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At least 307 records · Page 17

An analytical solution for the squeeze film between a nondeformable sphere and groove

An analysis is presented to compute the film thickness, pressure and load relations between a rigid ball and rigid groove in normal approach when lubricated by a fluid with an exponential pressure-viscosity relationship. The geometry of the ball-groove system is reduced to the equivalent system of a paraboloid approaching a flat plate. Exact and approximate solutions are presented for the load and pressure relations. There is found to be a limiting load for a given geometry and lubricant regardless of the rate of approach.

Allen, C. W.↗

3D Woven Mid-Density Carbon Phenolic (3MDCP) Full-Scale Heatshield Development for Mars Sample Return (MSR) Earth Entry System (EES)

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission will be returning samples of Martian soil to Earth. The samples will be returned in the Earth Entry System (EES). The EES capsule is protected by a new thermal protection system; the 3-Dimensionally Woven, Mid-Density, Carbon Phenolic (3MDCP) material which is derived from the Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET). The baseline 3MDCP design is a single piece thermal protection system that avoids the manufacturing and certification challenges associated with a tiled configuration. A 3MDCP heatshield begins as a flat woven preform that is formed to the final heatshield shape and then infused with phenolic resin. A NASA Ames lead team, in collaboration with Spirit Textiles (formerly TEAM Inc.), Fiber Materials Inc. (FMI, a Spirit AeroSystems Company), and Kratos SRE, has been developing and demonstrating the processes to fabricate the 3MDCP heatshield and characterize the resulting properties. The process of forming the flat woven preform into the final heatshield shape, a sphere-cone geometry with a 52.5° cone angle, involves local but substantial movement of the yarns in the weave. This results in continuous fibers across the single piece heatshield, albeit with property variations between different regions of the heatshield. This presentation will provide a high-level status of 3MDCP development for the MSR EES heatshield. This will include an overview of the manufacturing processes with an emphasis on the impact of forming on fiber orientation, material properties, and performance. Results comparing preliminary formed and flat materials will be shown. Additionally, the presentation will layout the broader plan for property testing and tie-in to aerothermal performance.

Peter Edward Marshall↗

SU-F-T-67: Correction Factors for Monitor Unit Verification of Clinical Electron Beams

Purpose: Monitor units calculated by electron Monte Carlo treatment planning systems are often higher than TG-71 hand calculations for a majority of patients. Here I’ve calculated tables of geometry and heterogeneity correction factors for correcting electron hand calculations. Method: A flat water phantom with spherical volumes having radii ranging from 3 to 15 cm was created. The spheres were centered with respect to the flat water phantom, and all shapes shared a surface at 100 cm SSD. D{sub max} dose at 100 cm SSD was calculated for each cone and energy on the flat phantom and for the spherical volumes in the absence of the flat phantom. The ratio of dose in the sphere to dose in the flat phantom defined the geometrical correction factor. The heterogeneity factors were then calculated from the unrestricted collisional stopping power for tissues encountered in electron beam treatments. These factors were then used in patient second check calculations. Patient curvature was estimated by the largest sphere that aligns to the patient contour, and appropriate tissue density was read from the physical properties provided by the CT. The resulting MU were compared to those calculated by the treatment planning system and TG-71 hand calculations. Results: The geometry and heterogeneity correction factors range from ∼(0.8–1.0) and ∼(0.9–1.01) respectively for the energies and cones presented. Percent differences for TG-71 hand calculations drop from ∼(3–14)% to ∼(0–2)%. Conclusion: Monitor units calculated with the correction factors typically decrease the percent difference to under actionable levels, < 5%. While these correction factors work for a majority of patients, there are some patient anatomies that do not fit the assumptions made. Using these factors in hand calculations is a first step in bringing the verification monitor units into agreement with the treatment planning system MU.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

3D Woven Mid-Density Carbon Phenolic (3MDCP) Thermal Protection System Development

3-Dimensionally Woven, Mid-Density, Carbon Phenolic (3MDCP) Thermal Protection System (TPS) material is derived from the dual layer 3D woven Heatshield for Extreme Entry Environment Technology (HEEET) material. The baseline 3MDCP design is a single piece thermal protection system that avoids the manufacturing and certification challenges associated with a tiled configuration. 3MDCP is targeted for very aggressive entry environments such as high-speed sample return missions to Earth and missions to Saturn, Venus and the ice giants. A 3MDCP heatshield begins as a flat woven preform that is formed to a given heatshield shape and then infused with phenolic resin. NASA Ames, in collaboration with TEAM Inc. (weaving) and Fiber Materials Inc. (both Spirit AeroSystems Companies) have been developing and demonstrating the manufacturing processes to fabricate a 3MDCP heatshield at a diameter of 1.25 meters. The process of forming the flat woven preform into the final heatshield shape, a sphere-cone geometry, involves local movement of the yarns in the weave. This results in a single piece heatshield with continuous fibers, albeit with property variations between different regions on the heatshield. This presentation will provide a high-level status of 3MDCP development. This will include an overview of the manufacturing processes, with an emphasis on the impact of forming on fiber orientation, material properties and performance. The presentation will layout the plan for testing to assess the impact of forming on properties and review preliminary data comparing properties of flat to formed materials.

Thermal Protection System↗

Flat H Redundant Frangible Joint Development

Orion and Commercial Crew Program (CCP) Partners have chosen to use frangible joints for certain separation events. The joints currently available are zero failure tolerant and will be used in mission safety applications. The goal is to further develop a NASA designed redundant frangible joint that will lower flight risk and increase reliability. FY16 testing revealed a successful design in subscale straight test specimens that gained efficiency and supports Orion load requirements. Approach / Innovation A design constraint is that the redundant joint must fit within the current Orion architecture, without the need for additional vehicle modification. This limitation required a design that changed the orientation of the expanding tube assemblies (XTAs), by rotating them 90deg from the standard joint configuration. The change is not trivial and affects the fracture mechanism and structural load paths. To address these changes, the design incorporates cantilevered arms on the break plate. The shock transmission and expansion of the XTA applies force to these arms and creates a prying motion to push the plate walls outward to the point of structural failure at the notched section. The 2014 test design revealed that parts could slip during functioning wasting valuable energy needed to separate the structure with only a single XTA functioning. Dual XTA functioning fully separated the assembly showing a discrepancy can be backed up with redundancy. Work on other fully redundant systems outside NASA is limited to a few patents that have not been subjected to functionality testing Design changes to prevent unwanted slippage (with ICA funding in 2015) showed success with a single XTA. The main goal for FY 2016 was to send the new Flat H RFJ to WSTF where single XTA test failures occurred back in 2014. The plan was to gain efficiency in this design by separating the Flat H RFJ with thicker ligaments with dimensions baselined in 2014. Other modifications included geometry changes to better disperse loads paths and to minimize air gaps. The design additionally added more structural strength to enhance the structural limits in static loads testing. The design also implemented a smoother load line through the assembly. Results / Knowledge Gained The new Flat H RFJ successfully fractured at WSTF with thicker ligaments and lower cord size. Where failure to separate occurred earlier, there is now excessive energy available for structural separation. The new challenge to provide some structural support to prevent secondary fracturing of the break plate remains to be completed. This future work is being funded by the JSC Engineering Directorate in 2017 to elevate the TRL on curved Flat H RFJs that configure with the Orion Service Panel Separation. Additional funding from JSC Engineering will provide new design testing to avoid secondary fracturing.

Brown, Chris↗

Surface geometry of circular cut spiral bevel gears

An analysis of the surface geometry of spiral bevel gears formed by a circular cutter is presented. The emphasis is upon determining the tooth surface principal radii of curvature of crown (flat) gears. Specific results are presented for involute, straight, and hyperbolic cutter profiles. It is shown that the geometry of circular cut spiral bevel gears is somewhat simpler than a theoretical logarithmic spiral bevel gear.

Huston, R. L.↗

Intelligent feature selection techniques for pattern classification of Lamb wave signals

Lamb wave interaction with flaws is a complex, three-dimensional phenomenon, which often frustrates signal interpretation schemes based on mode arrival time shifts predicted by dispersion curves. As the flaw severity increases, scattering and mode conversion effects will often dominate the time-domain signals, obscuring available information about flaws because multiple modes may arrive on top of each other. Even for idealized flaw geometries the scattering and mode conversion behavior of Lamb waves is very complex. Here, multi-mode Lamb waves in a metal plate are propagated across a rectangular flat-bottom hole in a sequence of pitch-catch measurements corresponding to the double crosshole tomography geometry. The flaw is sequentially deepened, with the Lamb wave measurements repeated at each flaw depth. Lamb wave tomography reconstructions are used to identify which waveforms have interacted with the flaw and thereby carry information about its depth. Multiple features are extracted from each of the Lamb wave signals using wavelets, which are then fed to statistical pattern classification algorithms that identify flaw severity. In order to achieve the highest classification accuracy, an optimal feature space is required but it’s never known a priori which features are going to be best. For structural health monitoring we make use of the fact that physical flaws, such as corrosion, will only increase over time. This allows us to identify feature vectors which are topologically well-behaved by requiring that sequential classes “line up” in feature vector space. An intelligent feature selection routine is illustrated that identifies favorable class distributions in multi-dimensional feature spaces using computational homology theory. Betti numbers and formal classification accuracies are calculated for each feature space subset to establish a correlation between the topology of the class distribution and the corresponding classification accuracy.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Orbital-selective Dirac fermions and extremely flat bands in frustrated kagome-lattice metal CoSn

Layered kagome-lattice 3d transition metals are emerging as an exciting platform to explore the frustrated lattice geometry and quantum topology. However, the typical kagome electronic bands, characterized by sets of the Dirac-like band capped by a phase-destructive flat band, have not been clearly observed, and their orbital physics are even less well investigated. Here, we present close-to-textbook kagome bands with orbital differentiation physics in CoSn, which can be well described by a minimal tight-binding model with single-orbital hopping in Co kagome lattice. The capping flat bands with bandwidth less than 0.2 eV run through the whole Brillouin zone, especially the bandwidth of the flat band of out-of-plane orbitals is less than 0.02 eV along Γ-M. The energy gap induced by spin-orbit interaction at the Dirac cone of out-of-plane orbitals is much smaller than that of in-plane orbitals, suggesting orbital-selective character of the Dirac fermions.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Effects of bleed-hole geometry and plenum pressure on three-dimensional shock-wave/boundary-layer/bleed interactions

A numerical study was performed to investigate 3D shock-wave/boundary-layer interactions on a flat plate with bleed through one or more circular holes that vent into a plenum. This study was focused on how bleed-hole geometry and pressure ratio across bleed holes affect the bleed rate and the physics of the flow in the vicinity of the holes. The aspects of the bleed-hole geometry investigated include angle of bleed hole and the number of bleed holes. The plenum/freestream pressure ratios investigated range from 0.3 to 1.7. This study is based on the ensemble-averaged, 'full compressible' Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations closed by the Baldwin-Lomax algebraic turbulence model. Solutions to the ensemble-averaged N-S equations were obtained by an implicit finite-volume method using the partially-split, two-factored algorithm of Steger on an overlapping Chimera grid.

Chyu, Wei J.↗

Geometric model of topological insulators from the Maxwell algebra

We propose a novel geometric model of time-reversal-invariant topological insulators in three dimensions in presence of an external electromagnetic field. Their gapped boundary supports relativistic quantum Hall states and is described by a Chern–Simons theory, where the gauge connection takes values in the Maxwell algebra. This represents a non-central extension of the Poincaré algebra and takes into account both the Lorentz and magnetic-translation symmetries of the surface states. In this way, we derive a relativistic version of the Wen–Zee term and we show that the non-minimal coupling between the background geometry and the electromagnetic field in the model is in agreement with the main properties of the relativistic quantum Hall states in the flat space.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Quantitative resonant soft x-ray reflectivity of ultrathin anisotropic organic layers: Simulation and experiment of PTCDA on Au

Resonant soft X-ray reflectivity at the carbon K edge, with linearly polarized light, was used to derive quantitative information of film morphology, molecular arrangement, and electronic orbital anisotropies of an ultrathin 3,4,9,10-perylene tetracarboxylic dianhydride (PTCDA) film on Au(111). The experimental spectra were simulated by computing the propagation of the electromagnetic field in a trilayer system (vacuum/PTCDA/Au), where the organic film was treated as an anisotropic medium. Optical constants were derived from the calculated (through density functional theory) absorption cross sections of the single molecule along the three principal molecular axes. These were used to construct the dielectric tensor of the film, assuming the molecules to be lying flat with respect to the substrate and with a herringbone arrangement parallel to the substrate plane. Resonant soft X-ray reflectivity proved to be extremely sensitive to film thickness, down to the single molecular layer. The best agreement between simulation and experiment was found for a film of 1.6 nm, with flat laying configuration of the molecules. The high sensitivity to experimental geometries in terms of beam incidence and light polarization was also clarified through simulations. The optical anisotropies of the organic film were experimentally determined and through the comparison with calculations, it was possible to relate them to the orbital symmetry of the empty electronic states.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Primordial cosmic fluctuations for variable gravity

The observability of primordial cosmic fluctuations does not require a geometric horizon H {sup −1}, which is exceeded temporarily by the wavelength of fluctuations. The primordial information can be protected against later thermal washout even if all relevant wavelengths remain smaller than H {sup −1}. This is demonstrated by formulating the equations governing the cosmic fluctuations in a form that is manifestly invariant under conformal field transformations of the metric. Beyond the field equations this holds for the defining equation for the correlation function, as expressed by the inverse of the second functional derivative of the quantum effective action. An observable almost scale invariant spectrum does not need an expanding geometry. For a variable Planck mass it can even arise in flat Minkowski space.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

An experimental investigation of a highly underexpanded sonic jet ejecting from a flat plate into a subsonic crossflow

The induced static pressures due to a highly underexpanded sonic jet ejecting normally from a flat plate into a subsonic crosswind have been investigated. These pressure data have been recorded on the flat plate for a range of nominal jet-to-free-stream dynamic-pressure ratios from 0 to 1000 at free-stream Mach numbers of 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, and 0.6. The static pressure data measured on the flat plate are presented and correlated based upon the Riemann shock geometry in the jet plume. This data correlation improves with increasing free-stream Mach number.

Shaw, C. S.↗

Black holes and relativitic gravity theories

All presently known relativistic gravitation theories were considered which have a Riemannian background geometry and possess exact static, spherically symmetric solutions which are asymptotically flat. Each theory predicts the existence of trapped surfaces (black holes). For a general static isotropic metric, MACSYMA was used to compute the Newman-Penrose equations, the black hole radius, the impact parameter, and capture radius for photon accretion. These results were then applied to several of the better known gravitation theories.

Fennelly, A. J.↗

Design of 3-dimensional complex airplane configurations with specified pressure distribution via optimization

A subcritical panel method applied to flow analysis and aerodynamic design of complex aircraft configurations is presented. The analysis method is based on linearized, compressible, subsonic flow equations and indirect Dirichlet boundary conditions. Quadratic dipol and linear source distribution on flat panels are applied. In the case of aerodynamic design, the geometry which minimizes differences between design and actual pressure distribution is found iteratively, using numerical optimization technique. Geometry modifications are modeled by surface transpiration concept. Constraints in respect to resulting geometry can be specified. A number of complex 3-dimensional design examples are presented. The software is adopted to personal computers, and as result an unexpected low cost of computations is obtained.

Kubrynski, Krzysztof↗

Parachute Decelerator System Performance During the Low Density Supersonic Decelerator Program's First Supersonic Flight Dynamics Test

During the first Supersonic Flight Dynamics Test (SFDT-1) for NASA's Low Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) Program, the Parachute Decelerator System (PDS) was successfully tested. The main parachute in the PDS was a 30.5-meter supersonic Disksail parachute. The term Disksail is derived from the canopy's constructional geometry, as it combined the aspects of a ringsail and a flat circular round (disk) canopy. The crown area of the canopy contained the disk feature, as a large flat circular disk that extended from the canopy's vent down to the upper gap. From this upper gap to the skirt-band the canopy was constructed with characteristics of sails seen in a ringsail. There was a second lower gap present in this sail region. The canopy maintained a nearly 10x forebody diameter trailing distance with 1.7 Do suspension line lengths. During the test, the parachute was deployed at the targeted Mach and dynamic pressure. Although the supersonic Disksail parachute experienced an anomaly during the inflation process, the system was tested successfully in the environment it was designed to operate within. The nature of the failure seen originated in the disk portion of the canopy. High-speed and high-resolution imagery of the anomaly was captured and has been used to aid in the forensics of the failure cause. In addition to the imagery, an inertial measurement unit (IMU) recorded test vehicle dynamics and loadcells captured the bridle termination forces. In reviewing the imagery and load data a number of hypothesizes have been generated in an attempt to explain the cause of the anomaly.

Gallon, John C.↗

A Vacuum-Compatible, Spectrally Tunable, Flat Panel Uniform Source for Testing Large Aperture Earth Observation Systems

Labsphere, Inc in conjunction with NASA GSFC and Genesis Engineering Solutions inc. has developed an innovative, fully T-VAC compatible, calibration spectro-radiometric illumination source with a highly uniform large-area rectangular flat panel active area. This source leverages a new shaped integration geometry to achieve high uniformity over a large active output area while maintaining a smaller and more robust overall form-factor when compared to previous designs or integrating spheres. This new illuminator also leverages a set of selectable LED arrays as well as broadband tungsten-halogen sources to provide multi-level, wide spectrum reference illumination to the VIIRS instrument over all optical sensor bands during pre-launch testing. The first unit has been demonstrated to meet its requirements using ambient technology and a fully-vacuum-compatible second unit is planned to allow testing for T-VAC campaigns. This technology is both flexible and capable of meeting the needs of many other instruments/missions requiring this type of test/calibration capability.

Jeff Holt↗

Probability of Detection (POD) Demonstration Transferability: Phase II

NASA Special Level POD demonstration tests are typically performed on flat plates of a single material containing fatigue cracks with aspect rations between 0.3 and 0.5. In many cases, the inspectors that pass the demonstration tests use (transfer) the NDE technique to inspect different materials and part geometries and for varying types of flaws. The objective of the task is to investigate several of the factors that may influence the transferability of POD demonstration tests. An existing set of 30 6061-T6 aluminum crack panels will be used to create parts with a square tube and pocket type geometries. These same aluminum crack panels were used in a study of the effect of penetrant sensitivity level on POD. Hence, we should be able to directly compare the POD for flat panels versus larger parts with more complex geometries.

Parker, Bradford H.↗