evolving buoyant helium gas jet in ambient air environment is presented. Numerical formulation incorporates a segregated approach to solve for the transport equations of helium mass fraction coupled with the conservation equations of mixture mass and momentum using a staggered grid method. The operating parameters correspond to the Reynolds number varying from 30 to 300 to demarcate the flow dynamics in oscillating and non-oscillating regimes. Computed velocity and concentration fields were used to analyze the flow structure in the evolving jet. For Re=300 case, results showed that an instability mode that sets in during the evolution process in Earth gravity is absent in zero gravity, signifying the importance of buoyancy. Though buoyancy initiates the instability, below a certain jet exit velocity, diffusion dominates the entrainment process to make the jet non-oscillatory as observed for the Re=30 case. Initiation of the instability was found to be dependent on the interaction of buoyancy and momentum forces along the jet shear layer.

Satti, Rajani P.↗

Medium amplitude parallel superposition (MAPS) rheology. Part 2: Experimental protocols and data analysis

An experimental protocol is developed to directly measure the new material functions revealed by medium amplitude parallel superposition (MAPS) rheology. This protocol measures the medium amplitude response of a material to a simple shear deformation composed of three sine waves at different frequencies, revealing a rich dataset consisting of up to 19 measurements of the third-order complex modulus at distinct three-frequency coordinates. We discuss how the choice of input frequencies influences the features of the MAPS domain studied by the experiment. A polynomial interpolation method for reducing the bias of measured values from spectral leakage and reducing variance due to noise is discussed, including a derivation of the optimal range of amplitudes for the input signal. This leads to the conclusion that conducting the experiment in a stress-controlled fashion possesses a distinct advantage to the strain-controlled mode. The experimental protocol is demonstrated through measurements of the MAPS response of a model complex fluid: a surfactant solution of wormlike micelles. The resulting dataset is indeed large and feature-rich, while still acquired in a time comparable to similar medium amplitude oscillatory shear (MAOS) experiments. We demonstrate that the data represent measurements of an intrinsic material function by studying its internal consistency, compatibility with low-frequency predictions for Coleman–Noll simple fluids, and agreement with data obtained via MAOS amplitude sweeps. Finally, the data are compared to predictions from the corotational Maxwell model to demonstrate the power of MAPS rheology in determining whether a constitutive model is consistent with a material’s time-dependent response.

Lennon, Kyle R. (ORCID:0000000212515461)↗

A Systematic Kernel Function Procedure for Determining Aerodynamic Forces on Oscillating or Steady Finite Wings at Subsonic Speeds

Details are given of a numerical solution of the integral equation which relates oscillatory or steady lift and downwash distributions in subsonic flow. The procedure has been programmed for the IBM 704 electronic data processing machine and yields the pressure distribution and some of its integrated properties for a given Mach number and frequency and for several modes of oscillation in from 3 to 4 minutes, results of several applications are presented.

Watkins, Charles E.↗

Improving constraints on inflation with CMB delensing

Abstract The delensing of cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps will be increasingly valuable for extracting as much information as possible from future CMB surveys. Delensing provides many general benefits, including sharpening of the acoustic peaks, more accurate recovery of the damping tail, and reduction of lensing-inducedB-mode power. In this paper we present several applications of delensing focused on testing theories of early-universe inflation with observations of the CMB. We find that delensing the CMB results in improved parameter constraints for reconstructing the spectrum of primordial curvature fluctuations, probing oscillatory features in the primordial curvature spectrum, measuring the spatial curvature of the universe, and constraining several different models of isocurvature perturbations. In some cases we find that delensing can recover almost all of the constraining power contained in unlensed spectra, and it will be a particularly valuable analysis technique to achieve further improvements in constraints for model parameters whose measurements are not expected to improve significantly when utilizing only lensed CMB maps from next-generation CMB surveys. We also quantify the prospects of testing the single-field inflation tensor consistency condition using delensed CMB data; we find it to be out of reach of current and proposed experimental technology and advocate for alternative detection methods.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗

Near-wake dynamics of a vertical-axis turbine

Cross-flow, or vertical-axis, turbines are a promising technology for capturing kinetic energy in wind or flowing water and their inherently unsteady fluid mechanics present unique opportunities for control optimization of individual rotors or arrays. To explore the potential for beneficial interactions between turbines in an array, as well as to characterize important cycle-to-cycle variations, coherent structures in the wake of a single two-bladed cross-flow turbine are examined using planar stereo particle image velocimetry in a water channel experiment. There are three main objectives in the present work. First, the mean wake structure of this high chord-to-radius ratio rotor is described, compared with previous studies, and a simple explanation for observed wake deflection is presented. Second, the unsteady flow is then analysed via the triple decomposition, with the periodic component extracted using a combination of traditional techniques and a novel implementation of the optimized dynamic mode decomposition. The latter method is shown to outperform conditional averaging and Fourier methods, as well as uncover frequencies suggesting a transition to bluff-body shedding in the far wake. Third, vorticity and finite-time Lyapunov exponents are then employed to further analyse the oscillatory wake component. Vortex streets on both sides of the wake are identified, and their formation mechanisms and effects on the mean flow are discussed. Strong axial (vertical) flow is observed in vortical structures shed on the retreating side of the rotor where the blades travel downstream. Time-resolved tracking of these vortices is performed, which demonstrates that vortex trajectories have significant rotation-to-rotation variation within one diameter downstream. This variability suggests it would be challenging to harness or avoid such structures at greater downstream distances.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

The role of edge plasma parameters in H-mode density limit on the JET-ILW

A study of a dataset of JET H-mode plasma with the Be/W ITER-like wall (JET-ILW) shows that reaching the edge MHD ballooning limit leads to confinement degradation. However, unlike JET plasmas with a carbon wall (JET-C), the JET-ILW plasmas stay in a marginal dithering phase for a relatively long period, associated with a higher (≈20%) H-mode density limit (HDL) than JET-C equivalents. This suggests that ITER could be operated in H-mode with higher density than the scaling based on carbon wall devices, but likely with a dithering phase plasma with lower confinement. A new, reliable estimator for JET E r, min has been derived by combining HRTS measurements of pedestal gradient and edge-SOL decay lengths. JET radial E r ETB wells are observed in the range of -15 to -60 kV m -1 in high performance H-modes, consistent with previous CXRS results in ASDEX Upgrade. The results imply that a higher positive E × B shear in the near SOL plays a role in sustaining a marginal phase in JET-ILW which leads to a higher HDL than that in JET-C. The results of the JET-ILW dataset show agreement with the Goldston finite collisionality HD model for SOL broadening at high collisionality. A hypothesis for the dithering H-mode phase is proposed: as n e,SOL increases, ν *,SOL increases, SOL broadens, E r shear decreases, triggers L-mode; n e drops, ν *,SOL decreases, SOL becomes narrower, and E r shear increases, triggering H-mode, resulting in a cycle of H–L–H- oscillations. For burning plasma devices, such as ITER, operating just below the MHD limit for the dithering phase could be a promising regime for maximising core density, and fusion performance while minimising plasma-material interaction. The oscillatory signal during the dithering phase could be used as a precursor of undesirable plasma performance for control purposes.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A simplified method for the determination and analysis of the neutral-lateral-oscillatory-stability boundary

A necessary condition for neutral oscillatory stability is that Routh's discriminant r, formed from the coefficients of the stability equation, is equal to zero. Computations obtained from rsub1=0 and d=0 show very good agreement with the results calculated by the expression for r=0. The nature of the modes of motion as a function of the directional-stability derivative and the effective-dihedral derivative is discussed in detail.

Sternfield, Leonard↗

The Effects of Image Motion on the L-nu Diagram

A simple two dimensional (x,t) model of the solar oscillatory velocity field is subjected to a form of differential image motion. This image motion is meant to approximately model the effect of the Earth's atmosphere on observations of high degree solar oscillations. The distorted velocity field is analyzed to provide the apparent frequencies of the modes. It is shown that the image motion can produce a discrepancy of as much as 12 micro Hz.

Hill, F.↗

Sunspot dynamics

The goal of this research was the understanding of the various oscillatory, transient, and quasi-steady motions in sunspots and the basic structure of a sunspot. The research involved both theoretical modeling (based on thermohydrodynamic theory) and observations of dynamical phenomena in sunspots. The principal topics of the research were sunspot seismology (the interaction of solar p-modes with a sunspot as a probe of the subsurface structure of a sunspot); three minute umbral oscillations and their relation to the structure of the umbral atmosphere; siphon flows in isolated magnetic flux tubes and their relation to the photospheric Evershed flow and to intense magnetic elements outside of sunspots; and more general theoretical work on magneto-atmospheric waves. Here, a summary of results is given.

Thomas, John H.↗

Ultrafast solvent-to-solute proton transfer mediated by intermolecular coherent vibrations

Ultrafast photoinduced excited-state proton transfer (ESPT) plays a crucial role in protecting biomolecules and functional materials from photodamage. However, the influence of solute-solvent interactions on ESPT dynamics remains under active investigation. Here, we present an ultrafast spectroscopic study of ESPT in the photobase 2-(2´-pyridyl)benzimidazole (PBI) in methanol. Ultrafast absorption spectroscopy, supported by quantum chemical calculations, reveals three distinct kinetic steps: (1) a 2.2 ps solvent-to-solute proton transfer, (2) subsequent nonradiative relaxation to the ground state within 31 ps, producing a vibrationally hot ensemble with substantial excess kinetic energy, and (3) equilibration as this energy dissipates into the surrounding solvent bath over 186 ps. Femtosecond-resolved dynamics exhibit oscillatory signals indicative of coherent wavepacket motion on the S 1 potential energy surface. A phase flip in the excited-state absorption maximum confirms this assignment. Fourier analysis resolves two dominant periods (∼117 fs and ∼340 fs), corresponding to in-plane and out-of-plane vibrational modes coupled between PBI and the hydrogen-bonded methanol molecule. The rapid dephasing ( < 300 fs) suggests that the nuclear wavefunction evolves on an anharmonic potential energy surface while traversing the ESPT reaction coordinate.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗