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NASA Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT) Prototypes

NASA IST Program is now designing and developing Digital Twins of the Earth and/or Earth systems. Earth System Digital Twins (ESDTs) are information systems for understanding, forecasting, and conjecturing the complex interconnections among Earth systems, including anthropomorphic forcings and impacts to humanity. In order to define ESDT's technologies and architectures that will be needed for developing future operational ESTDs, the IST Program is developing several ESDT prototypes representing various use case domains and technological/architectural needs.

Earth Science Remote Sensing↗

Initial Development of A Digital Twin Model for an Electrified Aircraft Propulsion Emulation Rig

In support of aviation fuel burn and emission reduction goals, NASA is pursing high-payoff research investments that promise to transform aviation. This includes investments in Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP), which relies on the generation, storage, transmission, and use of electrical power for producing thrust and optimizing propulsion system efficiency. Multiple technology challenges must be addressed to unlock the full potential of EAP. This includes advances in propulsion controls, which will be vital for ensuring coordinated efficient operation of the complex integrated subsystems that comprise EAP architectures. To support EAP controls research, the NASA Glenn Research Center has developed the Hybrid Propulsion Emulation Rig (HyPER). The HyPER laboratory hardware includes shaft-mounted electric machines, power converters, power supplies, power distribution cables, and an energy storage device that can be reconfigured to represent a variety of EAP architectures. It also includes an integrated real-time computer system that hosts developed EAP control software and turbomachinery simulations. This enables the electrical system and rotating shafts of EAP designs to be implemented in actual hardware and integrated with turbomachinery simulations and system-level EAP control logic implemented in software. In this form, the HyPER laboratory provides a partially simulated, partially hardware-in-the-loop test environment enabling the initial development and evaluation of EAP control technology. A prerequisite for the development of EAP control designs is the availability of a system model that accurately reflects the operation of the electrical system hardware. To support this need, a digital twin model of the HyPER electrical system hardware is under development. This model is being coded in the MATLAB Simulink environment and uses the NASA-developed Electrical Modeling and Thermal Analysis Toolbox (EMTAT) to construct a digital twin framework. EMTAT contains generic electrical component building blocks that are simulated at turbomachinery timescales. Associated inputs and outputs allow the blocks to be combined to model complete electrical systems. The EMTAT blocks also contain adjustable internal maps and parameters that can be set to reflect the operation of a specific electrical component. For the HyPER digital twin, the settings of these EMTAT block internal maps and parameters is determined through machine learning approaches applied to characterization run data collected from the laboratory. During characterization runs the laboratory electrical system hardware is subjected to a full range of torque, speed, and power settings. Acquired data is then used to estimate EMTAT block parameters using a variety of machine learning techniques. The resulting digital twin model is found to match the operation of actual HyPER hardware with an accuracy suitable for control development purposes. It also holds promise for other applications including modeling the performance of HyPER laboratory reconfigurations and model-based anomaly detection. Planned follow-on work to automate post-processing of acquired laboratory data to update the HyPER digital twin model will also be presented and discussed.

Electrified Aircraft Propulsion↗

Development of a Digital Twin for Electrified Aircraft Powertrain Health Management

The augmentation of aircraft powertrains with electrical power systems is a promising path to reducing aircraft fuel consumption, emissions, and noise. Like conventional propulsion systems, electrified aircraft propulsion (EAP) systems will be subject to wear and tear throughout their lifecycles. System health management for EAP will enable efficient flight and maintenance scheduling, realizing economic, safety, and reliability benefits. A digital twin is, broadly, a dynamically updated virtual representation of an individual physical asset. This paper presents a Kalman filter-based approach for the development of a digital twin for an electrified powertrain and applies the approach to an EAP controls testbed. Measurements from nominal testbed operations are used to update a nonlinear model of the testbed. A Kalman filter is then created and used to identify and isolate anomalous testbed behavior based on measurements from off- nominal operations. Results show that the Kalman filter-based digital twin can monitor individual powertrain components’ health for degradation or other changes in performance. The applicability of the presented digital twin approach to any hybrid- or fully-electrified powertrain is emphasized.

Electrified Aircraft Propulsion↗

NASA Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT) Use Cases

NASA AIST Program is now designing and developing Digital Twins of the Earth and/or Earth systems. Organized around interconnected, multi-domain, high-scale modeling capabilities, the three major components of an Earth System Digital Twin are a continuously updated Digital Replica of the Earth System of interest, dynamic Forecasting models, and Impact Assessment capabilities. In order to define ESDT's benefits to Earth Science, as well as the AIST capabilities required to develop such systems, the AIST Program has been developed 6 science use cases corresponding to 6 of the main Earth Science domains.

J. Le Moigne↗

Earth System Digital Twin (ESDT) Architecture Framework

NASA AIST Program is now designing and developing Digital Twins of the Earth and/or Earth systems. Organized around interconnected, multi-domain, high-scale modeling capabilities, the three major components of an Earth System Digital Twin are a continuously updated Digital Replica of the Earth System of interest, dynamic Forecasting models, and Impact Assessment capabilities. This document identifies the key features and capabilities needed in an ESDT and describes the major notional components of the system and some key relationships, while providing room for a variety of architectures to respond to them. It provides a generic system diagram of an ESDT, including the interfaces to external observing systems and models.

Jacqueline Le Moigne↗

Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT) Definition and Science Use Cases

NASA AIST Program is now designing and developing Digital Twins of the Earth and/or Earth systems. Organized around interconnected, multi-domain, high-scale modeling capabilities, the three major components of an Earth System Digital Twin are a continuously updated Digital Replica of the Earth System of interest, dynamic Forecasting models, and Impact Assessment capabilities. In order to define ESDT's benefits to Earth Science, as well as the AIST capabilities required to develop such systems, the AIST Program has been developed 6 science use cases corresponding to 6 of the main Earth Science domains.

Earth Science Remote Sensing; Information Systems↗

Orion SysML Model, Digital Twin, and Lessons Learned for Artemis I

In 2015 it was recognized by NASA’s Orion Chief Engineer that NASA’s design insight into the Orion subsystems for Artemis I were not sufficient to provide traditional engineering support to flight operations. To address these concerns and provide an opportunity to apply emerging model-based systems engineering and digital twin methodologies and provide opportunities for employees across NASA to get hands-on training, an Orion digital twin pilot project was initiated in 2020. With the increase in complexities of spacecraft, and decreased time to made decisions during missions in critical or emergency situations, digital modeling and integration of design can reduce the time to answer questions by days and required human resources by an order of magnitude over historical approaches and was identified to be critical capability for NASA’s future. This paper describes the genesis of this digital twin pilot project, efforts undertaken, a reproducible methodology to take available system information from a mature program to create an executable SysML model that supports a link to unit-specific data, thus forming a connection to the physical asset, and associated lessons learned and project deliverables.

MBSE↗

Digital Twins of the Environment

Please download and open the zip folder on your system to view the talks. As part of AI-UK'2024 (organized by UK Turing Institute), Jacqueline Le Moigne and Robert Morris (NASA ARC AIST Associate) were part of a Panel on "Digital Twins of the Environment". We described what Earth System Digital Twins (ESDTs) are, how they could be used in the future, which technologies need to be developed for these ESDTs to become a reality and what the state-of-the-art is. No formal presentations were given but 2 videos were generated during the conference and will be posted on the AI-UK website: https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/ai-uk-2024. The 2 videos cover: (1) a recording of the entire Panel featuring Robert Morris/NASA ARC and Jacqueline Le Moigne/ESTOl; (2) a post-panel interview of Jacqueline Le Moigne.

Earth Science Remote Sensing↗

Transfer-AE: A novel autoencoder-based impact detection model for structural digital twin

Accurately detecting the location and intensity of impacts is crucial for ensuring structural safety. Currently, AI-based structural impact detection methods are widely used for their excellent detection accuracy. However, their generalization capability is limited by the scenarios present in the training data. Many complex and dangerous impact scenarios are difficult to conduct real-world experiments on to collect sufficient samples. To capture all impact scenarios and fully leverage the advantages of AI-based detection technologies, advanced methods involve combining real-world structural monitoring data with corresponding numerical models to construct digital twins. These methods continuously refine the created numerical models with limited real-world data and provide diverse impact scenarios through numerical model simulations. However, there are inevitable differences between digital models and physical models that are challenging to correct through mechanical means. This discrepancy in data distribution between the two models significantly hinders the application of digital twin technology in impact/event identification tasks. To address this challenge, this study proposes a novel model based on autoencoders, named Transfer-AE. Transfer-AE encodes the common features of digital twins in the latent space to bridge the uncertainty gap at a macro scale between numerical models and physical models and synchronously fits the magnitude and location of the impact load in the decoder. This enables consistent detection results for the same impact event, whether the sample comes from the numerical model or the physical model. Transfer-AE includes two operating modes: Mode 1 has a fixed computational complexity with stable inference speed, but the training cost and difficulty increase with data distribution. Mode 2's computational complexity increases with data distribution, but it has a fixed training cost and speed. In both cases involving the geodesic dome structure simulating a deep space habitat and the IASC-ASCE benchmark structure, Transfer-AE demonstrated the best performance in impact localization and quantification tasks compared to mainstream domain-adaptive transfer models.

Chengjia Han↗

Development of Digital Twin Technologies for Climate Projections

Climate projections are increasingly needed for adaptation, climate resilience and related decision making. However, existing projections have systematic biases, are limited in scope, and are not readily available for most potential users. While the ideal of an observational data-driven ‘digital twin’ for climate is initially attractive, there is only a very limited set of climate data available with which to train such a tool. Nonetheless, we are confident that there is a role for ‘digital twin technologies’ in removing biases, increasing computational efficiency, expanding scenarios and data accessibility.

digital twins↗

Comprehensive Digital Twin of a Macro-fluidic Electrochemical Reactor to Optimize the Electrochemical-based Recovery of O2 from Metabolic CO2

Future long-duration missions will require a sustainable and efficient system capable of yielding a minimum of 75% O 2 recovery from metabolic CO 2 to achieve self-sufficiency for long space missions beyond Earth's low orbit. A Macro-fluidic Electrochemical Reactor (MFECR) development effort to electrochemically recover O 2 from CO 2 is underway at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) to increase current O 2 recovery efficiency and reduce air revitalization (AR) system complexity at the International Space Station (ISS) habitat and future long missions. The authors have developed and deployed a digital twin of an actual single cell of the MFECR via a comprehensive 3D multiphysics model that thoroughly replicates the exact configuration and fluid/material domains of the MFECR. This model's electrochemical physics consists of multicomponent-multiphase electrochemical-driven reactions leading to CO 2 conversion to C 2 H 4 and CO along with the formation of H 2 on the cathode in parallel with the generation of O 2 and H 2 O on the anode. This electrochemical model is coupled with all the physics phenomena involved in the process, including but not limited to fluid and non-ideal mass transfer of reactant and product species in free and porous media, convective/conduction/radiative heat transfer, and conduction of DC electrical current with Joule heating generation. The digital twin has proved to be an essential tool for performing different qualitative studies, including the effect of reducing the height (increasing the respect ratio) of the serpentine walls, leading to a further redesign of the EDU (the newly redesigned MFECR EDU has been fabricated and is expected to be used in future tests), the evaluation of setting different MFECRs connected in series, and the assessment of feeding air directly to the MFECR skipping the preceding metabolic CO 2 separation from air. The MFECR's test stand is fully automated and equipped with several inline measurements (flow, pressure, temperature, pH, component concentration) systems on all six MFECR's IO streams, allowing reliable experimental validation of the model, parametric determination of all electrochemical reactions, and process optimization.

Jesus A Dominguez↗

Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT) Workshop

"The Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) is hosting an Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT) workshop in collaboration with NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program. The event will bring together science and technology communities to explore the use and benefits of ESDT and their enabling technologies. This workshop is one of the first steps in developing ESDT reference use cases and corresponding technology needs to guide the development of ESDT technologies that will be needed by NASA Earth Science within the next five to ten years. The workshop goals are to: • identify driving Earth science use cases that will benefit from unique ESDT capabilities • identify emerging technologies that will enable such ESDT systems within the next five to ten years • understand opportunities and technologies for federating ESDTs and creating more capable systems"

Earth Science Remote Sensing; Information Systems↗

AmesDT: Digital Twin and Autonomy Validation Environment

A simulation of NASA Ames Research Center was developed to provide a common testbed for multiple areas of research within the Intelligent Systems Division, primarily related to verification and validation of autonomous technologies, machine learning, and digital twin systems. AmesSim corresponds a physical rover that is capable of navigation in the real-world environment; in this way, the same experiments can be run in both settings, with the same software and hardware stacks in the loop. The simulation is built in Unreal Engine 4 and uses the AirSim plugin for API convenience. Several custom modifications allow deterministic, faster-than-realtime execution, which enables consistent testing of on-line algorithms and large-scale data collection. This paper describes the architecture and capabilities of the simulation and discusses development challenge.

simulation↗

Digital Twin Technology for Aviation

As technology progresses, so have the tools for data visualization. This project presents a digital twin model of the San Francisco airport displaying a 10-minute window of historical flight data, visualizing the trajectory data of airplanes and vehicles in three dimensions. Multiple different cameras where implemented to fully utilize the 3D visualization. This is a 100:1 feet scale model created in Autodesk Maya, using the airport center as the origin and recalculating all coordinates accordingly featuring the airport, some surrounding buildings, and the bay. For this project, six different models of airplanes were modeled at a 50:1 feet scale with texturing to mimic real-world aircraft models along with certain airlines. The animation is driven through archived data captured from NASA’s Sherlock Open-Data Portal, cleaned of noisy data points, processed into useable data formats, and implemented into a Maya ASCII file of animation paths with the corresponding previously-stated airplane models attached all using Java based conversion program.

Aleksander Schade↗

A Digital Twin Feasibility Study (Part II):Non-Deterministic Predictions of Fatigue Life Using In-Situ Diagnostics and Prognostics

The Digital Twin (DT) concept has the potential to revolutionize the way systems and their components are designed, managed, maintained, and operated across a vast number of fields from engineering to healthcare. The focus of this work is the implementation of DT for the health management of fatigue critical structures. This paper is the second part of a two-part series. The first of the series demonstrated the use of multi-scale, initiation-to-failure crack growth modeling to form non-deterministic predictions of fatigue life. In this second part, a general method for reducing uncertainty in fatigue life predictions is presented that couples in-situ diagnostics and prognostics in a probabilistic framework. Monte Carlo methods and high-fidelity finite element models are used to (i) generate probabilistic estimates of crack state throughout the life of the same geometrically complex test specimen and (ii) predict fatigue life with decreasing uncertainty as more of these diagnoses are obtained. The ability to predict accurately and in the presence of uncertainty is demonstrated, suggesting that the proposed DT method is feasible for fatigue life prognosis and should be pursued further with a focus on increasing application realism.

Patrick E Leser↗

Towards Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT)

I will present an overview (in French) of the AIST Program with a particular emphasis on Earth system Digital Twins (ESDT) and on the collaborative work the AIST Program is currently conducting with CNES.

Earth Science Remote Sensing; Information Systems↗

From Blood Platelets Classification to Earth System Digital Twins: A Career in Computer Vision

IEEE SIgnal Processing Society (SPS) and Women in Signal Processing (WiSP) Webinar (https://signalprocessingsociety.org/blog/webinar-wisp-blood-platelets-classification-earth-system-digital-twins-career-computer-vision): Join us for an interactive session with Dr. Jacqueline Le Moigne, Manager of the NASA Science Mission Directorate Earth Science Technology Office’s Advanced Information Systems Technology Program. In this webinar, Dr. Le Moigne will share her journey through academia, the private sector, and her pivotal roles at NASA, emphasizing her work in signal processing, computer vision, and related technologies. The webinar will conclude with an interactive Q&A session, providing attendees the opportunity to engage directly with Dr. Le Moigne about her experiences and insights. Dr. Jacqueline Le Moigne manages NASA's Advanced Information Systems Technology Program, focusing on novel technologies that support Earth Science missions. She previously held roles at NASA Goddard, including Assistant Chief for Technology, and has worked on NASA's Space Technology Research Grants Program and Technology Roadmaps. Before NASA, she was a Research Scientist at the University of Maryland's Computer Vision Laboratory and also gained experience in the private sector. Jacqueline earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris. Her research interests include Image Registration, Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Systems, Distributed Spacecraft Missions (DSM), and Earth System Digital Twins (ESDT), as well as high-performance and onboard computing. She has authored over 180 publications, including books and patents, and has received multiple awards, including the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and the Goddard Information Science and Technology Award in 2012.

Computer Vision; Image Processing; Earth Science R↗