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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

Measuring the Photocatalytic Breakdown of Crystal Violet Dye using a Light Emitting Diode Approach

A simple method to estimate the photocatalytic reactivity performance of spray-on titanium dioxide coatings for transmissive glass surfaces was developed. This novel technique provides a standardized method to evaluate the efficiency of photocatalytic material systems over a variety of illumination levels. To date, photocatalysis assessments have generally been conducted using mercury black light lamps. Illumination levels for these types of lamps are difficult to vary, consequently limiting their use for assessing material performance under a diverse range of simulated environmental conditions. This new technique uses an ultraviolet (UV) gallium nitride (GaN) light emitting diode (LED) array instead of a traditional black light to initiate and sustain photocatalytic breakdown. This method was tested with a UV-resistant dye (crystal violet) applied to a titanium dioxide coated glass slide. Experimental control is accomplished by applying crystal violet to both titanium dioxide coated slides and uncoated control slides. A slide is illuminated by the UV LED array, at various light levels representative of outdoor and indoor conditions, from the dye side of the slide. To monitor degradation of the dye over time, a temperature-stabilized white light LED, whose emission spectrum overlaps with the dye absorption spectrum, is used to illuminate the opposite side of the slide. Using a spectrometer, the amount of light from the white light LED transmitted through the slide as the dye degrades is monitored as a function of wavelength and time and is subsequently analyzed. In this way, the rate of degradation for photocatalytically coated versus uncoated slide surfaces can be compared. Results demonstrate that the dye absorption decreased much more rapidly on the photocatalytically coated slides than on the control uncoated slides, and that dye degradation is dependent on illumination level. For photocatalytic activity assessment purposes, this experimental configuration and methodology minimizes many external variable effects and enables small changes in absorption to be measured. This research also compares the advantages of this innovative LED light source design over traditional mercury black light systems and non- LED lamp approaches. This novel technology begins to address the growing need for a standard method that can assess the performance of photocatalytic materials before deployment for large scale, real world use.

Ryan, Robert E.↗

Fire-related standards and testing

The state of the art of flammability testing has been changing rapidly. Here, the progress in developing general test methods for solid materials and products exposed to an external fire are reviewed. The special requirements pertinent to environments of concern to NASA are examined and some suggestions for possible directions for future test method developments are given.

Babrauskas, Vytenis↗

InGaAsP/InP laser development for single-mode, high-data-rate communications

Materials studies as well as general and specific device development were carried out in the InGaAsP system. A comparison was made of three standard methods of evaluating substrate quality by means of dislocation studies. A cause of reduced yield of good wafers, the pullover of melt from one bin to the next, has been analyzed. Difficulties with reproducible zinc acceptor doping have been traced to segregation of zinc in the In/Zn alloy used for the doping source. Using EBIC measurments, the pn junction was shown to drift in location depending on factors not always under control. An analysis of contact structures by SIMS showed that the depth to which the sintered Au/Zn contact penetrates into the structure is typically 0.13 microns, or well within the cap layer and out of the p-type cladding and thus not deleterious to laser prformance. The problem of single-mode laser development was investigated and it was shown to be related to the growth habit over four different possible substrate configurations. The fabrication of constricted double heterojunctions, mesa stripe buried heterostructures, and buried heterostructures was discussed, and measurements were presented on the device properties of single-mode buried heterostructure lasers. Results include single spectral line emission at 3 mW and a threshold current of 60 mA.

Ladany, I.↗

Analytical solutions with Generalized Impedance Boundary Conditions (GIBC)

The diffraction by a material discontinuity in a thick dielectric/ferrite layer is considered by modeling the layer as a distributed current sheet obeying generalized sheet transition conditions (GSTC's). The sheet currents are then formulated and solved via the standard dual integral equation approach. This yields the diffracted field in terms of unknown constants which underscore the non-uniqueness of the GSTC current sheet representation. The constants are dependent on the geometry and properties of the discontinuity and are determined by enforcing field continuity across the material junction. This requires the field internal to the slab which are determined from the external ones via analytic continuity. Results are given which validate the solution and demonstrate the importance of the constants.

Ricoy, Mark A.↗

Finite difference time domain modeling of steady state scattering from jet engines with moving turbine blades

The approach chosen to model steady state scattering from jet engines with moving turbine blades is based upon the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method. The FDTD method is a numerical electromagnetic program based upon the direct solution in the time domain of Maxwell's time dependent curl equations throughout a volume. One of the strengths of this method is the ability to model objects with complicated shape and/or material composition. General time domain functions may be used as source excitations. For example, a plane wave excitation may be specified as a pulse containing many frequencies and at any incidence angle to the scatterer. A best fit to the scatterer is accomplished using cubical cells in the standard cartesian implementation of the FDTD method. The material composition of the scatterer is determined by specifying its electrical properties at each cell on the scatterer. Thus, the FDTD method is a suitable choice for problems with complex geometries evaluated at multiple frequencies. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the FDTD method.

Ryan, Deirdre A.↗

Development of flame-resistant structures for use in the Apollo and Skylab programs

Flame-resistant materials have been designed and fabricated to meet certain end-use criteria established by NASA with emphasis on meeting established flammability standards. The program had three general phases: (1) fabrication of candidate sample structures for evaluation by the Structures and Mechanics Division and/or NASA contractors; (2) physical testing of the structures developed; and (3) supply of required quantities of specific items for fabrication into prototype and/or flight items for the Apollo and Skylab programs.

Coskren, R. J.↗

Finite-Strain Fractional-Order Viscoelastic (FOV) Material Models and Numerical Methods for Solving Them

Fraction-order viscoelastic (FOV) material models have been proposed and studied in 1D since the 1930's, and were extended into three dimensions in the 1970's under the assumption of infinitesimal straining. It was not until 1997 that Drozdov introduced the first finite-strain FOV constitutive equations. In our presentation, we shall continue in this tradition by extending the standard, FOV, fluid and solid, material models introduced in 1971 by Caputo and Mainardi into 3D constitutive formula applicable for finite-strain analyses. To achieve this, we generalize both the convected and co-rotational derivatives of tensor fields to fractional order. This is accomplished by defining them first as body tensor fields and then mapping them into space as objective Cartesian tensor fields. Constitutive equations are constructed using both variants for fractional rate, and their responses are contrasted in simple shear. After five years of research and development, we now possess a basic suite of numerical tools necessary to study finite-strain FOV constitutive equations and their iterative refinement into a mature collection of material models. Numerical methods still need to be developed for efficiently solving fraction al-order integrals, derivatives, and differential equations in a finite element setting where such constitutive formulae would need to be solved at each Gauss point in each element of a finite model, which can number into the millions in today's analysis.

Freed, Alan D.↗

Status of SEMI's solar-grade substrate standards

A proposal for a standard specifications listing covering requirements for silicon wafers used in solar cell manufacturing is outlined. The specific contents of the general requirements specifications include: ordering information; dimensions and permissible variations; material and manufacture; physical parameters; sampling; test methods; certification; and packaging and marking.

Gallagher, B. D.↗

Materials Control for Aerospace Applications

The distant future of mankind and the ultimate survivability of the human race, as it is known today, will depend on mans' ability to break earthly bonds and establish new territorial positions throughout the universe. Man must therefore be positioned to not only travel to, but also, to readily adapt to numerous and varying environments. For this mass migration across the galaxies nothing is as import to the human race as is NASA's future missions into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), to the moon, and/or Mars. These missions will form the building blocks to eternity for mankind. From these missions, NASA will develop the foundations for these building blocks based on sound engineering and scientific principles, both known and yet to be discovered. The integrity of the program will lead to development, tracking and control of the most basic elements of hardware production: That being development and control of applications of space flight materials. Choosing the right material for design purposes involves many considerations, such as governmental regulations associated with manufacturing operations, both safety of usage and of manufacturing, general material usage requirements, material longevity and performance requirements, material interfacing compatibility and material usage environments. Material performance is subject to environmental considerations in as much as a given material may perform exceptionally well at standard temperatures and pressures while performing poorly under non-standard conditions. These concerns may be found true for materials relative to the extreme temperatures and vacuum gradients of high altitude usage. The only way to assure that flight worthy materials are used in design is through testing. However, as with all testing, it requires both time on schedule and cost to the operation. One alternative to this high cost testing approach is to rely on a materials control system established by NASA. The NASA community relies on the MAPTIS materials control system founded at MSFC and supported by the other NASA Centers. This system is a data bank of all materials used in space flight operations. These materials are rated for several characteristics that are common concerns in high altitude or deep space usage: Odor, off gassing, material fluid compatibility, toxicity, corrosion susceptibility, stress corrosion susceptibility, etc.

Ferguson, Michael↗

Microstrip proportional counter development at MSFC

Microstrip detectors are an exciting new development in proportional counter design fabricated using integrated circuit-type photolithography techniques; they therefore offer very high spatial accuracy and uniformity. A development program is underway at NASA-Marshall to produce large-area microstrips for use in an X-ray detector balloon flight program and to investigate the general performance limits of these new devices. Microstrips tested so far have been fabricated both in-house using standard photolithographic techniques and by an outside contractor using electron beam technology. Various substrate materials have been tested along with different electrode configurations. The distributions of pickup on subdivided cathodes on both top and bottom surfaces of the microstrips are also being investigated for use as two-dimensional imaging detectors. Data from these tests in the development of a large-area device will be presented.

Fulton, M. A.↗

Testing the Predictive Capability of the High-Fidelity Generalized Method of Cells Using an Efficient Reformulation

The High-Fidelity Generalized Method of Cells is a new micromechanics model for unidirectionally reinforced periodic multiphase materials that was developed to overcome the original model's shortcomings. The high-fidelity version predicts the local stress and strain fields with dramatically greater accuracy relative to the original model through the use of a better displacement field representation. Herein, we test the high-fidelity model's predictive capability in estimating the elastic moduli of periodic composites characterized by repeating unit cells obtained by rotation of an infinite square fiber array through an angle about the fiber axis. Such repeating unit cells may contain a few or many fibers, depending on the rotation angle. In order to analyze such multi-inclusion repeating unit cells efficiently, the high-fidelity micromechanics model's framework is reformulated using the local/global stiffness matrix approach. The excellent agreement with the corresponding results obtained from the standard transformation equations confirms the new model's predictive capability for periodic composites characterized by multi-inclusion repeating unit cells lacking planes of material symmetry. Comparison of the effective moduli and local stress fields with the corresponding results obtained from the original Generalized Method of Cells dramatically highlights the original model's shortcomings for certain classes of unidirectional composites.

Arnold, Steven M.↗

Spoken Language Processing in the Clarissa Procedure Browser

Clarissa, an experimental voice enabled procedure browser that has recently been deployed on the International Space Station, is as far as we know the first spoken dialog system in space. We describe the objectives of the Clarissa project and the system's architecture. In particular, we focus on three key problems: grammar-based speech recognition using the Regulus toolkit; methods for open mic speech recognition; and robust side-effect free dialogue management for handling undos, corrections and confirmations. We first describe the grammar-based recogniser we have build using Regulus, and report experiments where we compare it against a class N-gram recogniser trained off the same 3297 utterance dataset. We obtained a 15% relative improvement in WER and a 37% improvement in semantic error rate. The grammar-based recogniser moreover outperforms the class N-gram version for utterances of all lengths from 1 to 9 words inclusive. The central problem in building an open-mic speech recognition system is being able to distinguish between commands directed at the system, and other material (cross-talk), which should be rejected. Most spoken dialogue systems make the accept/reject decision by applying a threshold to the recognition confidence score. NASA shows how a simple and general method, based on standard approaches to document classification using Support Vector Machines, can give substantially better performance, and report experiments showing a relative reduction in the task-level error rate by about 25% compared to the baseline confidence threshold method. Finally, we describe a general side-effect free dialogue management architecture that we have implemented in Clarissa, which extends the "update semantics'' framework by including task as well as dialogue information in the information state. We show that this enables elegant treatments of several dialogue management problems, including corrections, confirmations, querying of the environment, and regression testing.

Rayner, M.↗

IRAS Low Resolution Spectra of Asteroids

Optical/near-infrared studies of asteroids are based on reflected sunlight and surface albedo variations create broad spectral features, suggestive of families of materials. There is a significant literature on these features, but there is very little work in the thermal infrared that directly probes the materials emitting on the surfaces of asteroids. We have searched for and extracted 534 thermal spectra of 245 asteroids from the original Dutch (Groningen) archive of spectra observed by the IRAS Low Resolution Spectrometer (LRS). We find that, in general, the observed shapes of the spectral continua are inconsistent with that predicted by the standard thermal model used by IRAS. Thermal models such as proposed by Harris (1998) and Harris et al.(1998) for the near-earth asteroids with the "beaming parameter" in the range of 1.0 to 1.2 best represent the observed spectral shapes. This implies that the IRAS Minor Planet Survey (IMPS, Tedesco, 1992) and the Supplementary IMPS (SIMPS, Tedesco, et al., 2002) derived asteroid diameters are systematically underestimated, and the albedos are overestimated. We have tentatively identified several spectral features that appear to be diagnostic of at least families of materials. The variation of spectral features with taxonomic class hints that thermal infrared spectra can be a valuable tool for taxonomic classification of asteroids.

Cohen, Martin↗

Development, Characterization, and Validation of Elevated-Temperature Constitutive Models: Deformation and Damage

This report provides a brief review of experimentally observed hereditary and nonhereditary material behavior along with background information on standard as well as advanced internal state variable constitutive modeling at elevated temperature. A description of exploratory, characterization, and validation testing is presented along with a detailed outline of what constitutes “sufficient” data content (i.e., quality and quantity) for developing or enhancing, characterizing, and validating a particular sophisticated nonlinear time- and history-dependent (hereditary) class of constitutive models known as GVIPS (generalized viscoplasticity with potential structure). The tests described are necessary to reveal a material’s behavior in the reversible (or viscoelastic) and irreversible (or viscoplastic) regimes, for the identification of both deformation and damage model parameters. Results presented are primarily for metallic materials. In all cases, both uniaxial and multiaxial tests are described, and the linkage between the specific tests and the parameters within the model that can be characterized from the results of these tests are also discussed. Discussion is also provided relative to the role information management must play relative to material data collection, analysis, maintenance, and dissemination. The need for such an information system is particularly important as both analyst and designer move toward utilizations of sophisticated, nonlinear time- and history dependent (hereditary) constitutive models. Lastly, the concept of state space and its utility in understanding and establishing constitutive models is addressed throughout. The intent behind this document is to help both the modeler and experimentalist understand each other’s specific points of view and provide guidance for both model development and characterization. Emphasis has been placed on providing the mechanician with information regarding how tests are performed and what issues to be aware of when interpreting results. It is hoped that experimentalists will take away a new perspective on the types of information that modelers and analysts are looking for from them.

Constitutive Modeling↗

Methodological questions of creating tissue-equivalent phantoms

On the basis of analysis and generalization of literature data, the composition of tissue equivalent plastic was justified, parameters of a standard man were determined, plaster and metal forms were created for casting dummies, and an experimental model was produced from tissue equivalent material.

Kolodkin, A. V.↗

Characteristics of the transmission loss apparatus at NASA Langley Research Center

A description of the Transmission Loss Apparatus at NASA Langley Research Center, which is specifically designed to accommodate general aviation type aircraft structures, is presented. The measurement methodology, referred to as the Plate Reference Method, is discussed and compared with the classical method as described in the Standard of the American Society for Testing and Materials. This measurement procedure enables reliable and accurate noise transmission loss measurements down to the 50 Hz one-third octave band. The transmission loss characteristics of add-on acoustical treatments, applied to the basic structure, can be established by inclusion of appropriate absorption corrections for the treatment.

Grosveld, F. W.↗

Determination of Ballistic Limit for IM7/8552 Using LS-DYNA MAT 261

The goal of the NASA ACC High Energy Dynamic Impact Project is to determine the state of the art of dynamic fracture simulations for high velocity impact for composite fuselage shielding applications. Using a building block approach, several computational models considered under NASA ACC are being validated against test data, starting at unconfigured panels and progressing to configured panels under combined out-of-plane and in-plane loading due to ballistic impact. The computational models being evaluated in this project include MAT 162, MAT 213, MAT 261, SPG, and Peridynamics. In this paper, the simulation results using LS-Dyna Material MAT 261 are presented. In particular, a series of blind predictions for unconfigured panels were performed to determine the ballistic limit or V50 velocity. MAT 261 employs failure approach that is generally physically-based using fracture toughness criteria. The overall material model relies on typical ply-level stiffness properties, similar to MAT 162 and other composite continuum damage material models. The fracture toughness values are based on standard tests, and thus are not subject to extensive calibration. This approach is more efficient than performing extensive optimization studies for calibration of parameters. Also, this approach of relying on physical properties reduces the uncertainty of results, as questions concerning the quality and extent of the calibration studies is no longer relevant. However, it was found that carefully controlled coupon-level tests are needed to accurately obtain the required fracture toughness values. Additionally, it should be noted that there is one significant parameter in MAT 261 that does appear to require calibration, and that is the overall failure strain. This is the strain at which the element is deleted, and is not the same as the strain at which damage begins to accumulate. This failure strain is termed EFS (Effective Failure Strain), and is the maximum effective stain for element failure. Simulations have shown that this value will significantly affect impact response and failure. The paper presents the effect of this element failure strain parameter, along with possible uncertainties in fracture toughness values. With an adjusted appropriate value for EFS, it is seen that simulation results compare well with impact test data for predicted penetration velocity.

Byar, Alan↗

Ruggedizing a Commercial Depth Camera for Novel Lunar Exploration.

The novel contribution of this instrument is to take the first depth images on the moon. A commercial Kinect camera from Microsoft has been ruggedized for a CLPS mission to the Lunar South Pole. The 12-megapixel color camera is combined with a 1-megapixel color time-of-flight (ToF) depth sensor. The solid-state depth sensor/LIDAR provides greater resolution, a wider field of view, pixel binning, and reduced power consumption. The high-resolution data collected from the mission can be used to construct a near-field virtual environment of the lunar surface for scientific applications. The depth camera can provide a 360-degree view of the target area by combining ToF data with RGB imagery and rover turning. The unit was evaluated for space flight compliant materials and parts at NASA Ames. The microphone array, RF shield, front face, and outer body parts were removed to reduce mass. Plastic parts were replaced with vacuum-compatible materials; manufactured cables were added to properly interface with the host rover, built by Lunar Outpost. The environmental testing was performed on the Kinect with Random Vibration/Sine Testing (Fig 1a), per GEVS (NASA’s General Environmental Verification Standard for spaceflight launch survival). Thermal Vacuum testing cycled the instrument between expected hot (+ 85 C) and cold survival temperatures, as well as +50 C and -25 C operational temps (Fig 1b). The instrument functioned nominally at the conclusion of vibration and thermal cycling tests. The Azure Kinect is manifested on the Nova-C lander which flies on the Intuitive Machines mission IM-2, landing at the lunar south pole for a mission duration of 14 days (one lunar daylight cycle). The unit will be integrated to the MAPP (Mobile Autonomous Prospecting Platform) rover at Lunar Outpost. The Azure Kinect with ToF feature will improve the resolution of lunar geology data near the south pole and enable ground-based VR experience of details of the lunar surface (Fig 1c).

V. Jha↗