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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 361 records · Page 20

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

NASA NTRS1977

A study of Stormsat interactive data analysis facility

Stormsat, a third generation geosynchronous satellite intended for the investigation and forecasting of severe local storms, tropical cyclones and other mesoscale phenomena, could be launched as early as 1982. The paper outlines the interactive data processing and analysis functions which must be performed and presents a possible configuration capable of achieving the demonstration forecast objectives. Important features of the data processing system include (1) interactive extraction of wind, temperature and moisture profiles, cloud structure and precipitation from Stormsat data, and (2) numerical and statistical modeling necessary to provide demonstration forecasts.

Hasler, A. F.↗

NASA NTRS1978

Navigation performance of the Triscan concept for shipboard VTOL aircraft operations

The paper deals with the Triscan concept - a dual-antenna microwave landing guidance system, using triangulation for close-in accuracy - developed to facilitate the landing of VTOL aircraft on ships in all-weather conditions. Analysis of the navigation performance of an onboard system receiving data from Triscan and data-linked information regarding the motion of the ship showed that the approach navigation performance depends on the approach path profile flown, the magnitude of the measurement bias error, and the navigation system's knowledge of the shipboard landing pad motion, which was implemented through the concept of a landing pad deviation vector.

Mcgee, L. A.↗

NASA NTRS1991

Numerical study of high-area-ratio H2/O2 rocket nozzles

Calculations were made for high-area-ratio H2/O2 rocket nozzles by using the RPLUS code which employs an implicit finite volume, lower-upper symmetric successive over-relaxation scheme to solve the Navier-Stokes equations and the species equations in a coupled manner. The combustion processes of hydrogen and oxygen are modeled by an 8-species and 18-step reaction mechanism, and the turbulence is simulated by the Baldwin-Lomax turbulence model with a pressure gradient correction on the van Driest's damping constant in the inner-layer model. The calculated results for two different rocket nozzles are presented as contours, profiles, and performance values. The predicted specific impulse and thrust agree well with the experimental data and those from the industry standard code. It is demonstrated that the RPLUS code can be used for analysis of rocket nozzles.

Kim, S. C.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Experimental investigation of nozzle/plume aerodynamics at hypersonic speeds

Work continued on the improvement of 16-Inch Shock Tunnel. This comprised studies of ways of improving driver gas ignition, an improved driver gas mixing system, an axial translation system for the driver tube, improved diaphragm materials (carbon steel vs. stainless steel), a copper liner for the part of the driven tube near the nozzle, the use of a buffer gas between the driver and driven gases, the use of N2O in the driven tube, the use of a converging driven tube, operation of the facility as a non-reflected shock tunnel and expansion tube, operation with heated hydrogen or helium driver gas, the use of detonations in the driver and the construction of an enlarged test section. Maintenance and developmental work continued on the scramjet combustor continued. New software which greatly speeds up data analysis has been written and brought on line. In particular, software which provides very rapid generation of model surface heat flux profiles has been brought on line. A considerable amount of theoretical work was performed in connection with upgrading the 16 Inch Shock Tunnel Facility. A one-dimensional Godunov code for very high velocities and any equation of state is intended to add viscous effects in studying the operation of the Shock Tunnel and also of two-stage light gas guns.

Bogdanoff, David W.↗

NASA NTRS1999

Nickel-Hydrogen Cell Testing Experience, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

The objectives of the project were to test the Nickel-Hydrogen Cell to: (1) verify the Aerospace Cell Flight Worthiness, (2) Elucidate the Aerospace Cell Thermal Behavior, (3) Develop the Aerospace Battery Assembly Design(s) and In-orbit Battery Management plan(s) and (4) Understand the Aerospace Cell Failure Mechanism. The tests included the LEO and GEO Life cycle tests, Calorimetric Analysis, Destructive Physical analysis, and special tests. Charts show the Mission Profile Cycling Data, Stress Cycling Data. The test data complies with the mission requirements, validating the flight worthiness of batteries. The nominal stress and mission profile cycling performance test shows the charge voltage as high as 1.60V and recharge ratio greater than 1.05. It is apparent that the electrochemical signatures alone do not provide conclusive proof for Nickel precharge. The researchers recommend a gas and positive plate analyses for further confirmation.

Rao, Gopalakrishna M.↗

NASA NTRS1999

Initial Piloted Simulation Evaluation of the Reference-H High-Speed Civil Transport Design During Takeoff and Recovery From Limit Flight Conditions

An initial assessment of a proposed High-Speed Civil Transport (HSCT) was conducted in the fall of 1995 at the NASA Langley Research Center. This configuration, known as the Industry Reference-H (Ref.-H), was designed by the Boeing Aircraft Company as part of their work in the High Speed Research program. It included a conventional tail, a cranked-arrow wing, four mixed-flow turbofan engines, and capacity for transporting approximately 300 passengers. The purpose of this assessment was to evaluate and quantify operational aspects of the Reference-H configuration from a pilot's perspective with the additional goal of identifying design strengths as well as any potential configuration deficiencies. This study was aimed at evaluating the Ref.-H configuration at many points of the aircraft's envelope to determine the suitability of the vehicle to accomplish typical mission profiles as well as emergency or envelope-limit conditions. Pilot-provided Cooper-Harper ratings and comments constituted the primary vehicle evaluation metric. The analysis included simulated real-time piloted evaluations, performed in a 6 degree of freedom motion base NASA Langley Visual-Motion Simulator, combined with extensive bath analysis. The assessment was performed using the third major release of the simulation data base (known as Ref.-H cycle 2B).

Glaab, Louis J.↗

NASA NTRS2011

Design of Z-Pinch and Dense Plasma Focus Powered Vehicles

Z-pinch and Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) are two promising techniques for bringing fusion power to the field of in-space propulsion. A design team comprising of engineers and scientists from UAHuntsville, NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Wisconsin developed concept vehicles for a crewed round trip mission to Mars and an interstellar precursor mission. Outlined in this paper are vehicle concepts, complete with conceptual analysis of the mission profile, operations, structural and thermal analysis and power/avionics design. Additionally engineering design of the thruster itself is included. The design efforts adds greatly to the fidelity of estimates for power density (alpha) and overall performance for these thruster concepts

Polsgrove, Tara↗

NASA NTRS2020

Analysis of 2018 Aerothermal Calibration Test at the NASA Propulsion Systems Laboratory

This report documents some of the key findings from an aerothermal calibration test that was conducted at the NASA Propulsion Systems Laboratory (PSL) as part of a series of fundamental ice-crystal icing tests in 2018. The purpose of the aerothermal calibration test was to characterize the cloud-off temperature and flow of the PSL test facility prior to performing the cloud-on icing experiments. This report presents the temperature measurements and analysis of that test day which examined uniformity and the influence of spray bars and wall temperature effects. Air temperature profiles were measured just upstream of the test section, and at the test section, for several cases across a range of parameters, including, but not limited to, spray-bar air temperature (Tnozz), altitude, air flow velocity, and spray-bar atomizing pressure (Pnozz).

NASA Propulsion Systems Laboratory↗

NASA NTRS1993

Conservative force model performance for TOPEX/Poseidon precision orbit determination

The TOPEX/Poseidon spacecraft was launched on August 10, 1992 to study the Earth's oceans. To achieve maximum benefit from the altimetric data collected, mission requirements dictate that TOPEX/Poseidon's orbit must be computed at an unprecedented level of accuracy. In order to satisfy these requirements, a model which accounts for the satellite's complex geometry, attitude, and surface properties has been developed. This `box-wing' representation treats the spacecraft as the combination of flat plates arranged in the shape of a box and a connecetd solar array. The nonconservative forces acting on each of the eight surfaces are computed independently, yielding vector accelerations which are summed to compute the total aggregate effect on the satellite center-of-mass. Parameters associated with each flat plate were derived from a finite element analysis of the spacecraft. Certain parameters can be inferred from tracking data and have been adjusted to obtain a better representation of the satellite acceleration history. Changes in the nominal mission profile and the presence of an `anomalistic' force have complicated this tuning process. Model performance, parameter sensitivities, and the `anomalistic' force will be discussed.

Marshall, J. Andrew↗

DOE OSTI2025

EVI-EnSitePy (Electric Vehicle Infrastructure – Energy Estimation and Site Optimization Tool in Python) [EVI-X Modeling Suite] [SWR-25-07]

EVI-EnSitePy is a comprehensive agent-based tool designed for the analysis and design of high-power charging sites, encompassing a wide array of site agents including Electric Vehicles (EVs), chargers, energy storage units (ESS), renewable energy resources (DER), and loads. This versatile tool offers diverse functionalities and a modular modeling approach, allowing detailed configuration of agents based on power ratings, port numbers, energy capacities, demand requirements, charger interfaces, and flexibility to customize the tool for project specific goals. By simulating agent interactions and employing various metrics, EVI-EnSitePy enables the assessment of site performance, exploration of energy management systems (EMS), and implementation of innovative EV charging policies. Utilizing EV charge schedules and arrival states, the tool performs thorough charging site simulations, with outputs consisting of agent and site-level power profiles and statistical metrics. Employing a tree graph structure, EVI-EnSitePy supports nested site structures and power distribution modeling. The tool's ability to generate charging schedules deterministically or via stochastic analysis further enhances its versatility. Through its features and capabilities, EVI-EnSitePy offers a powerful platform for informed decision-making in the realm of high-power charging site design and operation.

Jackson, Derek [National Renewable Energy Laborato↗

NASA NTRS2018

Increasing the Statistical Rigor of Cross-Species Differential Expression Analysis

Microgravity inflicts substantial, but undercharacterized, pressure on organisms that induces metabolic responses such as increased microbial virulence and antibiotic resistance, altered organ weights in developing rats, and loss of bone tissue in astronauts. Numerous studies have analyzed the effects of microgravity on specific organisms, tissues, or test conditions, but these projects are necessarily limited by the small sample size of space research. Increasing the sample size of spaceflight studies is non-trivial; however, pooling data from numerous studies can greatly increase the statistical rigor of comparative analyses. The GeneLab houses datasets from 73 spaceflight studies that performed transcription profiling assays. These data encompass a diverse array of organisms ranging from Escherichia coli to Mus musculus to Homo sapiens and comprise studies analyzing ionizing radiation, mammalian pregnancy, etc. Collectively, the GeneLab database contains a large quantity of transcription assays and RNA sequence data analyzing Differential Gene Expression (DGE) between microand normogravity. Xspecies, a cross-species analysis method for DGE developed by Kristiansson, et al. in 2012, identifies homologous genes between species that are universally up- or downregulated in response to test conditions. Previous work by an intern at GeneLab applied Xspecies to 19 datasets containing seven different species and identified 14 homologous groups differentially expressed under spaceflight conditions including several heat shock proteins and cytoskeletal components. Unfortunately, these results may be biased by the disproportionate number of studies on Arabidopsis thaliana (5) and Mus musculus (6) and the results are not normalized by evolutionary distances. Here, we present modifications to the Xspecies algorithm that permits incorporation of multi-omic data and normalizes data for effect size, directionality, and evolutionary distances. We then apply this algorithm to all currently available GeneLab studies

Xspecies↗

DOE OSTI2024

A Model of Large Scale Electrochemical Direct Ocean Capture Under Variable Power

Since limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C by 2100 will not only require an energy transition but also billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) removal per year, it is essential to expand these efforts. This can be done offshore via electrochemical direct ocean capture (eChem DOC) which extracts CO2 from seawater that can later be stored underground or converted to products. Deployments of eChem DOC will be powered by renewable energy and therefore need to function with variable power inputs. This project aims to support future large-scale deployments by developing a model of eChem DOC operation, informed by industry and literature, and assessing its performance under variable power and varying designs. Initial analysis suggests that discretizing the eChem system has a higher impact on increasing overall capture than storing the chemical solutions to continue capture during periods of lower power availability, but this is likely situation dependent. Future work will use more realistic power profiles.

direct ocean capture↗

NASA NTRS2014

Design and Analysis of Morpheus Lander Flight Control System

The Morpheus Lander is a vertical takeoff and landing test bed vehicle developed to demonstrate the system performance of the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GN&C) system capability for the integrated autonomous landing and hazard avoidance system hardware and software. The Morpheus flight control system design must be robust to various mission profiles. This paper presents a design methodology for employing numerical optimization to develop the Morpheus flight control system. The design objectives include attitude tracking accuracy and robust stability with respect to rigid body dynamics and propellant slosh. Under the assumption that the Morpheus time-varying dynamics and control system can be frozen over a short period of time, the flight controllers are designed to stabilize all selected frozen-time control systems in the presence of parametric uncertainty. Both control gains in the inner attitude control loop and guidance gains in the outer position control loop are designed to maximize the vehicle performance while ensuring robustness. The flight control system designs provided herein have been demonstrated to provide stable control systems in both Draper Ares Stability Analysis Tool (ASAT) and the NASA/JSC Trick-based Morpheus time domain simulation.

Jang, Jiann-Woei↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Design, Instrumentation, and Data Analysis for the SLS Core Stage Green Run Test Series

The Space Launch System (SLS) Core Stage (CS) Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system is comprised of eight mechanical feedback Shuttle heritage Type III TVC actuators and four RS-25 engines, each attached to a Shuttle heritage gimbal block/bearing. The actuators are powered by a Shuttle-derived hydraulic Core Auxiliary Power Unit (CAPU), and integrated with an all-new Core Stage thrust structure. The actuators are interfaced to the SLS Vehicle Management (VM) software via an all-new TVC Actuator Control (TAC) avionics subsystem. Despite the significant test and flight experience of the Shuttle hardware, the SLS Green Run ambient and hot fire test activities revealed a number of new findings associated with the dynamic response of the TVC integrated system. Test responses suggested that the TVC system did not meet its performance specifications and its step and frequency responses exhibited unexpected departures from prior lab tests and modeled behavior. This paper is the fifth installment in a seven-paper series surveying the design, engineering, test validation, and flight performance of the Core Stage Thrust Vector Control system. In this paper, the design of the TVC analyses conducted during the Core Stage Green Run test series are discussed in detail. Throughout the course of the test activities, the SLS flight control team worked diligently with the Core Stage contractor to revise test command profiles and ensure sufficient instrumentation was available to collect data. Post-test analysis combined the Green Run modal, ambient, and hot fire test data, MSFC 2- axis Core Stage TVC Inertial Load Simulator (ILS) data, Hardware-In-the-Loop (HWIL) Systems Integration Lab (SIL) results, and actuator Acceptance Testing Procedure (ATP) responses. These data were used to characterize the response, validate critical math models of the TVC subsystem, and isolate the probable cause of the unexpected responses. Through comprehensive analysis of the available test data sources, the integrated team identified the dominant contributors to the observed response and developed test-correlated rationale for vehicle flight control system performance, ultimately leading to a confident posture for the Artemis I mission.

John H. Wall↗

DOE OSTI2026

Observations of Offshore Low‐Level Jets Off the U.S. East Coast Reveal Systematic Biases in ERA5 and HRRR

Low-level jets (LLJs)—wind speed maxima typically occurring a few hundred meters above the surface—are common off the U.S. East Coast and influence many atmospheric processes with societal importance, including cloud formation, aviation safety, and search-and-rescue. However, their vertical structure and frequency remain poorly quantified due to limited offshore observations. This study presents new scanning Doppler LiDAR and infrared spectroradiometer data from the 2024 summer deployment of an offshore barge during the Wind Forecast Improvement Project 3. These coupled wind and temperature profiles provide unprecedented resolution to assess LLJ behavior and model performance. LLJs occurred in over 21% of observed profiles, with a weak diurnal preference for nighttime and early morning hours and maximum winds typically near 300 m. Both ERA5 and High-Resolution Rapid Refresh analysis underestimate jet wind speeds and misrepresent the boundary layer thermal structure. These results highlight persistent model biases and the critical need for high-resolution offshore observations.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

NASA NTRS1976

Numerical simulation of tornado wind loading on structures

A numerical simulation of a tornado interacting with a building was undertaken in order to compare the pressures due to a rotational unsteady wind with that due to steady straight winds used in design of nuclear facilities. The numerical simulations were performed on a two-dimensional compressible hydrodynamics code. Calculated pressure profiles for a typical building were then subjected to a tornado wind field and the results were compared with current quasisteady design calculations. The analysis indicates that current design practices are conservative.

Maiden, D. E.↗

NASA NTRS1994

Miniature laser ignited bellows motor

A miniature optically ignited actuation device has been demonstrated using a laser diode as an ignition source. This pyrotechnic driven motor provides between 4 and 6 lbs of linear force across a 0.090 inch diameter surface. The physical envelope of the device is 1/2 inch long and 1/8 inch diameter. This unique application of optical energy can be used as a mechanical link in optical arming systems or other applications where low shock actuation is desired and space is limited. An analysis was performed to determine pyrotechnic materials suitable to actuate a bellows device constructed of aluminum or stainless steel. The aluminum bellows was chosen for further development and several candidate pyrotechnics were evaluated. The velocity profile and delivered force were quantified using an non-intrusive optical motion sensor.

Renfro, Steven L.↗

NASA NTRS2004

Concentration Measurements in Self-Excited, Momentum-Dominated Helium Jets

Flow structure of momentum-dominated pure helium jets discharged vertically into ambient air was investigated using high-speed rainbow schlieren deflectometry (RSD) technique. Effects of the operating parameters, i.e., Reynolds number (Re) and Richardson number (Ri), on the oscillatory behavior of the flow were examined over a range of experimental conditions. To seek the individual effect of these parameters, one of them was fixed and the other was varied with certain constraints. Measurements revealed highly periodic oscillations in the laminar region as well as high regularity in transition and turbulent regions. Maximum spectral power profiles at different axial locations indicated the oscillation amplitude increasing until the breakdown of the jet in the turbulent regime. The transition from the laminar to turbulent flow was also investigated. Fast Fourier transform analysis performed in the transition regime showed that the flow oscillates at a unique frequency, which was the same in the upstream laminar flow region. Measured deflection angle data were used in Abel inversion algorithm to construct the helium concentration fields. Instantaneous helium concentration contours revealed changes in the flow structure and evolution of vortical structures during an oscillation cycle. Temporal evolution plots of helium concentration at different axial location showed repeatable oscillations at all axial and radial locations up to the turbulent regime. A cross-correlation technique, applied to find the spatial displacements of the vortical structures, provided correlation coefficient peaks between consecutive schlieren images. Results show that the vortical structure convected and accelerated only in the axial direction.

Yildirim, Bekir Sedat↗