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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 307 records · Page 17
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Magnets for a Muon Collider—Needs and Plans

We describe the magnet challenges for a Muon Collider, an exciting option considered for the future of particle physics at the energy frontier. Starting from the comprehensive work performed by the US Muon Accelerator Program, we have reviewed the performance specifications dictated by beam physics and the operating conditions to satisfy the accelerator needs. Among the many magnets that make up a muon collider, we have identified four systems that represent well the envelope of challenges: the target and capture solenoid, the final cooling solenoid, the accelerator dipoles and the collider dipoles. These systems provide focus for the development of novel concepts, largely based on HTS for reasons of performance, cost and sustainability. After giving a consolidated overview of the needs for the magnet systems, we describe here the basic technology options considered, and the plan for design and development activities.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
NASA NTRS1975

Flow field characteristics and performance limitations of quasi-steady magnetoplasmadynamic accelerators

Measurements of terminal voltage, exhaust velocity, current and potential distributions in a quasi-steady MPD arc operating over a range of currents from 3 to 25 kA countervene previous indications of basic limitations on MPD performance. Terminal voltage fluctuations, previously used as an indicator of a unique limiting value of the parameter current squared over mass flow, are shown to be related to cathode surface area rather than to interelectrode plasma phenomena. With improved electrodes and insulators, satisfactory arc operation at specific impulses somewhat beyond previously proposed limits has been demonstrated, and the significant thrust producing mechanisms in such arcs have been identified.

Boyle, M. J.↗
NASA NTRS1973

Performance of 30-cm ion thrusters with dished accelerator grids

Thirteen sets of dished accelerator grids were tested on five different 30-cm diameter bombardment thrustors to evaluate the effects of grid geometry variations on thrustor discharge chamber performance. The dished grid parameters varied were: grid-to-grid spacing, screen and accelerator grid hole-diameter, screen and accelerator open area fraction, compensation for beam divergence losses, and accelerator grid thickness. Also investigated were the effects on discharge chamber performance of main magnetic field changes, magnetic baffle current cathode pole piece length and cathode position.

Rawlin, V. K.↗
DOE OSTI2025

LLM-Inference-Bench: Inference Benchmarking of Large Language Models on AI Accelerators

Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled groundbreaking advancements across several domains and are commonly used for text generation applications. However, the computational demands of these complex models pose significant challenges, requiring efficient hardware acceleration. Benchmarking the performance of LLMs across diverse hardware platforms is crucial to understanding their scalability and throughput characteristics. We introduce LLM-Inference-Bench, a comprehensive benchmarking suite to evaluate the hardware inference performance of LLMs. We thoroughly analyze diverse hardware platforms, including GPUs from Nvidia and AMD and specialized AI accelerators, Intel Habana and SambaNova. Our evaluation includes several LLM inference frameworks and models from LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen families with 7B and 70B parameters. Our benchmarking results reveal the strengths and limitations of various models, hardware platforms, and inference frameworks. We provide an interactive dashboard to help identify configurations for optimal performance for a given hardware platform.

Chitty-Venkata, Krishna Teja↗
NASA NTRS1987

Solar particle acceleration and propagation

The research performed in the period 1983-1986 on solar-particle acceleration and propagation is discussed. Special attention is given to satellite-based observations of large solar energetic particles and (He-3)-rich events; measurements of solar gamma rays, neutrons, and low-energy (1-100-keV) electrons; and observations related to the interplanetary propagation of fast particles. Consideration is also given to theoretical acceleration models based on satellite measurements of accelerated ions.

Lin, R. P.↗
DOE OSTI2026

MFC 5.0: An exascale many-physics flow solver

Many problems of interest in engineering, medicine, and the fundamental sciences rely on high-fidelity flow simulation, making performant computational fluid dynamics solvers a mainstay of the open-source software community. Previous work MFC 3.0 was made a published, documented, and open-source solver via Bryngelson et al. Comp. Phys. Comm. (2021) with numerous physical features, numerical methods, and scalable infrastructure. MFC 5.0 is a significant update to MFC 3.0, featuring a broad set of well-established and novel physical models and numerical methods, as well as the introduction of GPU and APU (or superchip) acceleration. Here, we exhibit state-of-the-art performance and ideal scaling on the first two exascale supercomputers, OLCF Frontier and LLNL El Capitan. Combined with MFC’s single-accelerator performance, MFC achieves exascale computation in practice, and achieved the largest-to-date public CFD simulation at 200 trillion grid points as a 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalist. New physical features include the immersed boundary method, N-fluid phase change, Euler–Euler and Euler–Lagrange sub-grid bubble models, fluid-structure interaction, hypo- and hyper-elastic materials, chemically reacting flow, two-material surface tension, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), and more. Numerical techniques now represent the current state-of-the-art, including general relaxation characteristic boundary conditions, WENO variants, Strang splitting for stiff sub-grid flow features, and low Mach number treatments. Weak scaling to tens of thousands of GPUs on OLCF Summit and Frontier and LLNL El Capitan achieves efficiencies within 5% of ideal to over 90% of their respective system sizes. Strong scaling results for a 16-times increase in device count show parallel efficiencies over 90% on OLCF Frontier. MFC’s software stack has undergone further improvements, including continuous integration, which ensures code resilience and correctness through over 300 regression tests; metaprogramming, which reduces code length while maintaining performance portability; and code generation for computing chemical reactions

Computational fluid dynamics↗
NASA NTRS2014

Investigation of the Effects of Cathode Flow Fraction and Position on the Performance and Operation of the High Voltage Hall Accelerator

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Science Mission Directorate In- Space Propulsion Technology office is sponsoring NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) to develop a 4 kW-class Hall thruster propulsion system for implementation in NASA science missions. Tests were performed within NASA GRC Vacuum Facility 5 at background pressure levels that were six times lower than what has previously been attained in other vacuum facilities. A study was conducted to assess the impact of varying the cathode-to-anode flow fraction and cathode position on the performance and operational characteristics of the High Voltage Hall Accelerator (HiVHAc) thruster. In addition, the impact of injecting additional xenon propellant in the vicinity of the cathode was also assessed. Cathode-to-anode flow fraction sensitivity tests were performed for power levels between 1.0 and 3.9 kW. It was found that varying the cathode flow fraction from 5 to approximately 10% of the anode flow resulted in the cathode-to-ground voltage becoming more positive. For an operating condition of 3.8 kW and 500 V, varying the cathode position from a distance of closest approach to 600 mm away did not result in any substantial variation in thrust but resulted in the cathode-to-ground changing from -17 to -4 V. The change in the cathode-to-ground voltage along with visual observations indicated a change in how the cathode plume was coupling to the thruster discharge. Finally, the injection of secondary xenon flow in the vicinity of the cathode had an impact similar to increasing the cathode-to-anode flow fraction, where the cathode-to-ground voltage became more positive and discharge current and thrust increased slightly. Future tests of the HiVHAc thruster are planned with a centrally mounted cathode in order to further assess the impact of cathode position on thruster performance.

Cathode Coupling↗
DOE OSTI2020

Energy deposition and radiological studies with MARS15 code for NuMI-AIP project

The studies described below have been performed for NuMI Accelerator Improvement Project (NuMI AIP). This work has been done to extend previous studies and address new issues encountered as the project evolves. The calculations have been performed for both normal operation and an accident scenario.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Laser-heated capillary discharge waveguides as tunable structures for laser-plasma acceleration

Laser-heated capillary discharge waveguides are novel, low plasma density guiding structures able to guide intense laser pulses over many diffraction lengths and have recently enabled the acceleration of electrons to 7.8 GeV by using a laser-plasma accelerator (LPA). These devices represent an improvement over conventional capillary discharge waveguides, as the channel matched spot size and plasma density can be tuned independently of the capillary radius. This has allowed the guiding of petawatt-scale pulses focused to small spot sizes within large diameter capillaries, preventing laser damage of the capillary structure. High performance channel-guided LPAs require control of matched spot size and density, which experiments and simulations reported here show can be tuned over a wide range via initial discharge and laser parameters. In this paper, measurements of the matched spot size and plasma density in laser-heated capillary discharges are presented, which are found to be in excellent agreement with simulations performed using the MHD code MARPLE. Strategies for optimizing accelerator performance are identified based on these results.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Collaboration for Advanced Modeling of Particle Accelerators

The pverarching purpose is to accelerate and expand the scope of discoveries from high energy physics (HEP) particle accelerators by enabling the design of accelerators that are significantly more compact and cheaper to build and run. This will be realized through (i) developing high-performance computing (HPC) accelerator and beam modeling capabilities to design the full range of systems required (ii) developing community simulation ecosystems that seamlessly integrate accelerator elements to facilitate the design and control of next-generation accelerators.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2020

TeraChem Cloud: A High-Performance Computing Service for Scalable Distributed GPU-Accelerated Electronic Structure Calculations

The encapsulation and commoditization of electronic structure arise naturally as interoperability, and the use of nontraditional compute resources (e.g., new hardware accelerators, cloud computing) remains important for the computational chemistry community. Here, we present TERACHEM CLOUD, a high-performance computing service (HPCS) that offers on-demand electronic structure calculations on both traditional HPC clusters and cloud-based hardware. The framework is designed using off-the-shelf web technologies and containerization to be extremely scalable and portable. Within the HPCS model, users can quickly develop new methods and algorithms in an interactive environment on their laptop while allowing TERACHEM CLOUD to distribute ab initio calculations across all available resources. This approach greatly increases the accessibility of hardware accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and flexibility for the development of new methods as additional electronic structure packages are integrated into the framework as alternative backends. Cost-performance analysis indicates that traditional nodes are the most cost-effective long-term solution, but commercial cloud providers offer cutting-edge hardware with competitive rates for short-term large-scale calculations. We demonstrate the power of the TERACHEM CLOUD framework by carrying out several showcase calculations, including the generation of 300,000 density functional theory energy and gradient evaluations on medium-sized organic molecules and reproducing 300 fs of nonadiabatic dynamics on the B800-B850 antenna complex in LH2, with the latter demonstration using over 50 Tesla V100 GPUs in a commercial cloud environment in 8 h for approximately $1250.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2024

The Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at 12 GeV

This review paper describes the energy-upgraded Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) accelerator. This superconducting linac has achieved 12 GeV beam energy by adding 11 new high-performance cryomodules containing 88 superconducting cavities that have operated cw at an average accelerating gradient of 20 MV / m . After reviewing the attributes and performance of the previous 6 GeV CEBAF accelerator, we discuss the upgraded CEBAF accelerator system in detail with particular attention paid to the new beam acceleration systems. In addition to doubling the acceleration in each linac, the upgrade included improving the beam recirculation magnets, adding more helium cooling capacity to allow the newly installed modules to run cold, adding a new experimental hall, and improving numerous other accelerator components. We review several of the techniques deployed to operate and analyze the accelerator performance and document system operating experience and performance. In the final portion of the document, we present much of the current planning regarding projects to improve accelerator performance and enhance operating margins, and our plans for ensuring CEBAF operates reliably into the future. For the benefit of potential users of CEBAF, the performance and quality measures for the beam delivered to each of the experimental halls are summarized in the Appendix. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Adapting In Situ Accelerators for Sparsity With Granular Matrix Reordering

Neural network (NN) inference is an essential part of modern systems and is found at the heart of numerous applications ranging from image recognition to natural language processing. In situ NN accelerators can efficiently perform NN inference using resistive crossbars, which makes them a promising solution to the data movement challenges faced by conventional architectures. Although such accelerators demonstrate significant potential for dense NNs, they often do not benefit from sparse NNs, which contain relatively few non-zero weights. Processing sparse NNs on in situ accelerators results in wasted energy to charge the entire crossbar where most elements are zeros. To address this limitation, this paper proposes Granular Matrix Reordering (GMR): a preprocessing technique that enables an energy-efficient computation of sparse NNs on in situ accelerators. GMR reorders the rows and columns of sparse weight matrices to maximize the crossbars' utilization and minimize the total number of crossbars needed to be charged. The reordering process does not rely on sparsity patterns and incurs no accuracy loss. Finally, GMR achieves an average of 28% and up to 34% reduction in energy consumption over seven pruned NNs across four different pruning methods and network architectures.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRS1989

Numerical studies of multiple-encounter shock drift acceleration

Test particle simulation is performed to examine the mechanism previously proposed by Chiueh for particle acceleration by a nearly perpendicular shock where only downstream MHD turbulence is present. A nonnegligible fraction of low-energy particles is observed gaining energy by more than three orders of magnitude in a few hundred cyclotron periods. Criteria for effective acceleration given previously are examined and confirmed. The numerical results suggest that in the nonrelativistic energy range, a power-law particle energy spectrum, with the power index determined by the degree to which the criteria are satisfied, may form.

Chiueh, Tzihong↗
DOE OSTI2023

ML-based Real-Time Control at the Edge: An Approach Using hls4ml

This study focuses on implementing a real-time control system for a particle accelerator facility that performs high energy physics experiments. A critical operating parameter in this facility is beam loss, which is the fraction of particles deviating from the accelerated proton beam into a cascade of secondary particles. Accelerators employ a large number of sensors to monitor beam loss. The data from these sensors is monitored by human operators who predict the relative contribution of different sub-systems to the beam loss. Using this information, they engage control interventions. In this paper, we present a controller to track this phenomenon in real-time using edge-Machine Learning (ML) and support control with low latency and high accuracy. We implemented this system on an Intel Arria 10 SoC. Optimizations at the algorithm, high-level synthesis, and interface levels to improve latency and resource usage are presented. Our design implements a neural network, which can predict the main source of beam loss (between two possible causes) at speeds up to 575 frames per second (fps) (average latency of 1.74 ms). The practical deployed system is required to operate at 320 fps, with a 3ms latency requirement, which has been met by our design successfully.

Shi, R.↗
NASA NTRS1973

Sustained linear acceleration

The subjective effects of sustained acceleration are discussed, including positive, negative, forward, backward, and lateral acceleration effects. Physiological effects, such as retinal and visual response, unconsciousness and cerebral function, pulmonary response, and renal output, are studied. Human tolerance and performance under sustained acceleration are ascertained.

Fraser, T. M.↗
NASA NTRS1998

Life Testing of the Vapor Compression Distillation Urine Processing Assembly (VCD/UPA) at the Marshall Space Flight Center

Wastewater and urine generated on the International Space Station will be processed to recover pure water. The method selected is vapor compression distillation (VCD). To verify the long-term reliability and performance of the VCD Urine Processing Assembly (UPA), accelerated life testing was performed at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) from January 1993 to April 1996. Two UPAS, the VCD-5 and VCD-5A, were tested for 204 days and 665 days, respectively. The compressor gears and the distillation centrifuge drive belt were found to have an operating life of approximately 4800 hours. Precise alignment of the flex-spline of the fluids pump is essential to avoid failure of the pump after about 400 hours of operation. Also, leakage around the seals of the drive shaft of the fluids pump and purge pump must be eliminated for continued good performance. Results indicate that, with some design and procedural modifications and suitable quality control, the required performance and operational life can be met with the VCD/UPA.

Wieland, Paul O.↗