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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 55 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1999

Integrating Thermal Tools Into the Mechanical Design Process

The intent of mechanical design is to deliver a hardware product that meets or exceeds customer expectations, while reducing cycle time and cost. To this end, an integrated mechanical design process enables the idea of parallel development (concurrent engineering). This represents a shift from the traditional mechanical design process. With such a concurrent process, there are significant issues that have to be identified and addressed before re-engineering the mechanical design process to facilitate concurrent engineering. These issues also assist in the integration and re-engineering of the thermal design sub-process since it resides within the entire mechanical design process. With these issues in mind, a thermal design sub-process can be re-defined in a manner that has a higher probability of acceptance, thus enabling an integrated mechanical design process. However, the actual implementation is not always problem-free. Experience in applying the thermal design sub-process to actual situations provides the evidence for improvement, but more importantly, for judging the viability and feasibility of the sub-process.

Tsuyuki, Glenn T.↗
DOE OSTI2012

CO₂ Capture Membrane Process for Power Plant Flue Gas

Because the fleet of coal-fired power plants is of such importance to the nation's energy production while also being the single largest emitter of CO₂, the development of retrofit, post-combustion CO₂ capture technologies for existing and new, upcoming coal power plants will allow coal to remain a major component of the U.S. energy mix while mitigating global warming. Post-combustion carbon capture technologies are an attractive option for coal-fired power plants as they do not require modification of major power-plant infrastructures, such as fuel processing, boiler, and steam-turbine subsystems. In this project, the overall objective was to develop an advanced, hollow-fiber, polymeric membrane process that could be cost-effectively retrofitted into current pulverized coal-fired power plants to capture at least 90% of the CO₂ from plant flue gas with 95% captured CO₂ purity. The approach for this project tackled the technology development on three different fronts in parallel: membrane materials R&D, hollow-fiber membrane module development, and process development and engineering. The project team consisted of RTI (prime) and two industrial partners, Arkema, Inc. and Generon IGS, Inc. Two CO₂-selective membrane polymer platforms were targeted for development in this project. For the near term, a next-generation, high-flux polycarbonate membrane platform was spun into hollow-fiber membranes that were fabricated into both lab-scale and larger prototype (~2,200 ft²) membrane modules. For the long term, a new fluoropolymer membrane platform based on poly(vinylidene fluoride) [PVDF] chemistry was developed using a copolymer approach as improved capture membrane materials with superior chemical resistance to flue-gas contaminants (moisture, SO₂, NO x , etc.). Specific objectives were: - Development of new, highly chemically resistant, fluorinated polymers as membrane materials with minimum selectivity of 30 for CO₂ over N₂ and CO₂ permeance greater than 300 gas permeation units (GPU) targeted; - Development of next-generation polycarbonate hollow-fiber membranes and membrane modules with higher CO₂ permeance than current commercial polycarbonate membranes; - Development and fabrication of membrane hollow fibers and modules from candidate polymers; - Development of a CO₂ capture membrane process design and integration strategy suitable for end-of-pipe, retrofit installation; and - Techno-economic evaluation of the "best" integrated CO₂ capture membrane process design package In this report, the results of the project research and development efforts are discussed and include the post-combustion capture properties of the two membrane material platforms and the hollow-fiber membrane modules developed from them and the multi-stage process design and analysis developed for 90% CO₂ capture with 95% captured CO₂ purity.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2023

A New Class of SiC Power MOSFETs with Record-Low Resistance

Silicon carbide (SiC) power transistors are used in the main traction inverter of electric vehicles (EVs). Tesla began installing SiC power MOSFETs in 2017, and has now produced 4.8 million EVs containing over 169 million SiC power MOSFETs. Looking ahead, the worldwide EV market is projected to exceed 50 million vehicles per year by 2030 (Reuters, Oct. 25, 2022). This will create a demand for over two billion SiC power MOSFETs per year. Our program aims to double the efficiency of today's commercial power MOSFETs. This will cut the number of MOSFETs per EV in half, reducing cost, simplifying assembly, decreasing weight, and increasing vehicle reliability through reduced parts count. Our approach is to apply innovative design and advanced processing to increase the density of current-controlling channels in SiC power MOSFET. We have developed two new MOSFET devices, each of which increases the channel density by a factor of six over today's best commercial MOSFETs. This required implementing new fabrication processes, creating new device designs, and integrating the processing steps and device designs into a manufacturable technology. In this project we have developed two innovative devices: (i) a novel three-dimensional structure, the "tri-gate MOSFET," and (ii) a deeply-scaled, fully self-aligned trench MOSFET, the "IMOSFET". Both products were experimentally demonstrated during this project and meet the program goals of increased efficiency relative to the current state-of-the art commercial products. In the process we have generated significant IP, with two US patents issued and three applications pending. We have also published three journal articles and given reports on this technology at seven international conferences. The success of this program has led to significant follow-on funding from industry. In May 2023 Purdue University signed a five-year R&D contract with GlobalFoundries to transfer our novel technology to commercial production. With headquarters in Malta, NY, Global Foundries is one of the largest pure-play silicon foundries in the world, with annual revenue of $\$$8.1B. Their SiC foundry will be built around the next-generation 200-mm diameter SiC wafers, which will double the number of die per wafer and reduce per-die production cost.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

Chapter 14: Sustainable Biomass Conversion Process Assessment

Process intensification and integration for sustainable design play an essential role in addressing and alleviating severe sustainable development challenges. It is prudent to evaluate a process design in its early stage development to ensure the process can achieve sustainability goals. The primary goal of a sustainability evaluation is to assess the impact of systems on areas sought to be protected and maintained over time, such as human well-being and ecosystems (Schaubroeck, T. and Rugani, B. (2017). A revision of what life cycle sustainability assessment should entail: towards modeling the net impact on human well-being. Journal of Industrial Ecology 21 (6): 1464-1477). Parenthetically, sustainable process design to convert biomass to fuels and chemicals plays an integral part in the bioeconomy sustainability. It is recognized that the integration of sustainability in process design is core to the mission in developing renewable fuels and should be considered a necessary practice in biorefinery design. This study demonstrates the use of Gauging Reaction Effectiveness for ENvironmental Sustainability of Chemistries with a multi-Objective Process Evaluator (GREENSCOPE) as a tool to help track progress on process sustainability performance attributed to conversion improvement. With the incorporation of a wide range of indicators, GREENSCOPE captures the multi-dimensional aspect of the process design and operation. As opposed to conventional techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment (in which the focuses are limited to economic and environmental aspects), GREENSCOPE enables the consideration of process intensification and integration for sustainable design. A high-octane gasoline production from woody biomass feedstock is used as a case study to demonstrate the approach.

biomass↗
NASA NTRS1989

The telerobot workstation testbed for the shuttle aft flight deck: A project plan for integrating human factors into system design

The human factors design process in developing a shuttle orbiter aft flight deck workstation testbed is described. In developing an operator workstation to control various laboratory telerobots, strong elements of human factors engineering and ergonomics are integrated into the design process. The integration of human factors is performed by incorporating user feedback at key stages in the project life-cycle. An operator centered design approach helps insure the system users are working with the system designer in the design and operation of the system. The design methodology is presented along with the results of the design and the solutions regarding human factors design principles.

Sauerwein, Timothy↗
NASA NTRS1987

Efficient optimization of integrated aerodynamic-structural design

The introduction of composite materials is having a profound effect on the design process. Because these materials permit the designer to tailor material properties to improve structural, aerodynamic and acoustic performance, they require a more integrated multidisciplinary design process. Because of the complexity of the design process numerical optimization methods are required. The present paper is focused on a major difficulty associated with the multidisciplinary design optimization process - its enormous computational cost. We consider two approaches for reducing this computational burden: (1) development of efficient methods for cross-sensitivity calculation using perturbation methods; and (2) the use of approximate numerical optimization procedures. Our efforts are concentrated upon combined aerodynamic-structural optimization. Results are presented for the integrated design of a sailplane wing. The impact of our computational procedures on the computational costs of integrated costs of integrated designs are discussed.

Haftka, R. T.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

The Inspectability Metric: A Formalized System Of Measurement Enabling The Design For Inspection Framework

Nondestructive evaluation (NDE) engineers are often confronted with structural design choices that present challenges to meeting inspection requirements. These challenges, at best, increase the resources needed to design an inspection solution and, at worst, require resource intensive redesign of the structure. If the inspectability of the structure can be determined early in the design cycle, these challenging inspection scenarios can be avoided. The emergence of additive manufacturing has further compounded this problem by enabling the creation of highly optimized structures with no regard to inspection constraints. Design for inspection (DFI) offers a framework to integrate nondestructive evaluation (NDE) into the design process to alleviate the mechanisms that produce uninspectable designs. DFI is the concept of including inspectability in a multi-objective optimization framework so that it can be considered in parallel to other metrics such as mass and manufacturability. This allows rapid evaluation of the trade-off between design metrics to find solutions that meet the inspection needs of a particular material system, structural concept, or vehicle program. To enable DFI, there must be a system by which the inspectability of a structure can be measured. This system must be agile to produce results quickly, it must be versatile to work with the type of incomplete information one would encounter early in the design process (such as lack of inspection requirements), and it must be delivered in a form that is easily understood by designers. To meet this need, this presentation introduces the novel inspectability metric as a system to measure inspectability. The inspectability metric is a standardized, automation friendly procedure that uses simulations to determine inspectability. Along with guidelines to properly process designs and integrate with existing workflows, the inspectability metric provides a suite of simulation tests to interrogate the ability to find defects and the sensitivity to variability. The testing rubric is designed to maximize the coverage of the parameter space while minimizing the number of simulations needed. The inspectability metric has been in development in collaboration with industry partners to ensure compatibility with modern simulation tools and aerospace design workflows. In this study, we will demonstrate how the inspectability metric is able to determine the inspectability of multiple types of structures, including aerospace composites and additively manufactured parts. We will then show how the inspectability score can be plugged into existing design optimization tasks, such as structural sizing algorithms or design for manufacturing (DFM) frameworks.

Design for inspection↗
NASA NTRS1988

Figures of merit for airfoil/aircraft design integration

Because the airfoil can so strongly impact other aspects of an aircraft configuration, it is important that the airfoil design process be integrated with that of the aircraft to achieve the best possible performance of a new flight vehicle. To aid in preliminary design efforts, several aerodynamic figures of merit are presented which facilitate the matching of the airfoil performance characteristics to those of the aircraft. These figures of merit are fairly general and can assist the airfoil design process for flight vehicles designed for maximum endurance, range, or ceiling. Although specifically applicable to vehicles for which the wing area is sized by some required minimum airspeed, the discussion is pertinent to all airfoil/aircraft matching situations and points the way for developing similar figures of merit to aid the airfoil/aircraft design process for any flight vehicle.

Maughmer, Mark D.↗
NASA NTRS1999

Nacelle/Diverter Integration into the Design Optimization Process Using Pseudo, Warped, and Real Nacelles

The computational results of the optimized complete configurations, including nacelles and diverters, are presented in terms of drag count improvement compared with the TCA baseline configuration at Mach 2.4, C(sub L)=0.1. The three candidate designs are designated by the organization from which they were derived. ARC represents the Ames Research Center 1-03 design, BCAG represents the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group's design from Seattle, and BLB represents the design from Boeing Long Beach. All CFD methods are in unanimous agreement that the Ames 1-03 configuration has the largest performance improvement, followed closely by the BCAG configuration, with a much smaller improvement attained by Boeing Long Beach. The Ames design was obtained using the single-block wing/body code SYN87-SB with its "pseudo" nacelle option-an elaborate technique for incorporating nacelle/diverter effects into the design optimization process. This technique uses AIRPLANE surface pressure coefficient data with and without the nacelles/diverters. Further details of this method are described. It is reasonable to expect that further improvements could be achieved by including the "real" nacelles directly into the optimization process by use of the newly-developed multiblock optimization code, SYN107-MB, which can handle full configurations.

Cliff, Susan E.↗
NASA NTRS2007

ESAS-Derived Earth Departure Stage Design for Human Mars Exploration

The Vision for Space Exploration has set the nation on a course to have humans on Mars as early as 2030. To reduce the cost and risk associated with human Mars exploration, NASA is planning for the Mars architecture to leverage the lunar architecture as fully as possible. This study takes the defined launch vehicles and system capabilities from ESAS and extends their application to DRM 3.0 to design an Earth Departure Stage suitable for the cargo and crew missions to Mars. The impact of a propellant depot in LEO was assessed and sLzed for use with the EDS. To quantitatively assess and compare the effectiveness of alternative designs, an initial baseline architecture was defined using the ESAS launch vehicles and DRM 3.0. The baseline architecture uses three NTR engines, LH2 propellant, no propellant depot in LEO, and launches on the Ares I and Ares V. The Mars transfer and surface elements from DRM 3.0 were considered to be fixed payloads in the design of the EDS. Feasible architecture alternatives were identified from previous architecture studies and anticipated capabilities and compiled in a morphological matrix. ESAS FOMs were used to determine the most critical design attributes for the effectiveness of the EDS. The ESAS-derived FOMs used in this study to assess alternative designs are effectiveness and performance, affordability, reliability, and risk. The individual FOMs were prioritized using the AHP, a method for pairwise comparison. All trades performed were evaluated with respect to the weighted FOMs, creating a Pareto frontier of equivalently ideal solutions. Additionally, each design on the frontier was evaluated based on its fulfillment of the weighted FOMs using TOPSIS, a quantitative method for ordinal ranking of the alternatives. The designs were assessed in an integrated environment using physics-based models for subsystem analysis where possible. However, for certain attributes such as engine type, historical, performance-based mass estimating relations were more easily employed. The elements from the design process were integrated into a single loop, allowing for rapid iteration of subsystem analyses and compilation of resulting designs.

Flaherty, Kevin↗
NASA NTRS1989

Integrated multidisciplinary optimization of rotorcraft: A plan for development

This paper describes a joint NASA/Army initiative at the Langley Research Center to develop optimization procedures aimed at improving the rotor blade design process by integrating appropriate disciplines and accounting for important interactions among the disciplines. The paper describes the optimization formulation in terms of the objective function, design variables, and constraints. Additionally, some of the analysis aspects are discussed, validation strategies are described, and an initial attempt at defining the interdisciplinary couplings is summarized. At this writing, significant progress has been made, principally in the areas of single discipline optimization. Accomplishments are described in areas of rotor aerodynamic performance optimization for minimum hover horsepower, rotor dynamic optimization for vibration reduction, and rotor structural optimization for minimum weight.

Adelman, Howard M.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Recent advances in integrated multidisciplinary optimization of rotorcraft

A joint activity involving NASA and Army researchers at NASA LaRC to develop optimization procedures to improve the rotor blade design process by integrating appropriate disciplines and accounting for all of the important interactions among the disciplines is described. The disciplines involved include rotor aerodynamics, rotor dynamics, rotor structures, airframe dynamics, and acoustics. The work is focused on combining these five key disciplines in an optimization procedure capable of designing a rotor system to satisfy multidisciplinary design requirements. Fundamental to the plan is a three-phased approach. In phase 1, the disciplines of blade dynamics, blade aerodynamics, and blade structure are closely coupled while acoustics and airframe dynamics are decoupled and are accounted for as effective constraints on the design for the first three disciplines. In phase 2, acoustics is integrated with the first three disciplines. Finally, in phase 3, airframe dynamics is integrated with the other four disciplines. Representative results from work performed to date are described. These include optimal placement of tuning masses for reduction of blade vibratory shear forces, integrated aerodynamic/dynamic optimization, and integrated aerodynamic/dynamic/structural optimization. Examples of validating procedures are described.

Adelman, Howard M.↗
NASA NTRS1990

Status of integrated multidisciplinary rotorcraft optimization research at the Langley Research Center

This paper describes a joint NASA/Army research activity at the Langley Research Center to develop optimization procedures aimed at improving the rotor blade design process by integrating appropriate disciplines and accounting for important interactions among the disciplines. The activity is being guided by a Steering Committee made up of key NASA and Army researchers and managers. The paper describes the optimization formulation in terms of the objective function, design variables, and constraints. The analysis aspects are discussed, and the interdisciplinary interactions are defined in terms of the information that must be transferred among disciplinary analyses as well as the trade-offs between disciplines in determining the details of the design. At this writing, some significant progress has been made. Results given in the paper represent accomplishments in rotor aerodynamic performance optimization for minimum horsepower, rotor dynamic optimization for vibration reduction, approximate analysis of frequencies and mode shapes, rotor structural optimization for minimum weight, and integrated aerodynamic load/dynamics optimization for minimum vibration and weight.

Mantay, Wayne R.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Integrated Design Tools Reduce Risk, Cost

Thanks in part to a SBIR award with Langley Research Center, Phoenix Integration Inc., based in Wayne, Pennsylvania, modified and advanced software for process integration and design automation. For NASA, the tool has resulted in lower project costs and reductions in design time; clients of Phoenix Integration are experiencing the same rewards.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2023

Comparison of Shape Optimization Methods for Heat Exchanger Fins Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Inverse design techniques are one way to leverage advances in 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and computational resources to achieve increased performance of heat exchangers. Two optimization techniques (genetic algorithm and particle swarm) and three geometry representations (binary level set, composite Bézier, and free form deformation) are used to increase the heat transfer and reduce the pressure drop of a heat exchanger fin. After running 210,810 OpenFOAM simulations, results indicate that a significant performance increase of the fin can be realized in less than 48 hrs, allowing for such a process to be integrated in traditional design processes. The best design increased the performance of the objective function, compared to the baseline rectangular geometry by 75%. A custom distributed infrastructure was built, allowing for all methods to reach 95% of the final objective values in a little over 4 hrs, handling 1674 OpenFoam simulations per hour.

42 ENGINEERING↗
NASA NTRS1993

Integration of Design, Thermal, Structural, and Optical Analysis, Including Thermal Animation

In many industries there has recently been a concerted movement toward 'quality management' and the issue of how to accomplish work more efficiently. Part of this effort is focused on concurrent engineering; the idea of integrating the design and analysis processes so that they are not separate, sequential processes (often involving design rework due to analytical findings) but instead form an integrated system with smooth transfers of information. Presented herein are several specific examples of concurrent engineering methods being carried out at Langley Research Center (LaRC): integration of thermal, structural and optical analyses to predict changes in optical performance based on thermal and structural effects; integration of the CAD design process with thermal and structural analyses; and integration of analysis and presentation by animating the thermal response of a system as an active color map -- a highly effective visual indication of heat flow.

Amundsen, Ruth M.↗
NASA NTRS2010

An Interactive Preliminary Design System of High Speed Forebody and Inlet Flows

This paper demonstrates a simulation-based aerodynamic design process of high speed inlet. A genetic algorithm is integrated into the design process to facilitate the single objective optimization. The objective function is the total pressure recovery and is obtained by using a PNS solver for its computing efficiency. The system developed uses existing software of geometry definition, mesh generation and CFD analysis. The process which produces increasingly desirable design in each genetic evolution over many generations is automatically carried out. A generic two-dimensional inlet is created as a showcase to demonstrate the capabilities of this tool. A parameterized study of geometric shape and size of the showcase is also presented.

Liou, May-Fun↗