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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 253 records · Page 14

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NASA NTRS2003

Learning to Fly: The Wright Brothers' Adventure. A Guide for Educators and Students with Activities in Aeronautics

This guide was produced by the NASA Glenn Research Center Office of Educational Programs in Cleveland, OH, and the NASA Aerospace Educational Coordinating Committee. It includes activity modules for students, including the history of the Wright Brothers and their family in Dayton, Ohio and flight experimentation in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Student activities such as building models of the Wright Brothers glider and writing press releases of the initial flight are included.

WILBUR WRIGHT↗

NASA NTRS1974

MSFC Skylab experimenter's reference

The methods and techniques for experiment development and integration that evolved during the Skylab Program are described to facilitate transferring this experience to experimenters in future manned space programs. Management responsibilities and the sequential process of experiment evolution from initial concept through definition, development, integration, operation and postflight analysis are outlined in the main text and amplified, as appropriate, in appendixes. Emphasis is placed on specific lessons learned on Skylab that are worthy of consideration by future programs.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS1995

Educational software for the visualization of space plasma processes

The UCLA Space Physics Group has developed educational software composed of a series of modules to assist students with understanding basic concepts of space plasmas and charged particle motion. Present modules cover planetary magnetospheres, charged particle motion, cold plasma waves, collisionless shock waves, and solar wind. The software is designed around the principle that students can learn more by doing rather than by reading or listening. The programs provide a laboratory-like environment in which the student can control, observe, and measure complex behavior. The interactive graphics environment allows the student to visualize the results of his or her experimentation and to try different parameters as desired. The current version of the software runs on UNIX-based operating systems in an X-Windows environment. It has been used in a classroom setting at both UCLA and the University of California at San Diego.

Russell, C. T.↗

NASA NTRS1997

Development of Computer Models for the Assessment of Foreign Body Impact Events on Composite Structures

The objective of this project was to model the 5-3/4 inch pressure vessels used on the NASA RTOP program in an attempt to learn more about how impact damage forms and what are the residual effects of the resulting damage. A global-local finite element model was developed for the bottle and the states of stress in the bottles were determined down to the constituent level. The experimental data that was generated on the NASA RTOP program was not in a form that enabled the model developed under this grant to be correlated with the experimental data. As a result of this exercise it is recommended that an experimental program be designed using statistical design of experiment techniques to generate data that can be used to isolate the phenomenon that control the formation of impact damage. This data should include residual property determinations so that models for post impact structural integrity can be developed. It is also recommended that the global-local methodology be integrated directly into the finite element code. This will require considerable code development.

Bucinell, Ronald B.↗

NASA NTRS1984

Assessment of three-dimensional inviscid codes and loss calculations for turbine aerodynamic computations

An assessment of several three dimensional inviscid turbine aerodynamic computer codes and loss models used at the NASA Lewis Research Center is presented. Five flow situations are examined, for which both experimental data and computational results are available. The five flows form a basis for the evaluation of the computational procedures. It was concluded that stator flows may be calculated with a high degree of accuracy, whereas, rotor flow fields are less accurately determined. Exploitation of contouring, learning, bowing, and sweeping will require a three dimensional viscous analysis technique.

Povinelli, L. A.↗

NASA NTRS1992

The Language Research Center's Computerized Test System for environmental enrichment and psychological assessment

In the spring of 1987, we undertook to provide environmental enrichment to nonhuman primate subjects in ways that would complement and even contribute to the bio-behaviorial science that justified the monkeys' captivity. Of course, the psychological well-being of captive primates--and indeed all research species-- has been an area of intense research activity since the 1985 amendment of the Animal Welfare Act. This mandate for researchers to ensure the psychological, as well as physical, fitness of experimental animals catalyzed the humane and scientific interests of the research community. The contemporary literature is replete with proposed means both of assaying and of providing enrichment and well-being. Notwithstanding, consensus on either assessment or intervention has yet to be reached. The paradigm we employed was modelled after successful efforts with chimpanzees. An automated test system was constructed in which subjects responded to computer tasks by manipulating a joystick. The tasks, interactive game-like versions of many of the classic testing paradigms of cognitive and comparative psychology, permitted the controlled presentation of stimuli and demands without the required presence of a human experimenter. Despite significant barriers to the success, rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) and a variety of other primate species (including, of course, humans) have mastered the skills necessary for testing in this paradigm. Previous experiments have illustrated the utility of the test system for addressing questions of learning, memory, attention, perception, and motivation. Additional data have been reported to support the contention that the Language Research Center's Computerized Test System (LRC-CTS) serves its other raison d'etre--providing environmental enrichment and assessing psychological well-being. This paper is designed to augment previous descriptions of the technology and the paradigm for scientists and caretakers interested in environmental enrichment and performance assessment with primates.

Non-NASA Center↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Characterizing the Effects of Thermal Profile and Gas Environment on the Heat Treatment of JSC-1A Lunar Simulant Using Combined Thermogravimetry and Mass Spectroscopy

As NASA strives towards a long duration presence on the Moon, it has become increasingly important to learn how to better utilize resources from the lunar surface for everything from habitats, vehicle infrastructure, and chemical extraction. To that end, a variety of lunar simulants have been sourced from terrestrially available volcanic minerals and glass as Apollo regolith is a finite resource unavailable for experimentation needing large masses. However, while mineralogy and chemical composition can approach that of lunar material in these simulants, there are still distinct non-lunar phases such as hydrates, carbonates, sulfates, and clays that can cause simulants to behave distinctly non-lunar in a variety of processing conditions that would ideally be applied to lunar material. Notably, severe glassy bubbling has been documented in a variety of vacuum sintering experiments on JSC-1A lunar Maria simulant heated via microwaves. The origins of this outgassing have not been well understood, but are normally attributed to the decomposition of non-lunar contaminates intrinsic to virtually all terrestrially sourced simulants. As such, a series of controlled environmental tests were performed to ascertain the origins of the high temperature outgassing and to develop heat treatments that can drive JSC-1A closer to lunar composition and behavior. It was found that in JSC-1A that distinct gas evolutions of water, carbon dioxide, and sulfur dioxide occur in both inert gas and vacuum. Additionally, the presence of hydrogen during heat treatments was shown to dramatically change gas evolutions, leading to distinctly more lunar-like composition and behavior from JSC-1A simulant.

sinter↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Characterizing the Effects of Thermal Profile and Gas Environment on the Heat Treatment of JSC-1A Lunar Simulant Using Combined Thermogravimetry and Mass Spectroscopy

sinter↗

NASA NTRS2002

Novel Advancements in Internet-Based Real Time Data Technologies

AZ Technology has been working with MSFC Ground Systems Department to find ways to make it easier for remote experimenters (RPI's) to monitor their International Space Station (ISS) payloads in real-time from anywhere using standard/familiar devices. AZ Technology was awarded an SBIR Phase I grant to research the technologies behind and advancements of distributing live ISS data across the Internet. That research resulted in a product called "EZStream" which is in use on several ISS-related projects. Although the initial implementation is geared toward ISS, the architecture and lessons learned are applicable to other space-related programs. This paper presents the high-level architecture and components that make up EZStream. A combination of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and custom components were used and their interaction will be discussed. The server is powered by Apache's Jakarta-Tomcat web server/servlet engine. User accounts are maintained in a My SQL database. Both Tomcat and MySQL are Open Source products. When used for ISS, EZStream pulls the live data directly from NASA's Telescience Resource Kit (TReK) API. TReK parses the ISS data stream into individual measurement parameters and performs on-the- fly engineering unit conversion and range checking before passing the data to EZStream for distribution. TReK is provided by NASA at no charge to ISS experimenters. By using a combination of well established Open Source, NASA-supplied. and AZ Technology-developed components, operations using EZStream are robust and economical. Security over the Internet is a major concern on most space programs. This paper describes how EZStream provides for secure connection to and transmission of space- related data over the public Internet. Display pages that show sensitive data can be placed under access control by EZStream. Users are required to login before being allowed to pull up those web pages. To enhance security, the EZStream client/server data transmissions can be encrypted to preclude interception. EZStream was developed to make use of a host of standard platforms and protocols. Each are discussed in detail in this paper. The I3ZStream server is written as Java Servlets. This allows different platforms (i.e. Windows, Unix, Linux . Mac) to host the server portion. The EZStream client component is written in two different flavors: JavaBean and ActiveX. The JavaBean component is used to develop Java Applet displays. The ActiveX component is used for developing ActiveX-based displays. Remote user devices will be covered including web browsers on PC#s and scaled-down displays for PDA's and smart cell phones. As mentioned. the interaction between EZStream (web/data server) and TReK (data source) will be covered as related to ISS. EZStream is being enhanced to receive and parse binary data stream directly. This makes EZStream beneficial to both the ISS International Partners and non-NASA applications (i.e. factory floor monitoring). The options for developing client-side display web pages will be addressed along with the development of tools to allow creation of display web pages by non-programmers.

Myers, Gerry↗

NASA NTRS2011

Prediction of Weather Impacted Airport Capacity using Ensemble Learning

Ensemble learning with the Bagging Decision Tree (BDT) model was used to assess the impact of weather on airport capacities at selected high-demand airports in the United States. The ensemble bagging decision tree models were developed and validated using the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) data and weather forecast at these airports. The study examines the performance of BDT, along with traditional single Support Vector Machines (SVM), for airport runway configuration selection and airport arrival rates (AAR) prediction during weather impacts. Testing of these models was accomplished using observed weather, weather forecast, and airport operation information at the chosen airports. The experimental results show that ensemble methods are more accurate than a single SVM classifier. The airport capacity ensemble method presented here can be used as a decision support model that supports air traffic flow management to meet the weather impacted airport capacity in order to reduce costs and increase safety.

Weather impact↗

NASA NTRS1999

Overview of Fluid Dynamics Activities at the Marshall Space Flight Center

Since its inception 40 years ago, Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) has had the need to maintain and advance state-of-the-art flow analysis and cold-flow testing capability to support its roles and missions. This overview discusses the recent organizational changes that have occurred at MSFC with emphasis on the resulting three groups that form the core of fluid dynamics expertise at MSFC: the Fluid Physics and Dynamics Group, the Applied Fluid Dynamics Analysis Group, and the Experimental Fluid Dynamics Group. Recently completed activities discussed include the analysis and flow testing in support of the Fastrac engine design, the X-33 vehicle design, and the X34 propulsion system design. Ongoing activities include support of the RLV vehicle design, Liquid Fly Back Booster aerodynamic configuration definition, and RLV focused technologies development. Other ongoing activities discussed are efforts sponsored by the Center Director's Discretionary Fund (CDDF) to develop an advanced incompressible flow code and to develop optimization techniques. Recently initiated programs and their anticipated required fluid dynamics support are discussed. Based on recent experiences and on the anticipated program needs, required analytical and experimental technique improvements are presented. Due to anticipated budgetary constraints, there is a strong need to leverage activities and to pursue teaming arrangements in order to advance the state-of-the-art and to adequately support concept development. Throughout this overview there is discussion of the lessons learned and of the capabilities demonstrated and established in support of the hardware development programs.

Garcia, Roberto↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Learning Based Edge Computing in Air-to-Air Communication Network

This paper studies learning-based edge computing and communication in a dynamic Air-to-Air Ad-hoc Network (AAAN). Due to spectrum scarcity, we assume the number of Air-to-Air (A2A) communication links is greater than that of the available frequency channels, such that some communication links have to share the same channel, causing co-channel interference. We formulate the joint channel selection and power control optimization problem to maximize the aggregate spectrum utilization efficiency under resource and fairness constraints. A distributed deep Q learning-based edge computing and communication algorithm is proposed to find the optimal solution. In particular, we design two different neural network structures and each communication link can converge to the optimal operation by exploiting only the local information from its neighbors, making it scalable to large networks. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in various AAAN scenarios.

Zhe Wang↗

NASA NTRS1994

Learning to train neural networks for real-world control problems

Over the past three years, our group has concentrated on the application of neural network methods to the training of controllers for real-world systems. This presentation describes our approach, surveys what we have found to be important, mentions some contributions to the field, and shows some representative results. Topics discussed include: (1) executing model studies as rehearsal for experimental studies; (2) the importance of correct derivatives; (3) effective training with second-order (DEKF) methods; (4) the efficacy of time-lagged recurrent networks; (5) liberation from the tyranny of the control cycle using asynchronous truncated backpropagation through time; and (6) multistream training for robustness. Results from model studies of automotive idle speed control serve as examples for several of these topics.

Feldkamp, Lee A.↗

NASA NTRS2000

Experimental Analysis of Steady-State Maneuvering Effects on Transmission Vibration Patterns Recorded in an AH-1 Cobra Helicopter

Flight experiment was designed primarily to determine the extent to which steady-state maneuvers influence characteristic vibration patterns measured at the input pinion and output annulus gear locations of the main transmission. If results were to indicate that maneuvers systematically influence vibration patterns, more extensive studies would be planned to explore the response surface. It was also designed to collect baseline data for comparison with experimental data to be recorded at a later date from test stands at Glenn Research Center. Finally, because this was the first vibration flight study on the Cobra aircraft, considerable energy was invested in developing an in-flight recording apparatus, as well as exploring acceleration mounting methods, and generally learning about the overall vibratory characteristics of the aircraft itself.

Huff, Edward M.↗

NASA NTRS2002

Novel Advancements in Internet-Based Real-Time Data Technologies

AZ Technology has been working with NASA MSFC (Marshall Space Flight Center) to find ways to make it easier for remote experimenters (RPI's) to monitor their International Space Station (ISS) payloads in real-time from anywhere using standard/familiar devices. That effort resulted in a product called 'EZStream' which is in use on several ISS-related projects. Although the initial implementation is geared toward ISS, the architecture and lessons learned are applicable to other space-related programs. This paper begins with a brief history on why Internet-based real-time data is important and where EZStream or products like it fit in the flow of data from orbit to experimenter/researcher. A high-level architecture is then presented along with explanations of the components used. A combination of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), Open Source, and custom components are discussed. The use of standard protocols is shown along with some details on how data flows between server and client. Some examples are presented to illustrate how a system like EZStream can be used in real world applications and how care was taken to make the end-user experience as painless as possible. A system such as EZStream has potential in the commercial (non-ISS) arena and some possibilities are presented. During the development and fielding of EZStream, a lot was learned. Good and not so good decisions were made. Some of the major lessons learned will be shared. The development of EZStream is continuing and the future of EZStream will be discussed to shed some light over the technological horizon.

Myers, Gerry↗

NASA NTRS2013

Lessons Learned in the Selection and Development of Test Cases for the Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop: Rectangular Supercritical Wing

The Aeroelastic Prediction Workshop brought together an international community of computational fluid dynamicists as a step in defining the state of the art in computational aeroelasticity. The Rectangular Supercritical Wing (RSW) was chosen as the first configuration to study due to its geometric simplicity, perceived simple flow field at transonic conditions and availability of an experimental data set containing forced oscillation response data. Six teams performed analyses of the RSW; they used Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes flow solvers exercised assuming that the wing had a rigid structure. Both steady-state and forced oscillation computations were performed by each team. The results of these calculations were compared with each other and with the experimental data. The steady-state results from the computations capture many of the flow features of a classical supercritical airfoil pressure distribution. The most dominant feature of the oscillatory results is the upper surface shock dynamics. Substantial variations were observed among the computational solutions as well as differences relative to the experimental data. Contributing issues to these differences include substantial wind tunnel wall effects and diverse choices in the analysis parameters.

Heeg, Jennifer↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

X-57 Maxwell Aircraft EMI/EMC Integration Lessons Learned

X-57 Project Need - Advance the Nation's ability to design, test, and determine airworthiness of distributed electric and aero-propulsive coupling technologies, which are a critical enabler of emerging, advanced air mobility markets. - The value of X-57 lies in advancing hte Nation's ability to design, test, and certify electric aircraft, which will enable entirely new markets - The Mod II flight test program is a pathfinder for the experimental propulsion system performance and reliability to reduce the risk in the X-57 configuration.

Heather Maliska↗

NASA NTRS1985

Computer architectures for computational physics work done by Computational Research and Technology Branch and Advanced Computational Concepts Group

Slides are reproduced that describe the importance of having high performance number crunching and graphics capability. They also indicate the types of research and development underway at Ames Research Center to ensure that, in the near term, Ames is a smart buyer and user, and in the long-term that Ames knows the best possible solutions for number crunching and graphics needs. The drivers for this research are real computational physics applications of interest to Ames and NASA. They are concerned with how to map the applications, and how to maximize the physics learned from the results of the calculations. The computer graphics activities are aimed at getting maximum information from the three-dimensional calculations by using the real time manipulation of three-dimensional data on the Silicon Graphics workstation. Work is underway on new algorithms that will permit the display of experimental results that are sparse and random, the same way that the dense and regular computed results are displayed.

Source record↗