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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2004

CMC Property Variability and Life Prediction Methods for Turbine Engine Component Application

The ever increasing need for lower density and higher temperature-capable materials for aircraft engines has led to the development of Ceramic Matrix Composites (CMCs). Today's aircraft engines operate with >3000"F gas temperatures at the entrance to the turbine section, but unless heavily cooled, metallic components cannot operate above approx.2000 F. CMCs attempt to push component capability to nearly 2700 F with much less cooling, which can help improve engine efficiency and performance in terms of better fuel efficiency, higher thrust, and reduced emissions. The NASA Glenn Research Center has been researching the benefits of the SiC/SiC CMC for engine applications. A CMC is made up of a matrix material, fibers, and an interphase, which is a protective coating over the fibers. There are several methods or architectures in which the orientation of the fibers can be manipulated to achieve a particular material property objective as well as a particular component geometric shape and size. The required shape manipulation can be a limiting factor in the design and performance of the component if there is a lack of bending capability of the fiber as making the fiber more flexible typically sacrifices strength and other fiber properties. Various analysis codes are available (pcGINA, CEMCAN) that can predict the effective Young's Moduli, thermal conductivities, coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE), and various other properties of a CMC. There are also various analysis codes (NASAlife) that can be used to predict the life of CMCs under expected engine service conditions. The objective of this summer study is to utilize and optimize these codes for examining the tradeoffs between CMC properties and the complex fiber architectures that will be needed for several different component designs. For example, for the pcGINA code, there are six variations of architecture available. Depending on which architecture is analyzed, the user is able to specify the fiber tow size, tow spacing, weave parameter, and angle of orientation of fibers. By holding the volume fraction of the fibers constant, variations in tow spacing can be explored for different architectures. The CMC material properties are usually calculated assuming the component is manufactured perfectly. However, this is typically not the case so that a quantification of the material property variability is needed to account for processing and/or manufacturing imperfections. The overall inputs and outputs are presented using a regression software to rapidly investigate the tradeoffs associated with fiber architecture, material properties, and ultimately cost. This information is then propagated through lifing models and Larson-Miller data to assess timehemperature-dependent CMC strength. In addition, a first order cost estimation will be quantified from a current qualitative perspective. This cost estimation includes the manufacturing challenges, such as tooling, as well as the component cost for a particular application. Ultimately, a cost to performance ratio should be established that compares the effectiveness of CMCs to their current rival, nickel superalloys.

Cheplak, Matthew L.↗
NASA NTRS2005

A Fundamental Mathematical Model of a Microbial Predenitrification System

Space flight beyond Low Earth Orbit requires sophisticated systems to support all aspects of the mission (life support, real-time communications, etc.). A common concern that cuts across all these systems is the selection of information technology (IT) methodology, software and hardware architectures to provide robust monitoring, diagnosis, and control support. Another dimension of the problem space is that different systems must be integrated seamlessly so that communication speed and data handling appear as a continuum (un-interrupted). One such team investigating this problem is the Advanced Integration Matrix (AIM) team whose role is to define the critical requirements expected of software and hardware to support an integrated approach to the command and control of Advanced Life Support (ALS) for future long-duration human space missions, including permanent human presence on the Moon and Mars. A goal of the AIM team is to set the foundation for testing criteria that will assist in specifying tasks, control schemes and test scenarios to validate and verify systems capabilities. This project is to contribute to the goals of the AIM team by assisting with controls planning for ALS. Control for ALS is an enormous problem it involves air revitalization, water recovery, food production, solids processing and crew. In more general terms, these systems can be characterized as involving both continuous and discrete processes, dynamic interactions among the sub-systems, nonlinear behavior due to the complex operations, and a large number of multivariable interactions due to the dimension of the state space. It is imperative that a baseline approach from which to measure performance is established especially when the expectation for the control system is complete autonomous control.

Hoo, Karlene A.↗
NASA NTRS2010

Multi-Instrument Tools and Services to Access NASA Earth Science Data from the GSFC Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center

The presentation purpose is to describe multi-instrument tools and services that facilitate access and usability of NASA Earth science data at Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). NASA's Earth observing system includes 14 satellites. Topics include EOSDIS facilities and system architecture, and overview of GSFC Earth Science Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) mission, Mirador data search, Giovanni, multi-instrument data exploration, Google Earth[TM], data merging, and applications.

Kempler, Steve↗
NASA NTRS2011

Evaluating Cloud Computing in the Proposed NASA DESDynI Ground Data System

The proposed NASA Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice (DESDynI) mission would be a first-of-breed endeavor that would fundamentally change the paradigm by which Earth Science data systems at NASA are built. DESDynI is evaluating a distributed architecture where expert science nodes around the country all engage in some form of mission processing and data archiving. This is compared to the traditional NASA Earth Science missions where the science processing is typically centralized. What's more, DESDynI is poised to profoundly increase the amount of data collection and processing well into the 5 terabyte/day and tens of thousands of job range, both of which comprise a tremendous challenge to DESDynI's proposed distributed data system architecture. In this paper, we report on a set of architectural trade studies and benchmarks meant to inform the DESDynI mission and the broader community of the impacts of these unprecedented requirements. In particular, we evaluate the benefits of cloud computing and its integration with our existing NASA ground data system software called Apache Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT). The preliminary conclusions of our study suggest that the use of the cloud and OODT together synergistically form an effective, efficient and extensible combination that could meet the challenges of NASA science missions requiring DESDynI-like data collection and processing volumes at reduced costs.

Benchmark↗
NASA NTRS2019

GOES I-M: A Retrospective Look at Image Navigation and Registration (INR), Jitter and Lessons Learned

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) I-M series of spacecraft was the second generation of United States meteorological observational platforms in geosynchronous orbit. They served as the principal Earth- viewing observational platforms for continuously monitoring dynamic weather events from the mid-1990s and into the 21st century. This paper will look back at the program framing key system attributes of the mission, which necessitated a multi-layered development approach to meet stringent meteorological instrument Line-of-Sight (LoS) pointing and pointing stability requirements. The overall approach involved understanding, correcting, and avoiding pointing errors across a broad frequency range including what would typically be called dynamic interaction and jitter. Background information will be provided covering the mission architecture and program drivers. The systems solution for man- aging and mitigating the deleterious influences of on-board disturbances in order to meet the challenging instrument LoS pointing and jitter requirements will be described, along with the ‘first of its kind’ Image Navigation and Registration system. A broad look back at the lessons learned that emerged from the GOES I- M experience will be presented, with the intent of capturing general and specific insights for developers of future missions having stringent payload instrument pointing requirements. These discussions will touch on such critical aspects as defining jitter and related pointing requirements, the importance of early system architectural decisions, understanding and reducing on-board disturbances, the balance of test and analysis, and the imperative for maximizing on-orbit operational flexibility in order to accommodate unexpected dynamic interactions.

Sudey, John↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Functional Volume Assessment of an Early Version of the Mars Transit Habitat

During the summer of 2020, NASA assessed the transit habitat concept that was being used in Mars human exploration architecture studies. This assessment had six primary objectives: (1) provide a sanity check to the transit habitat concept layout; (2) understand if we can fit the hardware and functional tasks in the volume; (3) provide a high-level assessment of how aggressive the layout is; (4) generate a list of challenges or assumptions necessary to make it work; (5) generate a list of future work to refine understanding; and (6) identify proposed requirements. The results of this evaluation are discussed, including methodological challenges and rating challenges. Acceptability results are discussed for functions that the participants were able to rate and participant comments for functions that could not be evaluated are also described. Final conclusions are described, including challenges or assumptions needed to make the transit habitat concept design acceptable, future work needed to refine understanding of the transit habitat concept, and proposed habitat requirements based on test data. While NASA has since moved away from this architecture, the assessment is still useful to inform the design of future transit habitats or other deep space crewed vehicles.

Transit Habitat↗
NASA NTRS1994

Application of new technologies in the virtual library: Seminars in Turkey, Portugal, and Spain

This paper focuses on the technologies that are available today to support the concept of a virtual library. The concept of a 'virtual library' or a 'library without walls' is meant to convey the idea that information in any format should be available to the end-user from the desktop as if it were located on the local workstation. Discussed here are the background, trends, technology enablers, end-user requirements, and the NASA Access Mechanism (NAM) system, one example of how it is possible to apply existing technologies to the client server architecture to logically centralize geographically distributed applications and information.

Hunter, Judy F.↗
NASA NTRS2006

Weather Information Communication Technologies for Increased Safety and Mobility in the National Airspace System

The purpose of the NASA Glenn Research Center Weather Information Communications (WINCOMM) project was to develop advanced communications and information technologies to enable the high-quality and timely dissemination of strategic weather information between the flight deck and ground users as well as tactical turbulence hazard information between relevant aircraft and to the ground. This report will document and reference accomplishments on the dissemination of weather information during the en route phase of flight from ground-based weather information providers to the flight deck (ground-to-air), from airborne meteorological sensors to ground users (air-to-ground), and weather turbulence and icing hazard information between relevant aircraft (air-to-air). In addition, references in this report will demonstrate the architecture necessary to implement and perform successful transmission and reception of weather information to the cockpit, show that weather information flow does not impact "normal" traffic, demonstrate the feasibility of operational implementation, and lay foundation for future data link development.

Hilderman, Don R.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Intelligent Systems Technologies to Assist in Utilization of Earth Observation Data

With the launch of several Earth observing satellites over the last decade, we are now in a data rich environment. From NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites alone, we are accumulating more than 3 TB per day of raw data and derived geophysical parameters. The data products are being distributed to a large user community comprising scientific researchers, educators and operational government agencies. Notable progress has been made in the last decade in facilitating access to data. However, to realize the full potential of the growing archives of valuable scientific data, further progress is necessary in the transformation of data into information, and information into knowledge that can be used in particular applications. Sponsored by NASA s Intelligent Systems Project within the Computing, Information and Communication Technology (CICT) Program, a conceptual architecture study has been conducted to examine ideas to improve data utilization through the addition of intelligence into the archives in the context of an overall knowledge building system. Potential Intelligent Archive concepts include: 1) Mining archived data holdings using Intelligent Data Understanding algorithms to improve metadata to facilitate data access and usability; 2) Building intelligence about transformations on data, information, knowledge, and accompanying services involved in a scientific enterprise; 3) Recognizing the value of results, indexing and formatting them for easy access, and delivering them to concerned individuals; 4) Interacting as a cooperative node in a web of distributed systems to perform knowledge building (i.e., the transformations from data to information to knowledge) instead of just data pipelining; and 5) Being aware of other nodes in the knowledge building system, participating in open systems interfaces and protocols for virtualization, and collaborative interoperability. This paper presents some of these concepts and identifies issues to be addressed by research in future intelligent systems technology.

Ramapriyan, Hampapuram K.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Using MCC Facility Metrics to Size, Inform, and Troubleshoot

The Mission Control Center (MCC) underwent a major architecture update that has been used for Mission Operations since 2016. The MCC Performance team has collected system performance and usage metrics to improve the configuration, troubleshoot incidents, and help size the system to accommodate future programs. The data is collected through MCC custom software and custom scripts to extract data from our Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) tools. This data has enabled MCC to support more activities concurrently, help our operations and development teams to respond to issues more quickly, and make our directorate informed buyers to meet new requirements when developing project plans for the upcoming Fiscal Year.

Data Science↗
NASA NTRS2007

Program Management Tool

The Program Management Tool (PMT) is a comprehensive, Web-enabled business intelligence software tool for assisting program and project managers within NASA enterprises in gathering, comprehending, and disseminating information on the progress of their programs and projects. The PMT provides planning and management support for implementing NASA programmatic and project management processes and requirements. It provides an online environment for program and line management to develop, communicate, and manage their programs, projects, and tasks in a comprehensive tool suite. The information managed by use of the PMT can include monthly reports as well as data on goals, deliverables, milestones, business processes, personnel, task plans, monthly reports, and budgetary allocations. The PMT provides an intuitive and enhanced Web interface to automate the tedious process of gathering and sharing monthly progress reports, task plans, financial data, and other information on project resources based on technical, schedule, budget, and management criteria and merits. The PMT is consistent with the latest Web standards and software practices, including the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML) for exchanging data and the WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) protocol for collaborative management of documents. The PMT provides graphical displays of resource allocations in the form of bar and pie charts using Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Application (VBA) libraries. The PMT has an extensible architecture that enables integration of PMT with other strategic-information software systems, including, for example, the Erasmus reporting system, now part of the NASA Integrated Enterprise Management Program (IEMP) tool suite, at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). The PMT data architecture provides automated and extensive software interfaces and reports to various strategic information systems to eliminate duplicative human entries and minimize data integrity issues among various NASA systems that impact schedules and planning.

Gawadiak, Yuri↗
NASA NTRS1988

Computer sciences

The Computer Science Program provides advanced concepts, techniques, system architectures, algorithms, and software for both space and aeronautics information sciences and computer systems. The overall goal is to provide the technical foundation within NASA for the advancement of computing technology in aerospace applications. The research program is improving the state of knowledge of fundamental aerospace computing principles and advancing computing technology in space applications such as software engineering and information extraction from data collected by scientific instruments in space. The program includes the development of special algorithms and techniques to exploit the computing power provided by high performance parallel processors and special purpose architectures. Research is being conducted in the fundamentals of data base logic and improvement techniques for producing reliable computing systems.

Smith, Paul H.↗
NASA NTRS2018

Impacts on High-level Systems-of-Systems Figures of Merit due to Integrated Architecture Sizing and Technology Evaluation at the Subsystem-Level

Understanding the impacts on high-level system-of-systems (SOS) figures of merit (FOMs) due to the design of architectures and technologies is critical in providing decision makers sufficient information in selecting suitable alternatives in an effort to reduce costly financial and schedule overruns. Several techniques exist within academia and industry for performing SOS architecture design and technology evaluation. However, these techniques fail to solve the problem in an integrated fashion when defined at the subsystem-level. In order to understand the impacts on high-level SOS FOMs due to integrated architecture sizing and technology evaluation, a general concept exploration process is utilized to perform a notional 2033 manned Mars fly by study. The notional study draws out observation with regard to specific FOMs traditionally used during the subsystem-level sizing and technology evaluation processes which can result in misleading conclusions regarding the overall SOS design. Furthermore, these observations suggest that selection of FOMs for the subsystems of an architecture should be influenced by the desired objectives of the high-level SOS objectives and FOMs.

Trent, Douglas J.↗
NASA NTRS2006

NASA Crew Launch Vehicle Overview

The US. Vision for Space Exploration, announced January 2004, outlines the National Aeronautics and Space Administration s (NASA) strategic goals and objectives. These include: 1) Flying the Shuttle as safely as possible until its retirement, not later than 2010. 2) Bringing a new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) into service as soon as possible after Shuttle retirement. 3) Developing a balanced overall program of science, exploration, and aeronautics at NASA, consistent with the redirection of the human spaceflight program to focus on exploration. 4) Completing the International Space Station (ISS) in a manner consistent with international partner commitments and the needs of human exploration. 5) Encouraging the pursuit of appropriate partnerships with the emerging commercial space sector. 6) Establishing a lunar return program having the maximum possible utility for later missions to Mars and other destinations. Following the confirmation of the new NASA Administrator in April 2005, the Agency commissioned a team of aerospace subject matter experts from government and industry to perform the Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS), which provided in-depth information for selecting the follow-on launch vehicle designs to enable these goals, The ESAS team analyzed a number of potential launch systems, with a focus on: (1) a human-rated launch vehicle for crew transport and (2) a heavy lift launch vehicle (HLLV) to carry cargo. After several months of intense study utilizing technical performance, budget, and schedule objectives, the results showed that the optimum architecture to meet the challenge of safe, reliable crew transport is a two-stage variant of the Space Shuttle propulsion system - utilizing the reusable Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) as the first stage, along with a new upper stage that uses a derivative of the RS-25 Space Shuttle Main Engine to deliver 25 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. The CEV that this new Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV) lofts into space early next decade will initially ferry astronauts to the Space Station and be capable of carrying crews back to lunar orbit and of supporting missions to Mars orbit. The HLLV system will utilize the Shuttle External Tank combined with SRBs. The focus of this paper is on the CLV system, giving an overview of plans and progress to date.

Dumbacher, Daniel L.↗
NASA NTRS1983

Space station needs, attributes, and architectural options study. Volume 2: Program options, architecture, and technology

Mission scenarios and space station architectures are discussed. Electrical power subsystems (EPS), environmental control and life support, subsystems (ECLSS), and reaction control subsystem (RCS) architectures are addressed. Thermal control subsystems, (TCS), guidance/navigation and control (GN and C), information management systems IMS), communications and tracking (C and T), and propellant transfer and storage systems architectures are discussed.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1992

Large-scale sparse singular value computations

Four numerical methods for computing the singular value decomposition (SVD) of large sparse matrices on a multiprocessor architecture are presented. Lanczos and subspace iteration-based methods for determining several of the largest singular triplets (singular values and corresponding left and right-singular vectors) for sparse matrices arising from two practical applications: information retrieval and seismic reflection tomography are emphasized. The target architectures for implementations are the CRAY-2S/4-128 and Alliant FX/80. The sparse SVD problem is well motivated by recent information-retrieval techniques in which dominant singular values and their corresponding singular vectors of large sparse term-document matrices are desired, and by nonlinear inverse problems from seismic tomography applications which require approximate pseudo-inverses of large sparse Jacobian matrices.

Berry, Michael W.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Automation technology using Geographic Information System (GIS)

Airport Surface Movement Area is but one of the actions taken to increase the capacity and safety of existing airport facilities. The System Integration Branch (SIB) has designed an integrated system consisting of an electronic moving display in the cockpit, and includes display of taxi routes which will warn controllers and pilots of the position of other traffic and warning information automatically. Although, this system has in test simulation proven to be accurate and helpful; the initial process of obtaining an airport layout of the taxi-routes and designing each of them is a very tedious and time-consuming process. Other methods of preparing the display maps are being researched. One such method is the use of the Geographical Information System (GIS). GIS is an integrated system of computer hardware and software linking topographical, demographic and other resource data that is being referenced. The software can support many areas of work with virtually unlimited information compatibility due to the system's open architecture. GIS will allow us to work faster with increased efficiency and accuracy while providing decision making capabilities. GIS is currently being used at the Langley Research Center with other applications and has been validated as an accurate system for that task. GIS usage for our task will involve digitizing aerial photographs of the topology for each taxi-runway and identifying each position according to its specific spatial coordinates. The information currently being used can be integrated with the GIS system, due to its ability to provide a wide variety of user interfaces. Much more research and data analysis will be needed before this technique will be used, however we are hopeful this will lead to better usage of man-power and technological capabilities for the future.

Brooks, Cynthia L.↗
NASA NTRS2003

A Comparison of Bus Architectures for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems

We describe and compare the architectures of four fault-tolerant, safety-critical buses with a view to deducing principles common to all of them, the main differences in their design choices, and the tradeoffs made. Two of the buses come from an avionics heritage, and two from automobiles, though all four strive for similar levels of reliability and assurance. The avionics buses considered are the Honeywell SAFEbus (the backplane data bus used in the Boeing 777 Airplane Information Management System) and the NASA SPIDER (an architecture being developed as a demonstrator for certification under the new DO-254 guidelines); the automobile buses considered are the TTTech Time-Triggered Architecture (TTA), recently adopted by Audi for automobile applications, and by Honeywell for avionics and aircraft control functions, and FlexRay, which is being developed by a consortium of BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Motorola, and Philips.

Rushby, John↗