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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 451 records · Page 25

Crystal structure of aminopentamide hydrogen sulfate, (C 19 H 25 N 2 O)(HSO 4 )

The crystal structure of aminopentamide hydrogen sulfate has been solved and refined using synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction data, and optimized using density functional techniques. Aminopentamide hydrogen sulfate crystallizes in space group P2 1 /c (#14) with a = 17.62255(14), b = 6.35534(4), c = 17.82499(10) Å, β = 96.4005(6)°, V = 1983.906(14) Å 3 , and Z = 4. The structure consists of layers parallel to the bc-plane with hydrogen sulfate anions at the core and aminopentamide cations on the outside. There is a strong charge-assisted O49–H53∙∙∙O52 hydrogen bond between the hydrogen sulfate anions. This hydrogen bond links the anions in a chain parallel to the b-axis. The cation forms a discrete N–H∙∙∙O hydrogen bond to the anion. The amide group also forms two weaker discrete hydrogen bonds to the anion. The three N–H∙∙∙O hydrogen bonds link the cations and anions into columns parallel to the b-axis. This commercial material from USP contained an unidentified impurity, the powder pattern of which could be indexed on a monoclinic unit cell. The powder pattern has been submitted to ICDD for inclusion in the Powder Diffraction File™ (PDF®).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Using Single-Molecule Chemo-Mechanical Unfolding to Simultaneously Probe Multiple Structural Parameters in Protein Folding

While single-molecule force spectroscopy has greatly advanced the study of protein folding, there are limitations to what can be learned from studying the effect of force alone. We developed a novel technique, chemo-mechanical unfolding, that combines multiple perturbants—force and chemical denaturant—to more fully characterize the folding process by simultaneously probing multiple structural parameters—the change in end-to-end distance, and solvent accessible surface area. Here, we describe the theoretical background, experimental design, and data analysis for chemo-mechanical unfolding experiments probing protein folding thermodynamics and kinetics. This technique has been applied to characterize parallel protein folding pathways, the protein denatured state, protein folding on the ribosome, and protein folding intermediates.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Flow visualization of mast-mounted-sight/main rotor aerodynamic interactions

Flow visualization tests were conducted on a 27 percent-scale AH-64 attack helicopter model fitted with various mast-mounted-sight configurations in an attempt to identify the cause of adverse vibration encountered during full-scale flight tests of an Apache/Longbow configuration. The tests were conducted at the NASA Langley Research Center in the 14- by 22-Foot Subsonic Tunnel. A symmetric and an asymmetric mast-mounted-sight oriented at several skew angles were tested at forward and rearward flight speeds of 30 and 45 knots. A laser light sheet seeded with vaporized propylene glycol was used to visualize the wake of the sight in planes parallel and perpendicular to the freestream flow. Analysis of the flow visualization data identified the frequency of the wake shed from the sight, the angle-of-attack at the sight, and the location where the sight wake crossed the rotor plane. Differences in wake structure were observed between the various sight configurations and slew angles. Postulations into the cause of the adverse vibration found in flight test are given along with considerations for future tests.

Ghee, Terence A.↗

Integrated Diagnostics and Prognostics for the Electrical Power System of a Planetary Rover

For electric vehicles, technology for monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis of the electrical power system (EPS) becomes essential for safe and efficient operation. To this end, we develop a general system-level integrated diagnosis and prognosis framework, which detects, isolates, and identifies EPS faults, and predicts when the EPS will fail to deliver sufficient power. The approach takes advantage of recent work in structural model decomposition in order to distribute the global diagnosis and prognosis problems into local subproblems that can be solved in parallel, thus enabling implementation on distributed computational platforms. The framework is applied to the EPS of a planetary rover testbed, and is demonstrated using data from field experiments.

Daigle, Matthew↗

Task-based Parallel Computation of the Density Matrix in Quantum-based Molecular Dynamics using Graph Partitioning

Quantum-based molecular dynamics (QMD) is a highly accurate and transferable method for material science simulations. However, the time scales and system sizes accessible to QMD are typically limited to picoseconds and a few hundred atoms. These constraints arise due to expensive self-consistent ground-state electronic structure calculations that can often scale cubically with the number of atoms. Linearly scaling methods depend on computing the density matrix P from the Hamiltonian matrix H by exploiting the sparsity in both matrices. The second-order spectral projection (SP2) algorithm is an O(N) algorithm that computes P with a sequence of 40 - 50 matrix-matrix multiplications. In this paper, we present task-based implementations of a recently developed data-parallel graph-based approach to the SP2 algorithm, G-SP2. We represent the density matrix P as an undirected graph and use graph partitioning techniques to divide the computation into smaller independent tasks. The partitions thus obtained are generally not of equal size and give rise to undesirable load imbalances in standard MPI-based implementations. This load-balancing challenge can be mitigated by dynamically scheduling parallel computations at runtime using task-based programming models. We develop task-based implementations of the data-parallel G-SP2 algorithm using both Intel's Concurrent Collections (CnC) as well as the Charm++ programming model and evaluate these implementations for future use. Scaling and performance results of our implementations are investigated for representative segments of QMD simulations for solvated protein systems containing more than 10,000 atoms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

An in situ Comparison of Electron Acceleration at Collisionless Shocks under Differing Upstream Magnetic Field Orientations

A leading explanation for the origin of Galactic cosmic rays is acceleration at high-Mach number shock waves in the collisionless plasma surrounding young supernova remnants. Evidence for this is provided by multi-wavelength non-thermal emission thought to be associated with ultrarelativistic electrons at these shocks. However, the dependence of the electron acceleration process on the orientation of the upstream magnetic field with respect to the local normal to the shock front (quasi-parallel/quasi-perpendicular) is debated. Cassini spacecraft observations at Saturn’s bow shock have revealed examples of electron acceleration under quasi-perpendicular conditions, and the first in situ evidence of electron acceleration at a quasi-parallel shock. Here we use Cassini data to make the first comparison between energy spectra of locally accelerated electrons under these differing upstream magnetic field regimes. We present data taken during a quasi-perpendicular shock crossing on 2008 March 8 and during a quasi-parallel shock crossing on 2007 February 3, highlighting that both were associated with electron acceleration to at least MeV energies. The magnetic signature of the quasi-perpendicular crossing has a relatively sharp upstream–downstream transition, and energetic electrons were detected close to the transition and immediately downstream. The magnetic transition at the quasi-parallel crossing is less clear, energetic electrons were encountered upstream and downstream, and the electron energy spectrum is harder above ∼100 keV. We discuss whether the acceleration is consistent with diffusive shock acceleration theory in each case, and suggest that the quasi-parallel spectral break is due to an energy-dependent interaction between the electrons and short, large-amplitude magnetic structures.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Hamming and Accumulator Codes Concatenated with MPSK or QAM

In a proposed coding-and-modulation scheme, a high-rate binary data stream would be processed as follows: 1. The input bit stream would be demultiplexed into multiple bit streams. 2. The multiple bit streams would be processed simultaneously into a high-rate outer Hamming code that would comprise multiple short constituent Hamming codes a distinct constituent Hamming code for each stream. 3. The streams would be interleaved. The interleaver would have a block structure that would facilitate parallelization for high-speed decoding. 4. The interleaved streams would be further processed simultaneously into an inner two-state, rate-1 accumulator code that would comprise multiple constituent accumulator codes - a distinct accumulator code for each stream. 5. The resulting bit streams would be mapped into symbols to be transmitted by use of a higher-order modulation - for example, M-ary phase-shift keying (MPSK) or quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The novelty of the scheme lies in the concatenation of the multiple-constituent Hamming and accumulator codes and the corresponding parallel architectures of the encoder and decoder circuitry (see figure) needed to process the multiple bit streams simultaneously. As in the cases of other parallel-processing schemes, one advantage of this scheme is that the overall data rate could be much greater than the data rate of each encoder and decoder stream and, hence, the encoder and decoder could handle data at an overall rate beyond the capability of the individual encoder and decoder circuits.

Divsalar, Dariush↗

Crystal structure of halofuginone hydrobromide, C 16 H 18 BrClN 3 O 3 Br

The crystal structure of one form of halofuginone hydrobromide has been solved and refined using synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction data, and optimized using density functional theory techniques. Halofuginone hydrobromide crystallizes in space group P2 1 (#4) with a = 8.87398(13), b = 14.25711(20), c = 15.0153(3) Å, β = 91.6867(15)°, V = 1898.87(4) Å 3 , and Z = 4. The crystal structure consists of alternating layers (parallel to the ab-plane) of planar and nonplanar portions of the cations. N–H∙∙∙Br and O–H∙∙∙Br hydrogen bonds link the protonated piperidine rings and bromide anions into a two-dimensional network parallel to the ab-plane. The powder pattern has been submitted to ICDD for inclusion in the Powder Diffraction File™ (PDF®).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Incorporating Human Readiness Levels at Sandia National Laboratories

Since 2010, the concept of human readiness levels has been under development as a possible supplement to the existing technology readiness level (TRL) scale. The intent is to provide a mechanism to address safety and performance risks associated with the human component in a system that parallels the TRL structure already familiar to the systems engineering community. Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, initiated a study in 2015 to evaluate options to incorporate human readiness planning for Sandia processes and products. The study team has collected the majority of baseline assessment data and has conducted interviews to understand staff perceptions of four different options for human readiness planning. Preliminary results suggest that all four options may have a vital role, depending on the type of work performed and the phase of product development. Upon completion of data collection, the utility of identified solutions will be assessed in one or more test cases.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Technologies for Visualization in Computational Aerosciences

State-of-the-art research in computational aerosciences produces' complex, time-dependent datasets. Simulations can also be multidisciplinary in nature, coupling two or more physical disciplines such as fluid dynamics, structural dynamics, thermodynamics, and acoustics. Many diverse technologies are necessary for visualizing computational aerosciences simulations. This paper describes these technologies and how they contribute to building effective tools for use by domain scientists. These technologies include data management, distributed environments, advanced user interfaces, rapid prototyping environments, parallel computation, and methods to visualize the scalar and vector fields associated with computational aerosciences datasets.

Miceli, Kristina D.↗

Mapping unstructured grid computations to massively parallel computers

Investigated here is this mapping problem: assign the tasks of a parallel program to the processors of a parallel computer such that the execution time is minimized. First, a taxonomy of objective functions and heuristics used to solve the mapping problem is presented. Next, we develop a highly parallel heuristic mapping algorithm, called Cyclic Pairwise Exchange (CPE), and discuss its place in the taxonomy. CPE uses local pairwise exchanges of processor assignments to iteratively improve an initial mapping. A variety of initial mapping schemes are tested and recursive spectral bipartitioning (RSB) followed by CPE is shown to result in the best mappings. For the test cases studied here, problems arising in computational fluid dynamics and structural mechanics on unstructured triangular and tetrahedral meshes, RSB and CPE outperform methods based on simulated annealing. Much less time is required to do the mapping and the results obtained are better. Compared with random and naive mappings, RSB and CPE reduce the communication time two fold for the test problems used. Finally, we use CPE in two applications on a CM-2. The first application is a data parallel mesh-vertex upwind finite volume scheme for solving the Euler equations on 2-D triangular unstructured meshes. CPE is used to map grid points to processors. The performance of this code is compared with a similar code on a Cray-YMP and an Intel iPSC/860. The second application is parallel sparse matrix-vector multiplication used in the iterative solution of large sparse linear systems of equations. We map rows of the matrix to processors and use an inner-product based matrix-vector multiplication. We demonstrate that this method is an order of magnitude faster than methods based on scan operations for our test cases.

Hammond, Steven Warren↗

Crystal structure of diclazuril, C 17 H 9 Cl 3 N 4 O 2

The crystal structure of diclazuril has been solved and refined using synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction data, and optimized using density functional theory techniques. Diclazuril crystallizes in space group P2 1 /a (#14) with a = 27.02080(18), b = 11.42308(8), c = 5.36978(5) Å, β = 91.7912(7)°, V = 1656.629(15) Å 3 , and Z = 4. The crystal structure consists of layers of molecules parallel to the ac-plane. A strong N–H∙∙∙O hydrogen bond links the molecules into dimers along the a-axis with a graph set R2,2(8). The powder pattern has been submitted to ICDD for inclusion in the Powder Diffraction File™ (PDF®).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

GridOPTICS/GridPACK

GridPACK is a software framework consisting of a set of modules designed to simplify the development of programs that model the power grid and run on parallel, high performance computing platforms. It also contains several fully developed applications, including powerflow, dynamic simulation, state estimation, Kalman filter analysis (dynamic state estimation), contingency analysis and real time path rating. These applications can be used either standalone or as components in more complicated workflows that combine several different types of application together. The framework modules are available as a combination of libraries and software templates and consist of components for setting up and distributing power grid networks, support for modeling the behavior of individual buses and branches in the network, converting the network models to the corresponding algebraic equations, and parallel routines for manipulating and solving large algebraic systems. The framework also contains a module for distributing tasks evenly amongst computing resources, even if individual tasks vary widely in their execution times. Additional modules support input and output, basic statistical analysis of contingency based calculations, distributed data structures, as well as basic profiling and error management.

Palmer, Bruce↗

Systolic VLSI for Kalman filters

A novel two-dimensional parallel computing method for real-time Kalman filtering is presented. The mathematical formulation of a Kalman filter algorithm is rearranged to be the type of Faddeev algorithm for generalizing signal processing. The data flow mapping from the Faddeev algorithm to a two-dimensional concurrent computing structure is developed. The architecture of the resulting processor cells is regular, simple, expandable, and therefore naturally suitable for VLSI chip implementation. The computing methodology and the two-dimensional systolic arrays are useful for Kalman filter applications as well as other matrix/vector based algebraic computations.

Yeh, H.-G.↗

Parallel processing environment for multi-flexible body dynamics

The implementation of a dynamics solution algorithm with inherent parallelism which is applicable to the dynamics of large flexible space structures is described. The algorithm is unique in that parts of the solution can be computed simultaneously by working with different branches of its tree topology. The algorithm exhibits close to 0(n) type behavior. The data flow within the solution algorithm is discussed along with results from its implementation in a multiprocessing environment. A model of the United States Space Station is used as an example. The results show that, with fast multiple scalar processors, an efficient algorithm, and symbolically generated equations of motion, real-time performance can be achieved with present-day hardware technology, even with complex dynamical models.

Venugopal, Ravi↗

Computational Analysis of a Chevron Nozzle Uniquely Tailored for Propulsion Airframe Aeroacoustics

A computational flow field and predicted jet noise source analysis is presented for asymmetrical fan chevrons on a modern separate flow nozzle at take off conditions. The propulsion airframe aeroacoustic asymmetric fan nozzle is designed with an azimuthally varying chevron pattern with longer chevrons close to the pylon. A baseline round nozzle without chevrons and a reference nozzle with azimuthally uniform chevrons are also studied. The intent of the asymmetric fan chevron nozzle was to improve the noise reduction potential by creating a favorable propulsion airframe aeroacoustic interaction effect between the pylon and chevron nozzle. This favorable interaction and improved noise reduction was observed in model scale tests and flight test data and has been reported in other studies. The goal of this study was to identify the fundamental flow and noise source mechanisms. The flow simulation uses the asymptotically steady, compressible Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations on a structured grid. Flow computations are performed using the parallel, multi-block, structured grid code PAB3D. Local noise sources were mapped and integrated computationally using the Jet3D code based upon the Lighthill Acoustic Analogy with anisotropic Reynolds stress modeling. In this study, trends of noise reduction were correctly predicted. Jet3D was also utilized to produce noise source maps that were then correlated to local flow features. The flow studies show that asymmetry of the longer fan chevrons near the pylon work to reduce the strength of the secondary flow induced by the pylon itself, such that the asymmetric merging of the fan and core shear layers is significantly delayed. The effect is to reduce the peak turbulence kinetic energy and shift it downstream, reducing overall noise production. This combined flow and noise prediction approach has yielded considerable understanding of the physics of a fan chevron nozzle designed to include propulsion airframe aeroacoustic interaction effects.

Massey, Steven J.↗

Distributed-Memory Breadth-First Search on Massive Graphs. IN: Parallel Graph Algorithms

This chapter studies the problem of traversing large graphs using the breadth-first search order on distributed-memory supercomputers. We consider both the traditional level-synchronous top-down algorithm as well as the recently discovered direction optimizing algorithm. We analyze the performance and scalability trade-offs in using different local data structures such as CSR and DCSC, enabling in-node multithreading, and graph decompositions such as 1D and 2D decomposition.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗