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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 37 records · Page 2

Business Case Analysis for Artificial Intelligence-Large Language Model Technology Integration

AI-assisted processes are expected to enhance operational efficiency and improve decision-making, supporting the long-term economic viability of nuclear power plants. However, detailed business analyses of AI-generated cost savings are rarely performed. Given the recent industry interest in Large Language Model (LLM), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program has conducted a comprehensive business case analysis of LLM Artificial Intelligence (AI) implementation in nuclear plant engineering workflows. The research employed three complementary business case approaches to evaluate impact of an LLM, using three representative engineering processes as use-cases: Boric Acid Corrosion (BAC) Evaluations, Maintenance Rule Evaluations, and 10 CFR 50.59 Screenings. Through detailed workload analyses and structured interviews, the study quantified significant efficiency improvements ranging from 11% to 59% across these processes. The research further considers how these efficiency gains could translate into tangible reliability improvements through enhanced engineering capacity. Analysis of historical plant trip data indicates that enabling engineers to focus on proactive reliability activities could provide substantial financial benefits through avoided outages, potentially generating greater value than the direct efficiency improvements alone. By documenting successful applications, implementation challenges, and strategic opportunities, this research provides nuclear utilities with a practical framework for evaluating the value of AI technology to support long-term operations through advanced digital technologies.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Intelligent Fasteners

Under a Small Business Innovation Research contract from Marshall Space Flight Center, Ultrafast, Inc. developed the world's first, high-temperature resistant, "intelligent" fastener. NASA needed a critical-fastening appraisal and validation of spacecraft segments that are coupled together in space. The intelligent-bolt technology deletes the self-defeating procedure of having to untighten the fastener, and thus upset the joint, during inspection and maintenance. The Ultrafast solution yielded an innovation that is likely to revolutionize manufacturing assembly, particularly the automobile industry. Other areas of application range from aircraft, computers and fork-lifts to offshore platforms, buildings, and bridges.

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An intelligent ground operator support system

This paper presents first results of the project 'Technologien fuer die intelligente Kontrolle von Raumfahrzeugen' (TIKON). The TIKON objective was the demonstration of feasibility and profit of the application of artificial intelligence in the space business. For that purpose a prototype system has been developed and implemented for the operation support of the Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT), a scientific spacecraft designed to perform the first all-sky survey with a high-resolution X-ray telescope and to investigate the emission of specific celestial sources. The prototype integrates a scheduler and a diagnosis tool both based on artificial intelligence techniques. The user interface is menu driven and provides synoptic displays for the visualization of the system status. The prototype has been used and tested in parallel to an already existing operational system.

Goerlach, Thomas↗

Preventing Reverse Engineering of Critical Industrial Data with DIOD

Business analytics augmented by artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) have revolutionized the role of data in the modern world. In recent years, businesses have incorporated data into their decision-making process for better prediction, risk-assessment, content creation, etc. While such businesses often seek to leverage the full use of their data through third-party AI/ML services, they are often hampered by the risks of data leaks, reverse-engineering, stolen technology, etc. that often have disastrous consequences for businesses and their stakeholders alike. Thus, there arises a need for data masking prior to its transmission that obfuscates proprietary information while preserving the information relevant for AI/ML applications. In order to meet the needs of industrial data which are significantly different from those of data warehouses, previous work proposed an efficient time and space-scalable data masking paradigm known as the deceptive infusion of data (DIOD) methodology. The present work expands upon this work by leveraging existing reverse-engineering capabilities to facilitate the decomposition of industrial data into its proprietary and AI/ML-relevant parts, referred to as fundamental and inference metadata respectively. Both sets of metadata are further obfuscated in accordance with the DIOD methodology to create the DIOD rendition of the industrial data, which is rendered immune to reverse-engineering by discarding proprietary information and only preserving AI/ML-relevant information. Additionally, constraints of the original DIOD manuscript are relaxed using mutual information by configuring the methodology to the target AI/ML application to unlock the full potential of the DIOD methodology. As an example, data from a nuclear reactor is transformed into that from a nonlinear spring-mass system with different levels of data masking as required by the generic system and the target application.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Free-Flowing Solutions for CFD

Licensed to over 1,500 customers worldwide, an advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) post-processor with a quick learning curve is consistently providing engineering solutions, with just the right balance of visual insight and hard data. FIELDVIEW is the premier product of JMSI, Inc., d.b.a. Intelligent Light, a woman-owned, small business founded in 1994 and located in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. In the early 1990s, Intelligent Light entered into a joint development contract with a research based company to commercialize the post-processing FIELDVIEW code. As Intelligent Light established itself, it purchased the exclusive rights to the code, and structured its business solely around the software technology. As a result, it is enjoying profits and growing at a rate of 25 to 30 percent per year. Advancements made from the earliest commercial launch of FIELDVIEW, all the way up to the recently released versions 8 and 8.2 of the program, have been backed by research collaboration with NASA's Langley Research Center, where some of the world's most progressive work in transient (also known as time-varying) CFD takes place.

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Differentially Private Map Matching (DPMM) v1.0

Human mobility trajectories provide valuable information for developing mobility applications, as they contain diverse and rich information about the users. User mobility data is valuable for various applications such as intelligent transportation systems (ITS), commercial business models, and disease-spread models. However, such spatio-temporal traces may pose a threat to user privacy. GPS trajectories in their raw form are not suitable for transportation studies, as they require matching locations with nearest road links — a process called map-matching. This software implements a differential privacy (DP)-based map-matching algorithm, called DPMM, that generates link-level location trajectories in a privacy-preserving manner to protect users' origin destinations (OD) and travel paths. OD privacy is achieved by injecting Planar Laplace noise to the user OD GPS points. Travel-path privacy is provided with randomized travel path construction using exponential DP mechanism. The injected noise level is selected adaptively, by considering the link density of the location and the functional category of the localized links. For path privacy, our mechanism samples waypoints and selects candidate paths between waypoints. DPMM provides privacy effectively with respect to link density instead of other trajectory samples in the database compared to other privacy mechanisms. Compared to the different baseline models our DP-based privacy model offers closer query responses to the raw data in terms of individual and aggregate trajectory-level statistics with an average at absolute deviation from the baseline for individual statistics on ϵ = 1.0. Beyond individual trajectory statistics, the DPMM outperforms the other benchmark DP-based mechanisms on different aggregate statistics with up to 8x improvement in utility.

Peisert, Sean [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborato↗

Artificial intelligence - New tools for aerospace project managers

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently being used for business-oriented, money-making applications, such as medical diagnosis, computer system configuration, and geological exploration. The present paper has the objective to assess new AI tools and techniques which will be available to assist aerospace managers in the accomplishment of their tasks. A study conducted by Brown and Cheeseman (1983) indicates that AI will be employed in all traditional management areas, taking into account goal setting, decision making, policy formulation, evaluation, planning, budgeting, auditing, personnel management, training, legal affairs, and procurement. Artificial intelligence/expert systems are discussed, giving attention to the three primary areas concerned with intelligent robots, natural language interfaces, and expert systems. Aspects of information retrieval are also considered along with the decision support system, and expert systems for project planning and scheduling.

Moja, D. C.↗

Biology-inspired Architecture for Situation Management

Situation Management is a rapidly developing science combining new techniques for data collection with advanced methods of data fusion to facilitate the process leading to correct decisions prescribing action. Current research focuses on reducing increasing amounts of diverse data to knowledge used by decision makers and on reducing time between observations, decisions and actions. No new technology is more promising for increasing the diversity and fidelity of observations than sensor networks. However, current research on sensor networks concentrates on a centralized network architecture. We believe this trend will not realize the full potential of situation management. We propose a new architecture modeled after biological ecosystems where motes are autonomous and intelligent, yet cooperate with local neighborhoods. Providing a layered approach, they sense and act independently when possible, and cooperate with neighborhoods when necessary. The combination of their local actions results in global effects. While situation management research is currently dominated by military applications, advances envisioned for industrial and business applications have similar requirements. NASA has requirements for intelligent and autonomous systems in future missions that can benefit from advances in situation management. We describe requirements for the Integrated Vehicle Health Management program where our biology-inspired architecture provides a layered approach and decisions can be made at the proper level to improve safety, reduce costs, and improve efficiency in making diagnostic and prognostic assessments of the structural integrity, aerodynamic characteristics, and operation of aircraft.

Jones, Kennie H.↗

Intelligent systems for KSC ground processing

The ground processing and launch of Shuttle vehicles and their payloads is the primary task of Kennedy Space Center. It is a process which is largely manual and contains little inherent automation. Business is conducted today much as it was during previous NASA programs such as Apollo. In light of new programs and decreasing budgets, NASA must find more cost effective ways in which to do business while retaining the quality and safety of activities. Advanced technologies including artificial intelligence could cut manpower and processing time. This paper is an overview of the research and development in Al technology at KSC with descriptions of the systems which have been implemented, as well as a few under development which are promising additions to ground processing software. Projects discussed cover many facets of ground processing activities, including computer sustaining engineering, subsystem monitor and diagnosis tools and launch team assistants. The deployed Al applications have proven an effectiveness which has helped to demonstrate the benefits of utilizing intelligent software in the ground processing task.

Heard, Astrid E.↗

Fluid Flow Technology that Measures Up

From 1994 to 1996, NASA s Marshall Space Flight Center conducted a Center Director's Discretionary Fund research effort to apply artificial intelligence technologies to the health management of plant equipment and space propulsion systems. Through this effort, NASA established a business relationship with Quality Monitoring and Control (QMC), of Kingwood, Texas, to provide hardware modeling and artificial intelligence tools. Very detailed and accurate Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) analysis and algorithms were jointly created, which identified several missing, critical instrumentation needs for adequately evaluating the engine health status. One of the missing instruments was a liquid oxygen (LOX) flow measurement. This instrument was missing since the original SSME included a LOX turbine flow meter that failed during a ground test, resulting in considerable damage for NASA. New balanced flow meter technology addresses this need with robust, safe, and accurate flow metering hardware.

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The Highly Integrated Vehicle Ecosystem (HIVE): A Platform for Managing the Operations of On-Demand Vehicle Fleets

This paper introduces the Highly Integrated Vehicle Ecosystem (HIVE), a transportation modeling tool developed by within the Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences (CIMS) group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). HIVE is an agent-based supply/demand model for Mobility on Demand (MoD) which mixes agent-based modeling and centralized dispatch for automated and human-driven fleets and ride hail passengers. Research questions using HIVE span multiple categories, including intelligent fleet planning (assessing fleet, battery, and infrastructure investment decisions), intelligent fleet control (charge management, vehicle dispatching) and strategic business model decision-making (depot-based full-time drivers versus gig-based drivers, human-driven versus automated). The components of the HIVE model are explained and then HIVE is demonstrated in a case study using demand data from the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission data set.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Programs Model the Future of Air Traffic Management

Through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts with Ames Research Center, Intelligent Automation Inc., based in Rockville, Maryland, advanced specialized software the company had begun developing with U.S. Department of Defense funding. The agent-based infrastructure now allows NASA's Airspace Concept Evaluation System to explore ways of improving the utilization of the National Airspace System (NAS), providing flexible modeling of every part of the NAS down to individual planes, airports, control centers, and even weather. The software has been licensed to a number of aerospace and robotics customers, and has even been used to model the behavior of crowds.

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A comprehensive methodology for intelligent systems life-cycle cost modelling

As NASA moves into the last part on the twentieth century, the desire to do 'business as usual' has been replaced with the mantra 'faster, cheaper, better'. Recently, new work has been done to show how the implementation of advanced technologies, such as intelligent systems, will impact the cost of a system design or in the operational cost for a spacecraft mission. The impact of the degree of autonomous or intelligent systems and human participation on a given program is manifested most significantly during the program operational phases, while the decision of who performs what tasks, and how much automation is incorporated into the system are all made during the design and development phases. Employing intelligent systems and automation is not an either/or question, but one of degree. The question is what level of automation and autonomy will provide the optimal trade-off between performance and cost. Conventional costing methodologies, however, are unable to show the significance of technologies like these in terms of traceable cost benefits and reductions in the various phases of the spacecraft's lifecycle. The proposed comprehensive life-cycle methodology can address intelligent system technologies as well as others that impact human-machine operational modes.

Korsmeyer, David J.↗

Dual-Use Space Technology Transfer Conference and Exhibition, Volume 1

This document contains papers presented at the Dual-Use Space Technology Transfer Conference and Exhibition held at the Johnson Space Center February 1-3, 1994. Possible technology transfers covered during the conference were in the areas of information access; innovative microwave and optical applications; materials and structures; marketing and barriers; intelligent systems; human factors and habitation; communications and data systems; business process and technology transfer; software engineering; biotechnology and advanced bioinstrumentation; communications signal processing and analysis; new ways of doing business; medical care; applications derived from control center data systems; human performance evaluation; technology transfer methods; mathematics, modeling, and simulation; propulsion; software analysis and decision tools systems/processes in human support technology; networks, control centers, and distributed systems; power; rapid development perception and vision technologies; integrated vehicle health management; automation technologies; advanced avionics; ans robotics technologies. More than 77 papers, 20 presentations, and 20 exhibits covering various disciplines were presented b experts from NASA, universities, and industry.

Kumar Krishen↗

Dual-Use Space Technology Transfer Conference and Exhibition

This is the second volume of papers presented at the Dual-Use Space Technology Transfer Conference and Exhibition held at the Johnson Space Center February 1-3, 1994. Possible technology transfers covered during the conference were in the areas of information access; innovative microwave and optical applications; materials and structures; marketing and barriers; intelligent systems; human factors and habitation; communications and data systems; business process and technology transfer; software engineering; biotechnology and advanced bioinstrumentation; communications signal processing and analysis; medical care; applications derived from control center data systems; human performance evaluation; technology transfer methods; mathematics, modeling, and simulation; propulsion; software analysis and decision tools; systems/processes in human support technology; networks, control centers, and distributed systems; power; rapid development; perception and vision technologies; integrated vehicle health management; automation technologies; advanced avionics; and robotics technologies.

Krishen, Kumar↗

Chemical-Sensing Cables Detect Potential Threats

Intelligent Optical Systems Inc. (IOS) completed Phase I and II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts with NASA's Langley Research Center to develop moisture- and pH-sensitive sensors to detect corrosion or pre-corrosive conditions, warning of potentially dangerous conditions before significant structural damage occurs. This new type of sensor uses a specially manufactured optical fiber whose entire length is chemically sensitive, changing color in response to contact with its target, and demonstrated to detect potentially corrosive moisture incursions to within 2 cm. After completing the work with NASA, the company received a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Phase III SBIR to develop the sensors further for detecting chemical warfare agents, for which they proved just as successful. The company then worked with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to fine tune the sensors for detecting potential threats, such as toxic industrial compounds and nerve agents. In addition to the work with government agencies, Intelligent Optical Systems has sold the chemically sensitive fiber optic cables to major automotive and aerospace companies, who are finding a variety of uses for the devices. Marketed under the brand name Distributed Intrinsic Chemical Agent Sensing and Transmission (DICAST), these unique continuous-cable fiber optic chemical sensors can serve in a variety of applications: Corrosive-condition monitoring, aiding experimentation with nontraditional power sources, as an economical means of detecting chemical release in large facilities, as an inexpensive "alarm" systems to alert the user to a change in the chemical environment anywhere along the cable, or in distance-resolved optical time domain reflectometry systems to provide detailed profiles of chemical concentration versus length.

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Exploration Laboratory Analysis

The Exploration Laboratory Analysis (ELA) project supports the Exploration Medical Capability (ExMC) risk to minimize or reduce the risk of adverse health outcomes and decrements in performance due to in-flight medical capabilities on human exploration missions. To mitigate this risk, the availability of inflight laboratory analysis instrumentation has been identified as an essential capability for manned exploration missions. Since a single, compact space-ready laboratory analysis capability to perform all exploration clinical measurements is not commercially available, the ELA project objective is to demonstrate the feasibility of emerging operational and analytical capability as a biomedical diagnostics precursor to long duration manned exploration missions. The initial step towards ground and flight demonstrations in fiscal year (FY) 2015 was the down selection of platform technologies for demonstrations in the space environment. The technologies selected included two Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) performers: DNA Medicine Institutes rHEALTH X and Intelligent Optical Systems later flow assays combined with Holomics smartphone analyzer. The selection of these technologies were based on their compact size, breadth of analytical capability and favorable ability to process fluids in a space environment, among several factors. These two technologies will be advanced to meet ground and flight demonstration success criteria and requirements that will be finalized in FY16. Also, the down selected performers will continue the technology development phase towards meeting prototype deliverables in either late 2016 or 2017.

Laboratory analysis↗

A Machine-Learning Approach to Assess Aircraft Engine System Performance

Artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning, and big data are transforming the global business environment. They have become the most disruptive technologies for organizations to improve workplace efficiency and productivity. This work explored the application of machine learning-based predictive analytics that would enable aircraft engine designers to estimate engine system performance quickly during the conceptual design stage. Supervised machine-learning algorithm was employed to study patterns in an existing database of production and research turbofan engines, and built predictive analytics for use in predicting system performance of new turbofan designs. Specifically, the author developed deep-learning analytics to predict turbofan system weight, using turbofan design parameters as the input. The predictive analytics were trained and deployed in Keras, an open-source neural networks API (application program interface) written in Python, with TensorFlow (an open-source artificial AI library developed by Google) serving as the backend engine. The current engine-weight prediction results, together with those for the TSFC (thrust specific fuel consumption) and core-size predictions that were studied previously by the author, show that machine learning-based predictive analytics can be an effective, time-saving tool for aircraft engine design-space exploration during the conceptual design stage. It would enable expeditious identification of the best engine design amongst several candidates.

Michael T Tong↗