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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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NASA NTRS2020

Soft-Switching GaN-Based Isolated Power Conversion System for Small Satellites with Wide Input Voltage Range

As we pursue the advancement of small satellites for space missions with more capabilities, there is a significant need for cutting-edge, modularly configurable, high density power converters. This article proposes a fixed switching frequency, high efficiency, compact isolated converter for sensitive loads such as radar, communication systems, or other instruments on small satellites.

Cook, Tom↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Overview of Nondestructive Evaluation Capabilities at NASA MSFC

Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods examine material integrity without impairing its usefulness. The NDE team at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama is responsible for applying existing methods to new hardware designs and material systems, probability of detection studies to quantify detection capabilities, overseeing NDE requirements for flight hardware, inspecting development articles and flight hardware, engineering support for failure investigations, and investigating emerging NDE methods. NASA MSFC has been on the cutting edge of developing new NDE techniques, first for the space shuttle, then for composite structures, and most recently for additive manufacturing (AM). Standard in-house inspection capabilities include eddy current, magnetic particle, liquid penetrant, ultrasonic, and radiographic testing (including computed tomography). Other advanced inspection capabilities include infrared flash thermography, shearography, acoustic emission, and microwave/millimeter wave testing. Some recent research studies include AM probability of detection testing, investigating in-situ process monitoring methods for AM, and correlating the NDE response of true fatigue cracks with artificial notches.

nondestructive evaluation↗
NASA NTRS2021

Remote Concurrent Engineering: A-Team Studies in the Virtual World

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL’s)Architecture Team (A-Team) has nearly a decade of experiencein maturing early formulation mission and technology conceptsby combining innovative collaborative engineering methodswith cutting-edge subject matter expertise and advancedanalysis tools in an in-person environment. When COVID-19forced JPL’s workforce to work remotely in March 2020, ATeamhad to quickly pivot from an in-person collaborativeenvironment to a remote working environment.Through introspection, careful planning, and considerablepractice, A-Team was able to develop new operating proceduresto effectively continue early formulation studies in a virtualenvironment. A-Team has held over 57 remote studies in the 10months since the start of mandatory telework at JPL in March2020. In the remote setting, A-Team conducts studies in half-daysessions with clients and subject matter experts (SMEs) viavideoconferencing, shared computer screens, and digitalcollaborative tools.The key lesson is that increased staffing and planning is neededto prepare and successfully run remote A-Team studies. RemoteA-Team studies require careful selection of the appropriatetools for security, accessibility, and usability within theNASA/JPL environment. Knowledge capture methods andtemplates need to be thought out and agreed upon in advance asthere is less room for improvising in a remote format. Variouscommunication channels have to be monitored to allow for teamcoordination while maintaining fruitful participant engagementduring a session. In addition, technical backup for all roleswithin the A-Team have to be identified to allow the study tocontinue even if a team member’s connectivity is temporarilyinterrupted. Finally, careful thought has to be put into methodsand processes to create a collaborative environment in a virtualspace such that a group of experts who are only connected viathe internet can experience the creative spark and flow of a greatcollaborative and innovative study.

Zusack, Steven↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Chasing Spacecraft

Measurements made during actual flight on a spacecraft represent the holy grail in supporting cutting edge research and providing critical vehicle health information during exposure to the harsh environments of launch and reentry. Remote optical imaging data obtained by the Scientifically Calibrated In-Flight Imagery (SCIFLI) team at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) is currently being used by NASA’s Artemis and Commercial Crew Programs to ensure the safety of astronauts. This emerging capability had its genesis during the Space Shuttle Program. A look toward the future will showcase the use of high-altitude long-endurance uncrewed aircraft coupled with novel sensors to support civilian and national flight-testing interests more effectively.

Tom Horvath↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Wildland Fire Mitigation: The Role of Airspace Management

Wildland fire is a significant problem on six continents. As wildland fires become increasingly widespread, dangerous, and costly, advances in aerial technology will make a significant difference. Leveraging Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) success, NASA is conducting aerial suppression research and development (R&D) and is collaborating across government, industry, and the academic community to co-develop cutting-edge technology, procedures, and best practices. Join Dr. Parimal "PK" Kopardekar, Director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute (NARI), and learn more about how to maximize the utilization of airspace for wildfire management and mitigation.

Wildland fire↗
NASA NTRS2022

NASA System-Wide Safety Wildland Firefighting Operations Workshop Report

On March 9-11, 2022, NASA’s System-Wide Safety Wildland Firefighting Operations Workshop engaged the broader wildland firefighting management ecosystem in a safety-oriented discussion via a virtual platform. This enabled a better understanding of how NASA and community expertise can be leveraged in the safe development of current and future firefighting systems and operations. The goals of the workshop were to: (1) identify and prioritize the top safety-oriented risks, gaps in capabilities, and emerging technologies to enhance wildland firefighting for both near-term and far-term concepts, with a specific focus on aviation operations and (2) engage the stakeholder community in defining emergent safety-oriented scope, roles, responsibilities, and procedures for agents undergoing increasingly complex wildland firefighting operations in information-rich, but uncertain environments. Workshop participants were solicited from wildland firefighting stakeholders across government, industry, and academia. All levels of government were engaged, as NASA sought attendees from federal, state, local, and tribal government agencies. Industry participants from traditional wildland firefighting domains such as data visualization and equipment manufacturers were invited, and corporate attendees from novel application domains such as aerial robotics and autonomous systems were present as well. The top three findings were as follows: (1) Enhancing situation awareness is a safety priority, especially in the use of aerial assets; (2) Timely access to information along with data fusion and integrated displays will enhance safety-critical decision-making both inside and outside aviation contexts; and (3) Tailorable standards and common operating pictures in the field will enhance inter-agency cooperation in the wildland firefighting lifecycle and enable the optimal use of limited resources such as aerial assets. The workshop helped inform NASA of the relevant safety-related wildland firefighting concerns and aided the broader ecosystem in understanding the potential safety-oriented role NASA might play in this community. Increased engagement with crucial governmental stakeholders (e.g., U.S. Forest Service, CAL FIRE, etc.) along with industry partners in cutting- edge information -centric domains is a fundamental next step. Additionally, the workshop findings will help define the first of a series of operationally challenging demonstrations, held in concert with strategic ecosystem partners, known as the Safety Demonstrator Series for NASA’s System-Wide Safety project. The first demonstration is set in the wildland firefighting application domain and will: (1) examine high risk operational scenarios to reduce their overall risk via services, functions or capabilities that act as risk mitigators (or transfer that risk to automated systems better able to tolerate it) and (2) explore novel tools and technologies that will enhance safety margins by enabling non-traditional or neoteric operational paradigms.

wildland firefighting↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

International Space Station (ISS) Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) System Overview of Events 2022

Nov 20th, 2022 marks the 24th anniversary of the beginning of construction of the International Space Station(ISS). The ECLS system is constantly changing to meet the needs of current missions and future exploration. The ISS has become the laboratory that was always envisioned, allowing for an ever-growing class of exploration level technologies that will propel the stage forward as humanity advances beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This paper will review the past year, and look towards the future for each U.S. ECLS subsystem. The impacts, challenges, and successes related to the intermingling of incumbent and cutting edge technologies are summarily discussed in this paper.

Steven F Balistreri↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The NASA Facility for Astromaterials Research at the Johnson Space Center – A National Laboratory for Planetary Research

The Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at the NASA Johnson Space Center houses a unique combination of laboratories, instruments, infrastructure, technical ex-pertise, and other assets for conducting broad-based world-class planetary research. These facilities have been accessed for decades by hundreds of external scientists, including faculty, post-docs, students, and interns, most at no cost and on a collaborative basis. With funding through NASA’s Planetary Science Enabling Facilities (PSEF) program, we have estab-lished the NASA Facility for Astromaterials Research (NFAR) to expand access to and enhance these labora-tories for a diverse and inclusive external user base, thus maximizing the science return from research funded by R&A programs in NASA’s Planetary Sci-ence Division (PSD). NFAR enables cutting edge planetary sample analyses, making new scientific dis-coveries possible, in addition to training the next-generation of planetary scientists. NFAR laboratories are co-located with JSC Curation that houses all NASA-controlled astromaterials collections, thus ena-bling direct access to both research and curation exper-tise, to facilitate specialized sample handling and anal-ysis of allocated samples (from JSC and other sample collections) to PIs, particularly those affiliated with institutions that historically have limited or no access to in-house analytical or experimental facilities.

J Filiberto↗
NASA NTRS2023

NASA Strategy for Technology Development

At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), foresight is a coordinated, iterative, and continual process for making informed decisions. NASA faces diverse and relatively unique challenges and opportunities as the leading U.S. agency for aeronautics development, cutting-edge scientific discovery, and human space exploration. To address these challenges and leverage opportunities, NASA uses foresight to strategically plan technology development across four mission directorates: Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, Space Technology Mission Directorate, Science Mission Directorate, and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (recently separated into the new Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate and Space Operations Mission Directorate). The mission directorates leverage a broad community of experts and partners to incorporate technology foresight into mission and program planning. Through this process NASA realizes tangible benefits to the agency’s science, technology, and exploration programs. As an independent office, NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS) provides strategic advice, supported by independent assessments and rigorous analysis, to inform NASA senior leadership on key areas to align mission and agency-level activities. OTPS serves as a trusted authority to inform technology strategy at the agency to enable future missions. Specifically, OTPS coordinates and uses inputs from a broad community of experts, both internal and external to NASA, to inform decision making for technology plans, investments, and partnerships. OTPS develops and maintains the NASA Technology Taxonomy to standardize communication across the agency’s diverse technology portfolio and the related Strategic Technology Investment Plan that integrates priorities and informs technology investment. Through these efforts, OTPS has refined elements of foresight-informed strategic planning that may be applicable to other technology-driven industries where foresight is essential for resilience. This chapter describes the processes of foresight for technology development at NASA and provides insight into the value the agency derives from these processes. The chapter further describes the role of OTPS as an independent advisory office that supports NASA’s efforts to capitalize on foresight and strategic technology planning. We present these examples with consideration for how organizations in defense, security, and other technology-driven industries can operationalize foresight in their own strategic technology development.

Erica Rodgers↗
NASA NTRS2023

Broader Impacts and Outreach Videos on Ocean Physics and Biogeochemistry

This is just a preliminary NF1676 in advance of filming for a project....A convergent team of experts in biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, and computational modeling examine how dynamic and coupled phytoplankton-pathogen-particle-predator linkages coalesce to explain the observed high spatial variability in the efficiency of the export of particulate organic carbon (POC) to the deep ocean. They elucidate and quantify the linkages between viruses and ballast minerals to increase understanding of carbon cycling in the oceanic biological carbon pump and the impact of viruses within it. By providing knowledge than can be used to improve the parameterization of carbon export in Earth system models, the project will help reduce uncertainty in regional marine biogeochemical projections, potentially improving marine ecosystem and fisheries management on timescales from seasons to decades. The project includes activities that provide teaching resources and hands-on training to educators within a ‘Tools of Science’ program that provides a simple and succinct way to communicate the process of scientific research to students in a way that is useful to teachers. The project couples laboratory-based experiments on model host-virus-grazer systems with extensive field based observational and manipulative studies on natural populations of diatoms and coccolithophores, the two phytoplankton groups that account for most of the estimated particulate organic matter flux to the deep ocean. Experiments and measurements integrate diagnostic biological and chemical controls on infection and particle coagulation theory with microscale physics and grazing to quantify links to each hypothesized export mechanism under field-relevant turbulent conditions. Cutting-edge engineering and analytical tools are used to diagnose and track infection dynamics while characterizing and quantifying particle aggregation and disaggregation, mineral dissolution, sinking dynamics, grazing rates, and fecal pellet production at unprecedented resolution and under well-defined, microscale physical regimes. Field campaigns elucidate the relative efficiency of hypothesized mechanisms in stimulating POC export in natural blooms, while providing bulk and size-resolved estimates of POC flux.

Daniel B Whitt↗
NASA NTRS2022

Flight Software Dictionary Development for the Mars2020 Rover

The Mars2020 project, developed and operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), successfully landed the Perseverance rover and its flying companion Ingenuity on the surface of Mars on February 18th 2021. Perseverance combines heritage and cutting-edge flight software and hardware to accomplish crucial mission requirements related to Martian surface sampling. The design, development, and operation of NASA’s large strategic science missions require the ability to communicate spacecraft capabilities to hundreds of engineers across multiple disciplines. The interaction between flight and ground software development, Verification and Validation (V&V), Assembly, Test, and Launch Operations (ATLO), and management each demand quick understanding of unique slices of information for each discipline. This information includes the current capabilities of the flight system as well as future capabilities and their status as they are developed and tested. Despite the fundamental and critical nature of this information, the flight software dictionaries used to track it are a stumbling block for many projects. These dictionaries provide the cornerstone for the interpretation of data sent from the spacecraft, allowing for quick comprehension by engineers on the ground. During both spacecraft development and operations, flight software dictionary management includes significant challenges due to the large number of interfacing systems and the subtle yet distinct needs of each.The engineering of flight software dictionaries for Mars2020 had numerous challenges, most-notably: parallel dictionary development to support simultaneous separate flight software build campaigns for each mission phase (cruise and surface), managing requests for operations-enabling information without perturbing the heritage interface with the rover, and the introduction of new tools by the dictionary stakeholders that forced the dictionary team to innovate and redesign the heritage tool chain. These challenges generated guiding principles for the dictionary development effort: emphasize coding best practices and unit testing in the dictionary code development tool chain, use institutionally provided COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) tools whenever possible, and maintain the heritage flight-ground interface all while advancing operations-enabling information via a loosely coupled interface.Throughout development and operations, the Mars2020 dictionary toolchain included IBM DOORS Next Generation, GitHub, Microsoft Excel, Docker, Jenkins, and a significant custom-built Python codebase. Significant interfaces included JPL’s command and control software, heritage flight software team tools and processes, and the many cloud-based ground tools developed for the mission.This paper will discuss the requirements for the Mars2020 dictionary development, the development team’s response to those requirements, lessons learned throughout the process, steps taken towards automated deliveries and continuous integration of stakeholder inputs, potential toolchain improvements for Mars2020, and key takeaways that could be applied to future missions.

Pyrzak, Guy↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

International Space Station (ISS) Environmental Control and Life Support (ECLS) System Overview of Events 2022

Nov 20th, 2022 marks the 24th anniversary of the beginning of construction of the International Space Station (ISS). The ECLS system is constantly changing to meet the needs of current missions and future exploration. The ISS has become the laboratory that was always envisioned, allowing for an ever-growing class of exploration level technologies that will propel the stage forward as humanity advances beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO). This paper will review the past year and look towards the future for each U.S. ECLS subsystem. The impacts, challenges, and successes related to the intermingling of incumbent and cutting-edge technologies are summarily discussed in this paper.

Steven F Balistreri Jr.↗
NASA NTRS2024

Ensuring Safety of Government Personnel During Suborbital Spaceflight

The NASA Suborbital Crew (SubC) project is focused on enabling flights by NASA civil servants, such as scientists and engineers conducting research, on suborbital vehicles. A broader goal is ensuring that commercial human spaceflight is both viable and safe. Within the Commercial Crew Program (CCP), the SubC project is exploring game-changing methods to perform safety assessments to enable NASA personnel to fly on suborbital missions. Commercial suborbital space flight capabilities are anticipated to be more accessible, affordable, and available than missions to the International Space Station and could provide additional opportunities for testing and qualification of space flight hardware, human-tended microgravity research, and further cutting-edge research enabled by the space environment. Although NASA currently permits human tended suborbital payloads for non-civil servants under auspices of NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program, the SubC effort will enable civil servant scientists, researchers, and even engineers to accompany their experiments and tests into the space microgravity environment. Figure 1 illustrates how the SubC program complements other microgravity experimental platforms. The targeted scope for SubC includes end-to-end suborbital capabilities reaching ~80km with several minutes of sustained microgravity (Table 1). The NASA SubC project office is working with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (FAA-AST) and the commercial suborbital space transportation industry to develop an efficient and holistic approach to a safety review and eventual government participation in suborbital flight. The current FAA certification process for suborbital launches is congressionally mandated to only consider public safety. NASA is responsible for understanding the risks to its employees should they fly on a commercially available suborbital flight. The SubC project is employing a Safety Case approach, applied to commercial suborbital providers, which is not a traditional certification process as was used for the SpaceX Dragon and Boeing Starliner vehicles. Rather, it is an assessment using elements of NASA’s Risk-Informed Safety Case and the Armstrong Flight Research Center’s Airworthiness Assessment process.

Elizabeth C Blome↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Biological Research and Space Health Enabled by Machine Learning to Support Deep Space Missions

A key science goal of the NASA “Moon to Mars” campaign is to understand how biology responds to the Lunar, Martian, and deep space environments in order to advance fundamental knowledge, reduce risk, and support safe, productive human space missions. Through the powerful emerging computer science approaches of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), a paradigm shift has begun in biomedical science and engineered astronaut health systems, to enable Earth-independence and autonomy of mission operations. We present a decadal view of AI/ML architecture to support deep space mission goals, developed in concert with leaders in the field. We describe current AI/ML methods to support 1) fundamental biology, 2) in situ analytics, 3) high performance computing hardware, 4) automated science, 5) self-driving labs, 6) remote data management, 7) integrated real-time mission biomonitoring, and 8) a Precision Space Health system. Cutting-edge AI/ML approaches that can be integrated to support these domains include active learning, explainable AI, adaptive learning, causal inference, knowledge graphs, federated learning, transfer learning, and large language models. Finally, we present results from several current ML projects that are underway in the field to address key challenges of small sample n, high feature count, heterogeneity, and sparse data. These include 1) connecting omics data to phenotypic data using an ensemble model to infer causality of spaceflight rodent liver health disruption, 2) usage of explainable ML to interrogate the muscular underpinnings of spaceflight muscle atrophy, 3) ML models analyzing and determining directed acyclic graphs of human space health risk leveraging rodent bone datasets, 4) usage of large pre-trained models connecting biomedical knowledgebases with small spaceflight datasets to understand gene-to-gene interaction networks, and 5) a suite of benchmarked open science datasets (spaceflight mouse liver; radiation DNA damage) enabling programmers to identify the best ML algorithms to answer space biological science questions.

space biology↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Elevating the Quality of Space Omics Sequencing Data: Innovations and Methodologies from NASA GeneLab Sample Processing Laboratory

NASA’s GeneLab, part of the NASA Open Science Data Repository, is a space-related database that hosts a diverse range of transcriptomics, proteomics, epigenomics and genomics data. The NASA GeneLab Sample Processing Laboratory (SPL) generates omics data from biological experiments conducted aboard the International Space Station, Space Shuttle and space related ground experiments, this omics data then hosted on the GeneLab repository. Samples generated such experiments pose numerous technical challenges such as small experimental sample size, variance in dissection times, limited tissue preservation methods, prolonged storage time, and more. GeneLab SPL team had developed specialized expertise in nucleic acid extraction, library preparation and sequencing of such biological samples via extensive training and years of experience. In order to ensure data accuracy and consistency across experiments, SPL has developed standardized protocols for each species and tissue type. These protocols in conjunction with quality control metrics and data standards are crucial in generating of high-quality data. SPL protocols and standards have been developed in collaboration with the scientific community and had been made publicly available on the GeneLab portal, guaranteeing comparability of datasets across spaceflight experiments. To ensure reliability of data generation, SPL leverages cutting-edge innovations in laboratory automation for sample processing. By leveraging these state-of-the-art platforms, SPL achieves high levels of data reproducibility while significantly minimizing sources of bias and variability, especially across experiments with large numbers of samples. Over the past few years, the space biology investigator community has accessed SPL-generated data from the Open Science Data Repository for a myriad of data re-analysis and re-use studies. We observe a trend that in-house SPL-generated data consistently outperforms outsourced sequencing data in terms of technical standards, quality control metrics, timeliness of data delivery, and sequencing and reagent efficiency. Superior data generation has and will continue to enable discoveries in disease, diagnostic tools, and the biological effects of long duration spaceflight.

GeneLab↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The Potential of Medical Drones: An Analysis of Current and Future Use Cases

Modern Application of Medical-Based Drone Delivery Drones have been used advantageously by militaries for nearly a century, but their uses in civilian life are still mostly cutting-edge, if not theoretical. After a decade of bold proclamations, Amazon’s “PrimeAir” drone delivery system is still in the stage of “preparing” for deliveries, while the public awaits for start ups like SkyDrop (formerly Flirtey) to follow through on impressive promises. Despite the well-publicized disappointment so far in commercial drone delivery, medical drone delivery has already proven itself practical and cheap in several countries, and it promises to expand in the coming years. Drones are uniquely suited to make valuable and urgent deliveries to remote areas, quickly transporting medical supplies where road transportation is prohibitively slow or not available at all. Drones have been used notably to deliver AEDs for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, frequently beating first-responders to the scene; to deliver blood when there is none on hand at hospitals; to deliver vaccines to an island nation with little transportation infrastructure; and to respond flexibly to medical emergencies in a war zone. Economics make the delivery of food and other cheap goods by drone unattractive in the near-term, but the value and time-sensitivity of medical deliveries mean that drones are already saving lives in healthcare. “We believe the value of new technology is most valuable where it is clearly needed...that’s why we wanted to focus on drones delivering medicine and not delivering pizzas, ”said one executive of a drone system manufacturer. The immediate prospects for the expansion of medical drone use are many; however, they do not exist without their own drawbacks and challenges. Most obvious is the limited range of current commercially-available drones, most of which are isolated to a perimeter of roughly 18 miles. Technological know-how presents another barrier to integration of medical drones on a larger scale. Reports from the United Nations frequently cite a“skill deficit”—a prohibitively low number of qualified drone operators in low-and moderate-income countries (LMICs). Another perhaps more discreet speed bump in global drone development and usage are the various regulations on drone usage. Drone technology has developed so quickly that many states, out of an excess of caution, have nearly snuffed out the fledgling industry with regulation. There also exist significant concerns over the security of private citizens, the efficacy of medical deliveries, and the costs of drone operation. It is these last three barriers which this study will seek to overcome. Put simply, the prospect for human development in LMICs from drone-based medical delivery is far too great to disregard. As of 2020, 3.4 billion people live in rural communities, containing fewer than 5,000 people/km^2. Often lacking infrastructure, these communities are largely isolated from their more populated, urban counterparts. In drones lies the potential to reshape the geographic and developmental distinctions that divide the global population. This development must, therefore, begin first and foremost with advancement in regional well-being and life expectancy. Life expectancy makes up a key facet of human development. The United Nations relies on it as a key indicator of a state’s health. Lars Kunze of the Dortmund University Department of Economic sex plains this as a matter of physical capital accumulation. The longer people live, the more they save as opposed to spend. The more they save, the more which eventually gets invested in themselves and the community as a whole. In providing medical products via drone, it is the intention of this study to enable communities with the means and incentives for long-run savings and investment for future economic development. Through a close analysis of Vanuatu, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ukraine—four states where drones are currently used to deliver medical supplies—this study develops a framework that LMICs in general and Mexico and particular can adopt and to use medical drones in difficult-to-reach communities for the sake of long-run human developmental initiatives.

Ryan Teoh↗
NASA NTRS2023

Broadband and Wide Angle Nonreciprocal Thermal Emission from Weyl Semimetal Structures

Nonreciprocal thermal emission is a cutting-edge technology that enables fundamental control over thermal radiation and has exciting applications in thermal energy harvesting. However, so far one of the foremost challenges is making nonreciprocal emission to operate over a broad wavelength range and for multiple angles. In this work, we solve this outstanding problem by proposing three different types of structures always utilizing only one Weyl semimetal (WSM) thin film combined with one or two additional dielectric or metallic layers and terminated by a metallic substrate. First a tradeoff relationship between the magnitude and bandwidth of the thermal nonreciprocity contrast is established based on the thickness of the WSM film. Then, the bandwidth broadening effect is demonstrated via the insertion of a dielectric spacer layer that can also be fine-tuned by varying its thickness. Finally, further control on the resulting strong nonreciprocal thermal radiation is demonstrated by the addition of a thin metallic layer in the proposed few layer designs. The presented composite structures work for a broad frequency range and multiple emission angles, consisting highly advantageous properties to various nonreciprocal thermal radiation applications. Moreover, the proposed designs do not require any patterning and can be experimentally realized by simple deposition fabrication methods. They are expected to aid in the creation of broadband nonreciprocal thermal emitters that can find applications in new energy harvesting devices.

Andrew Butler↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA) software

The open-source Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA) software was implemented to offer an efficient framework for determining material characteristics from 3D microstructures. Its development was inspired by progress in X-ray microtomography, an imaging technology that captures the internal structure of materials in 3D, and even in a 4D temporal context. Over recent years, this method has transformed the domain of materials science due to its capability to non-destructively examine material microstructures while presenting digital data about their geometrical details. It has provided insights into materials relevant to several NASA missions, including heatshields, parachute fabrics, meteorites, and other advanced composites. PuMA, in its current version 3, delivers an array of features, spanning from basic geometric insights of a microstructure to intricate anisotropic thermo-elastic and chemical behavior. Specifically, the software evaluates morphological attributes (specific surface area, volume fractions, mean intercept lengths, orientation) and physical characteristics (conductivity, elasticity, permeability, and tortuosity). Additionally, it can model material degradation processes, such as oxidation and surface chemistry interactions. The software can generate synthetic microstructures, from straightforward geometrical designs to intricate woven and non-woven geometries. Coupling material generation and characterization enable parametric studies and sensitivity analysis to optimize the microstructural performance and inform design decisions and reliability assessment based on uncertainty quantification. A recent addition to PuMA includes the TomoSAM plugin, devised to incorporate the cutting-edge Segment Anything Model (SAM). SAM is a promptable deep learning model that can identify objects and create image masks in a zero-shot manner, based only on a few user clicks. The synergy between these tools aids in the segmentation of complex 3D datasets from tomography or other imaging techniques, which would otherwise require a laborious manual segmentation process.

Tomography↗