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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
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

A high-order Shifted Interface Method for Lagrangian shock hydrodynamics

Here, we present a new method for two-material Lagrangian hydrodynamics, which combines the Shifted Interface Method (SIM) with a high-order Finite Element Method. Our approach relies on an exact (or sharp) material interface representation, that is, it uses the precise location of the material interface. The interface is represented by the zero level-set of a continuous high-order finite element function that moves with the material velocity. This strategy allows to evolve curved material interfaces inside curved elements. By reformulating the original interface problem over a surrogate (approximate) interface, located in proximity of the true interface, the SIM avoids cut cells and the associated problematic issues regarding implementation, numerical stability, and matrix conditioning. Accuracy is maintained by modifying the original interface conditions using Taylor expansions. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms on established numerical benchmarks in one, two and three dimensions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2020

IIA Incremental Interval Assignment

IIA is a solver for optimizing integer matrix problems Ax=b. It was developed to decide the number of mesh edges on model curves (intervals) for quad and hex meshing. Meshing schemes impose constraints ranging from the mild requirement (i.e. that any quad mesh must have an even number of edges on its boundary) to structured mapped patches where opposite sides of a rectangle must have exactly equal numbers of edges. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525. SAND2020-13618 M

MItchell, Scott↗
DOE OSTI2023

Incremental Interval Assignment by Integer Linear Algebra with Improvements

Interval Assignment (IA) is the problem of selecting the number of mesh edges (intervals) for each curve for conforming quad and hex meshing. The intervals x is fundamentally integer-valued. Many other approaches perform numerical optimization then convert a floating-point solution into an integer solution, which is slow and error prone. We avoid such steps: we start integer, and stay integer. Incremental Interval Assignment (IIA) uses integer linear algebra (Hermite normal form) to find an initial solution to the meshing constraints, satisfying the integer matrix equation Solving for reduced row echelon form provides integer vectors spanning the nullspace of A. Here we add vectors from the nullspace to improve the initial solution, maintaining Ax = b Heuristics find good integer linear combinations of nullspace vectors that provide strict improvement towards variable bounds or goals. IIA always produces an integer solution if one exists. In practice we usually achieve solutions close to the user goals, but there is no guarantee that the solution is optimal, nor even satisfies variable bounds, e.g. has positive intervals. We describe several algorithmic changes since first publication that tend to improve the final solution. The software is freely available.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Curvature Induced Modifications of Chirality and Magnetic Configuration in Perpendicular Films

Designing curvature in three-dimensional (3D) magnetic nanostructures enables controlled manipulation of local energy landscapes, allowing for the modification of noncollinear spin textures relevant for next-generation spintronic devices. In this study, we experimentally investigate 3D magnetization textures in a Co/Pd multilayer film, exhibiting strong perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), deposited onto curved Cu nanowire meshes with diameters as small as 50 nm and lengths of several microns. Utilizing magnetic soft X-ray nanotomography, we achieve reconstructions of 3D magnetic domain patterns at approximately 30 nm spatial resolution. This approach provides detailed information on both the orientation and magnitude of magnetization within the film. Our results reveal that interfacial anisotropy in the Co/Pd multilayers drives the magnetization toward the local surface normal. In contrast to typical labyrinth domains observed in planar films, the presence of curved nanowires significantly alters the domain structure, with domains preferentially aligning along the nanowire axis in close proximity, while adopting random orientations farther away. We report direct experimental observation of a curvature-induced Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI), which is quantified to be approximately one-third of the intrinsic DMI in Co/Pd stacks. The curvature induced DMI enhances stability of Néel-type domain walls. These experimental observations are further supported by micromagnetic simulations. Altogether, our findings demonstrate that introducing curvature into magnetic nanostructures provides a powerful strategy for tailoring complex magnetic behaviors, paving the way for the design of advanced 3D racetrack memory and neuromorphic computing devices.

Raftrey, David↗
DOE OSTI2023

Remapping of Data Between One-Dimensional Meshes

In this report we present two approaches to data remapping between one-dimensional meshes implemented with the c++ programming language. Our goal was to test the performance of two search algorithms, linear and binary, and verify the accuracy of our implementations of the two methods. We first introduce the concept of data remap and meshing components, as well as their various uses. We then delve into the differences between point-wise and conservative remap, the algorithms used in the implementations, and lastly confirm the implementations work as intended when given various inputs. We expect that, after profiling, the binary search algorithm will be more efficient than the linear algorithm for sorted sets of data, the point-wise remap implementation to accurately approximate the data transfer between two meshes, and the conservative remap implementation to conserve the area underneath the curve of two distinct meshes.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Interface Problem Formulation Improvements with Application to Nuclear Fuel Performance Analysis

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation Program aims to develop predictive capabilities by applying computational methods to the analysis and design of advanced reactor and fuel cycle systems. This program has been providing engineering scale support for the development of BISON, a high-fidelity and high-resolution fuel performance tool. This report documents new developments and robustness improvements in mechanical and thermal (gap heat transfer) contact formulations. The improvements range from the migration of industrial level (“assessment”) nuclear fuel model setups to the usage of mortar formulations, the addition of frictional contact to one-dimensional layered representations of fuel and cladding components, and the addition of the Petrov-Galerkin approach to dual mortar, which improves performance on curved, relatively coarse meshes. In addition, the Lagrange-multiplier enforcement of mechanical mortar contact constraints has been extended to two additional types of enforcement: penalty and augmented Lagrange-Uzawa. We show that the latter approach yields the same interface results as dual mortar in the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment, with the advantage of not worsening the condition number of the system matrix—thereby enabling the use of some general implementations of iterative preconditioners, at the expense of additional system evaluations (i.e., augmentations).

42 ENGINEERING↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Overlap Preservation Using Loosely-Coupled Boundary Conditions for Body-Fitted Structured Overset Grids

Several improvements are made to overlap preservation in the automated approach to generating overset structured meshes. A loosely-coupled boundary condition (LCBC) is introduced to maintain optimal overlap for surface meshes generated from overlapping initial curves. Extension of the LCBC scheme to three-dimensional volume meshing is also presented. Test cases include various rotary wing vehicles from NASA’s Revolutionary Vertical Lift Technology (RVLT) project, and the wing-body geometry from the NASA Juncture Flow Experiment. Results demonstrate improvements in donor stencil quality from the enhanced overlap between neighboring surface and volume meshes.

TTT↗
DOE OSTI2024

Preserving Superconvergence of Spectral Elements for Curved Domains [Slides]

Finite Element Methods (FEM) and Spectral Element Methods (SEM) are crucial for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on complex geometries. SEM offers superior accuracy due to potential superconvergence for simple domains. Challenges persist for domains with curved boundaries, restricting SEM’s advantages in real-world applications. A proposed solution is the introduction of a novel strategy to enhance accuracy and maintain superconvergence of SEM in curved domains. The strategy includes a mesh-generation procedure with geometrically refined elements near curved boundaries and a post-processing phase using the Adaptive Extended Stencil Finite Element Method (AES-FEM). The method, named AES-FEM post-processed Spectral Element Method (ApSEM), aligns the accuracy of non-tensor-product elements with superconvergent spectral elements.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2026

High-Order Mesh r-Adaptivity with Tangential Relaxation and Guaranteed Mesh Validity

High-order meshes are crucial for achieving optimal convergence rates in curvilinear domains, preserving symmetry, and aligning with key flow features in moving mesh simulations [1], but their quality is challenging to control. In prior work, we have developed techniques based on Target-Matrix Optimization Paradigm (TMOP) to adapt a given high-order mesh to the geometry and solution of the partial differential equation (PDE) [2, 3]. Here, we extend this framework to address two key gaps in the literature for highorder mesh 𝑟-adaptivity. First, we introduce tangential relaxation on curved surfaces using solely the discrete mesh representation, eliminating the need for access to underlying geometry (e.g., CAD model). Second, we ensure a continuously positive Jacobian determinant throughout the domain. This determinant positivity is essential for using the high-order mesh resulting from 𝑟-adaptivity with arbitrary quadrature schemes in simulations. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be robust using a variety of numerical experiments.

Mathematics and Computing↗
DOE OSTI2020

GL Visualization

GLVis is a lightweight tool for accurate and flexible finite element visualization. GLVis uses OpenGL with interactive refinement to accurately represent curved high-order meshes and a wide variety of finite element grid functions defined on them.

Yee, BenC.↗
DOE OSTI2024

mgsflib

Code for my PhD thesis that creates meshes using gmsh and code I wrote to create high-order hybrid meshes to use for testing a hybrid method between spectral element method and generalized finite differences. It also uses a tetrahedral mesh improvement method called "stellar" to improve mesh quality near a curved boundary.

Jones, Jacob↗
NASA NTRS2003

Applications of Space-Filling-Curves to Cartesian Methods for CFD

The proposed paper presents a variety novel uses of Space-Filling-Curves (SFCs) for Cartesian mesh methods in 0. While these techniques will be demonstrated using non-body-fitted Cartesian meshes, most are applicable on general body-fitted meshes -both structured and unstructured. We demonstrate the use of single O(N log N) SFC-based reordering to produce single-pass (O(N)) algorithms for mesh partitioning, multigrid coarsening, and inter-mesh interpolation. The intermesh interpolation operator has many practical applications including warm starts on modified geometry, or as an inter-grid transfer operator on remeshed regions in moving-body simulations. Exploiting the compact construction of these operators, we further show that these algorithms are highly amenable to parallelization. Examples using the SFC-based mesh partitioner show nearly linear speedup to 512 CPUs even when using multigrid as a smoother. Partition statistics are presented showing that the SFC partitions are, on-average, within 10% of ideal even with only around 50,000 cells in each subdomain. The inter-mesh interpolation operator also has linear asymptotic complexity and can be used to map a solution with N unknowns to another mesh with M unknowns with O(max(M,N)) operations. This capability is demonstrated both on moving-body simulations and in mapping solutions to perturbed meshes for finite-difference-based gradient design methods.

Aftosmis, Michael J.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Applications of Space-Filling-Curves to Cartesian Methods for CFD

This paper presents a variety of novel uses of space-filling-curves (SFCs) for Cartesian mesh methods in CFD. While these techniques will be demonstrated using non-body-fitted Cartesian meshes, many are applicable on general body-fitted meshes-both structured and unstructured. We demonstrate the use of single theta(N log N) SFC-based reordering to produce single-pass (theta(N)) algorithms for mesh partitioning, multigrid coarsening, and inter-mesh interpolation. The intermesh interpolation operator has many practical applications including warm starts on modified geometry, or as an inter-grid transfer operator on remeshed regions in moving-body simulations Exploiting the compact construction of these operators, we further show that these algorithms are highly amenable to parallelization. Examples using the SFC-based mesh partitioner show nearly linear speedup to 640 CPUs even when using multigrid as a smoother. Partition statistics are presented showing that the SFC partitions are, on-average, within 15% of ideal even with only around 50,000 cells in each sub-domain. The inter-mesh interpolation operator also has linear asymptotic complexity and can be used to map a solution with N unknowns to another mesh with M unknowns with theta(M + N) operations. This capability is demonstrated both on moving-body simulations and in mapping solutions to perturbed meshes for control surface deflection or finite-difference-based gradient design methods.

Aftosmis, M. J.↗
NASA NTRS2018

A Higher-Order Space-Time Finite-Element Method for Moving-Body and Fluid-Structure Interaction Problems

We present a high-order finite-element method for moving body and fluid/structure interaction problems. Our solution strategy is based on a space-time discontinuous Galerkin (DG) spectral-element discretization which extends to arbitrary order of accuracy. The space-time DG discretization is a natural choice for moving body and fluid-structure interaction problems as moving surfaces are incorporated simply by considering curved space-time elements whose space-time faces align with the moving body. We present a discontinuous-Galerkin in time discretization for six-degree of motion modeling of rigid bodies, and a continuous-Galerkin discretization for equations of linear elasticity to generate curved space-time meshes. Numerical results for several simple 2D test cases are presented in order to verify the implementation of the different models. Finally we present a preliminary dynamic simulation of a parachute.

High-Order↗
NASA NTRS1999

Inlet Spillage Drag Predictions Using the AIRPLANE Code

AIRPLANE (Jameson/Baker) is a steady inviscid unstructured Euler flow solver. It has been validated on many HSR geometries. It is implemented as MESHPLANE, an unstructured mesh generator, and FLOPLANE, an iterative flow solver. The surface description from an Intergraph CAD system goes into MESHPLANE as collections of polygonal curves to generate the 3D mesh. The flow solver uses a multistage time stepping scheme with residual averaging to approach steady state, but R is not time accurate. The flow solver was ported from Cray to IBM SP2 by Wu-Sun Cheng (IBM); it could only be run on 4 CPUs at a time because of memory limitations. Meshes for the four cases had about 655,000 points in the flow field, about 3.9 million tetrahedra, about 77,500 points on the surface. The flow solver took about 23 wall seconds per iteration when using 4 CPUs. It took about eight and a half wall hours to run 1,300 iterations at a time (the queue limit is 10 hours). A revised version of FLOPLANE (Thomas) was used on up to 64 CPUs to finish up some calculations at the end. We had to turn on more communication when using more processors to eliminate noise that was contaminating the flow field; this added about 50% to the elapsed wall time per iteration when using 64 CPUs. This study involved computing lift and drag for a wing/body/nacelle configuration at Mach 0.9 and 4 degrees pitch. Four cases were considered, corresponding to four nacelle mass flow conditions.

Thomas, Scott D.↗
NASA NTRS1998

Self-Avoiding Walks over Adaptive Triangular Grids

In this paper, we present a new approach to constructing a "self-avoiding" walk through a triangular mesh. Unlike the popular approach of visiting mesh elements using space-filling curves which is based on a geometric embedding, our approach is combinatorial in the sense that it uses the mesh connectivity only. We present an algorithm for constructing a self-avoiding walk which can be applied to any unstructured triangular mesh. The complexity of the algorithm is O(n x log(n)), where n is the number of triangles in the mesh. We show that for hierarchical adaptive meshes, the algorithm can be easily parallelized by taking advantage of the regularity of the refinement rules. The proposed approach should be very useful in the run-time partitioning and load balancing of adaptive unstructured grids.

Heber, Gerd↗
NASA NTRS1998

Simulation of Conformal Spiral Slot Antennas on Composite Platforms

During the course of the grant, we wrote and distributed about 12 reports and an equal number of journal papers supported fully or in part by this grant. The list of reports (title & abstract) and papers are given in Appendices A and B. This grant has indeed been instrumental in developing a robust hybrid finite element method for the analysis of complex broadband antennas on doubly curved platforms. Previous to the grant, our capability was limited to simple printed patch antennas on mostly planar platforms. More specifically: (1) mixed element formulations were developed and new edge-based prisms were introduced; (2) these elements were important in permitting flexibility in geometry gridding for most antennas of interest; (3) new perfectly matched absorbers were introduced for mesh truncations associated with highly curved surfaces; (4) fast integral algorithms were introduced for boundary integral truncations reducing CPU time from O(N-2) down to O(N-1.5) or less; (5) frequency extrapolation schemes were developed for efficient broadband performance evaluations. This activity has been successfully continued by NASA researchers; (6) computer codes were developed and extensively tested for several broadband configurations. These include FEMA-CYL, FEMA-PRISM and FEMA-TETRA written by L. Kempel, T. Ozdemir and J. Gong, respectively; (7) a new infinite balun feed was designed nearly constant impedance over the 800-3000 MHz operational band; (8) a complete slot spiral antenna was developed, fabricated and tested at NASA Langley. This new design is a culmination of the projects goals and integrates the computational and experimental efforts. this antenna design resulted in a U.S. patent and was revised three times to achieve the desired bandwidth and gain requirements from 800-3000 MHz.

Volakis, J. L.↗
NASA NTRS1989

Unsteady density-current equations for highly curved terrain

New nonlinear partial differential equations containing terrain curvature and its rate of change are derived that describe the flow of an atmospheric density current. Unlike the classical hydraulic-type equations for density currents, the new equations are valid for two-dimensional, gradually varied flow over highly curved terrain, hence suitable for computing unsteady (or steady) flows over arbitrary mountain/valley profiles. The model assumes the atmosphere above the density current exerts a known arbitrary variable pressure upon the unknown interface. Later this is specialized to the varying hydrostatic pressure of the atmosphere above. The new equations yield the variable velocity distribution, the interface position, and the pressure distribution that contains a centrifugal component, often significantly larger than its hydrostatic component. These partial differential equations are hyperbolic, and the characteristic equations and characteristic directions are derived. Using these to form a characteristic mesh, a hypothetical unsteady curved-flow problem is calculated, not based upon observed data, merely as an example to illustrate the simplicity of their application to unsteady flows over mountains.

Sivakumaran, N. S.↗