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High temperature liquid metal instrumentation for SNAP-10A flight system and mercury vapor quality
Today's selection of DC microgrid buildings features a diverse set of electrical topologies and turnkey solutions, each with specific design trade-offs and optimizations. Designers desperately need standardized metrics and procedures for measurement and verification (M&V) to analyze and compare the advantages of each DC solution to traditional AC building networks. This work develops M&V procedures for quantifying and comparing the energy efficiency and power quality in buildings. To calculate full-building efficiency, this work introduces the measurement-informed modeling method, a procedure that develops and refines a building's energy model with metered data. To quantify power quality, this work defines a new voltage quality index that applies to both AC and DC buildings. This article describes the equipment, instrumentation, and operation necessary to calculate the efficiency and power quality. It then demonstrates these methods with a set of field tests. We report these M&V procedures can ultimately be used to compare and improve the efficiency and power quality of various DC topologies.
Among the many upgrades designed and implemented in the NASA Ames 11-by 11-Foot Transonic Wind Tunnel over the past few years, several directly affect flow quality in the test section: a turbulence reduction system with a honeycomb and two screens, a flow smoothing system in the back leg diffusers, an improved drive motor control system, and a full replacement set of composite blades for the compressor. Prior to the shut-down of the tunnel for construction activities, an 8-foot span rake populated with flow instrumentation was traversed in the test section to fully document the flow quality and establish a baseline against which the upgrades could be characterized. A similar set of measurements was performed during the recent integrated system test trials, but the scope was somewhat limited in accordance with the primary objective of such tests, namely to return the tunnel to a fully operational status. These measurements clearly revealed substantial improvements in flow angularity and significant reductions in turbulence level for both full-span and semi-span testing configurations, thus making the flow quality of the tunnel one of the best among existing transonic facilities.
For the transmission of imagery at high data rates over large distances with limited power and system gain, it is usually necessary to compress the data before transmitting it over a noisy channel that uses channel coding to reduce the effect of noise introduced errors. Both compression and channel noise introduce distortion into the imagery. In order to design a communication link that provides adequate quality of received images, it is necessary first to define some suitable distortion measure that accounts for both these kinds of distortion and then to perform various tradeoffs to arrive at system parameter values that will provide a sufficiently low level of received image distortion. The overall mean square error is used as the distortion measure and a description of how to perform these tradeoffs are included.
As part of an ongoing effort to improve the aerodynamic flow characteristics of the Icing Research Tunnel (IRT), a modular scale model of the facility was fabricated. This 1/10th-scale model was used to gain further understanding of the flow characteristics in the IRT. The model was outfitted with instrumentation and data acquisition systems to determine pressures, velocities, and flow angles in the settling chamber and test section. Parametric flow quality studies involving the insertion and removal of a model of the IRT's distinctive heat exchanger (cooler) and/or of a honeycomb in the settling chamber were performed. These experiments illustrate the resulting improvement or degradation in flow quality.
Calorimetry, flow measurement, and acoustic techniques evaluated for analysis of three liquid metals
A lidar polarimeter system utilizing a 5 mw He-Ne laser has been constructed and used for laboratory and day light backscatter measurements from suspensions of teflon particles and absorbing dye in water. The results of this study have shown that a lidar polarimeter system can measure 'volume reflectance' without interference of peripheral effects such as sky reflections. The polarization ratio appears to be less affected by surface waves than does the total intensity or individual polarizations. The cross polarized return is the most sensitive to changes in the single scatter albedo and absolute concentrations of absorbing and scattering materials. A criterion is indicated which states that finite beam effects must be considered when the total extinction length is greater than the incident beam width.
Additional tests were conducted to further define the disturbance characteristics of the Langley 8-Foot Transonic Pressure Tunnel. Measurements were made in the settling chamber with hot wire probes and in the test section with pressure transducers when various methods were used to choke the flow. In addition to presenting rms values measured at various locations and tunnel condition, autocorrelations and cross correlation data are also presented.
The results of tests to measure the disturbance levels across the cooler, screens, and nozzle in the test section of the rehabilitated Langley Research Center Low Turbulence Pressure Tunnel are reported and discussed. The velocity fluctuations measured upstream and downstream of the cooler were approximately equal and ranged from 5 to 15 percent. The attenuation of the measured velocity fluctuations across the screen agreed with predictions from Dryden's (1949) theory. Velocity fluctuations in the test section ranged from 0.025 percent at Mach 0.05 to 0.3 percent at Mach 0.2. Pressure fluctuations at the test section walls agreed with previous measurements made under a turbulent boundary. The autocorrelation functions indicated that there were large reductions in the integral scale of turbulence across the cooler and screens. The spectra measured upstream and downstream of the cooler were mostly broadband.
Laminar flow experiments were performed in an 8-foot transonic pressure tunnel which was modified in order to simulate the conditions of an infinite span yawed wing. A liner in the tunnel provided a flow field around the yawed airfoil. The results were evaluated using hot-wire and fluctuating pressure measurements. Data were obtained for root-mean-square fluctuations, their spectra, and various cross product terms.
The study by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) was commissioned by Loral Space Information Systems, Inc. and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to evaluate internal assessment systems. APQC benchmarked approaches to the internal assessment of quality management systems in three phases. The first phase included work conducted for the International Benchmarking Clearinghouse (IBC) and consisted of an in-depth analysis of the 1991 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria. The second phase was also performed for the IBC and compared the 1991 award criteria among the following quality awards: Deming Prize, Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, The President's Award for Quality and Productivity Improvement, The NASA Excellence Award (The George M. Lowe Trophy) for Quality and Productivity Improvement and the Shigeo Shingo Award for Excellence in Manufacturing. The third phase compared the internal implementation approaches of 23 companies selected from American industry for their recognized, formal assessment systems.
For decades, wind tunnel testing has been conducted in test section environments which have not been adequately documented. However, with the advent of the energy shortage, the need for improved fuel-efficient transports employing supercritical or LFC airfoils has increased the awareness of the possible influence of freestream turbulence on advanced experimental testing. This has already lead to detailed flow quality measurements in NASA transonic wind tunnels. The purpose of this paper is to present results of a study in the Ames 2 x 2 ft transonic wind tunnel.
Regression analysis is applied to the problem of measuring water quality parameters from remote sensing spectral signature data. The equations necessary to perform regression analysis are presented and methods of testing the strength and reliability of a regression are described. An efficient algorithm for selecting an optimal subset of the independent variables available for a regression is also presented.
An atmospheric sounding mission starts with a wide range of concept designs involving measurement technologies, observing platforms, and observation scenarios. Observing system simulation experiment (OSSE) is a technical approach to evaluate the relative merits of mission and instrument concepts. At Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the OSSE team has developed an OSSE environment that allows atmospheric scientists to systematically explore a wide range of mission and instrument concepts and formulate a science traceability matrix with a quantitative science impact analysis. The OSSE environment virtually creates a multi-platform atmospheric sounding testbed (MAST) by integrating atmospheric phenomena models, forward modeling methods, and inverse modeling methods. The MAST performs OSSEs in four loosely coupled processes, observation scenario exploration, measurement quality exploration, measurement quality evaluation, and science impact analysis.
When models of human vision adequately measure the relative quality of candidate halftonings of an image, the problem of halftoning the image becomes equivalent to the search problem of finding a halftone that optimizes the quality metric. Because of the vast number of possible halftones, and the complexity of image quality measures, this principled approach has usually been put aside in favor of fast algorithms that seem to perform well. We find that the principled approach can lead to a range of useful halftoning algorithms, as we trade off speed for quality by varying the complexity of the quality measure and the thoroughness of the search. High quality halftones can be obtained reasonably quickly, for example, by using as a measure the vector length of the error image filtered by a contrast sensitivity function, and, as the search procedure, the sequential adjustment of individual pixels to improve the quality measure. If computational resources permit, simulated annealing can find nearly optimal solutions.
Longitudinal profiling of water quality via the deployment of sensors from watercraft has advanced the understanding of spatial patterns in large rivers and lakes; however, a similar approach in low- to mid-order streams is lacking. To fill this gap, we developed an unmanned surface vehicle (USV)-water quality measurement platform (the “AquaBOT”). The components of the AquaBOT included a nitrate sensor, multiparameter sonde (temperature, conductivity, turbidity, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll), quantum sensor, and global positioning system (GPS) mounted to a small pontoon-style USV. The AquaBOT was tested in four streams and rivers in Iowa and Tennessee. All measured water quality parameters varied longitudinally, and greater ranges were generally observed along the low-order, agriculturally influenced streams in Iowa. Nitrate, in particular, was spatially heterogeneous. For example, during one run in early June, concentrations ranged from 10.5 to 12.5 mg N L –1 along a 2.3 km reach and hotspots were observed directly downstream of some tile drains. The spatial resolution of AquaBOT data collected in June was 10× higher than grab sampling data, and measurements were collected in less time and at a comparable cost. Here, the AquaBOT can complement existing measurement approaches and will lead to advancements in understanding the processes driving water quality along the stream-to-river continuum.
Calculated and flight measured handling quality factors of three subsonic jet transports
This paper describes the current activities at the National Transonic Facility to document the test-section flow and to support tunnel improvements. The paper is divided into sections on the tunnel calibration, flow quality measurements, data quality assurance, and implementation of wall interference corrections.