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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 541 records · Page 30

Status of the Space Radiation Monte Carlos Simulation Based on FLUKA and ROOT

The NASA-funded project reported on at the first IWSSRR in Arona to develop a Monte-Carlo simulation program for use in simulating the space radiation environment based on the FLUKA and ROOT codes is well into its second year of development, and considerable progress has been made. The general tasks required to achieve the final goals include the addition of heavy-ion interactions into the FLUKA code and the provision of a ROOT-based interface to FLUKA. The most significant progress to date includes the incorporation of the DPMJET event generator code within FLUKA to handle heavy-ion interactions for incident projectile energies greater than 3GeV/A. The ongoing effort intends to extend the treatment of these interactions down to 10 MeV, and at present two alternative approaches are being explored. The ROOT interface is being pursued in conjunction with the CERN LHC ALICE software team through an adaptation of their existing AliROOT software. As a check on the validity of the code, a simulation of the recent data taken by the ATIC experiment is underway.

Andersen, Victor↗

Toward a high-fidelity tritium transport modeling for retention and permeation experiments

We report Tritium Migration Analysis Program version 8 (TMAP8), the latest version of TMAP, was developed within the framework of the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE). Created at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), MOOSE is an open-source, dimension-agnostic, fully coupled, and fully implicit multiphysics platform featuring massively parallel computation capabilities. Using TMAP8, tritium transport in a divertor monoblock was analyzed to elucidate the effects of pulsed operation (up to fifty 1,600 s plasma discharge and cool-down cycles) on the tritium in-vessel inventory source term and ex-vessel release term (i.e., tritium retention and permeation) for safety analysis. With its built-in Message Passing Interface capability, TMAP8 can, in under 2 h, simulate tritium transport in three different layered materials (i.e., tungsten, copper, and copper-chromium-zirconium alloy) in 2D geometry, using a single device/computer with 10 cores. The MOOSE-based TMAP8 code can leverage other MOOSE tools developed under the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation program to perform tritium and thermal transport in complex geometries and multiphysics environments. And via its massively parallel computation, MOOSE will enable the fusion pilot plant designers to conduct high-fidelity multiphysics modeling for the design of the divertor and blanket systems as well as for the safety analysis.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Characterization of Fuel-to-Coolant Heat Transfer During Reactivity-Initiated Accidents Using Tightly Coupled Thermal Hydraulics and Fuel Thermomechanics

The reactivity-initiated accident (RIA) is a complex scenario with several tightly interacting physical phenomena. Accurately predicting fuel behavior during these transients is difficult due to limitations in the modeling of fuel-to-coolant heat transfer. Common approaches to simulate RIAs involve standalone calculations using either a fuel performance code or a thermal-hydraulic code. The complex interdependencies of thermal-hydraulic and fuel mechanical behavior suggest that a tight coupling between these codes may provide more accurate predictions of fuel-to-coolant heat transfer and cladding mechanical response. Here, RELAP5-3D and BISON are coupled in this paper to simulate RIAs, and a sensitivity analysis is performed to rank key thermal properties and two-phase heat transfer parameters relevant for fuel-to-coolant heat transfer and cladding failure mechanisms in UO 2 –Zircaloy-4 systems. Gas gap conductance, film boiling heat transfer uncertainty, pulse width, fuel-specific heat capacity, and cladding-specific heat capacity were identified as important parameters. Variations in figures of merit resulting from changes to pulse width and the material thermal properties indicate that time-dependent heat transfer rates are significant for safety-relevant mechanical parameters due to the time dependence of cladding ductility and pellet-cladding mechanical interaction loading. The results suggest that the thermal-hydraulic factors have a nonnegligible influence on the thermomechanical solution and vice versa. Tight coupling of both sets of physics is recommended to improve prediction of fuel behavior during RIAs. Highlights include the following: 1. The RELAP5-3D thermal-hydraulic code and the BISON fuel performance code are tightly coupled for simulation of RIA transients with energy depositions at the Zircaloy-4 cladding failure threshold. 2. Departure from nucleate boiling occurred for all simulated cases. Due to the ductility of fresh fuel, substantial ballooning occurred in most cases. 3. Gas gap conductance, fuel-specific heat capacity, cladding-specific heat capacity, transient pulse width, and film boiling heat transfer were the dominant thermal factors impacting the safety figures of merit at energy depositions.

Critical Heat Flux (CHF)↗

HydraGNN v4.0

The new version of HydraGNN v4.0 provides additional core capabilities, such as: Inclusion of multi-body atomistic cluster expansion MACE, polarizable atom interaction neural network PAINN, and equivariant principal neighborhood aggregation (PNAEq) among the message passing layers supported -Inclusion of graph transformers to directly model long-range interactions between nodes that are distant in the graph topology Integration of graph transformers with message passing layers by combining the graph embedding generated by the two mechanisms, which allows for an improved expressivity of the HydraGNN architecture Improved re-implementation of multi-task learning (MTL) to allow its use for stabilized training across imbalanced, multi-source, multi-fidelity data Introduction of multi-task parallelism, a newly proposed type of model parallelism specifically for MTL architectures, which allows to dispatch different output decoding heads to different GPU devices Integration of multi-task parallelism with pre-existing distributed data parallelism to enable a 2D parallelization for distributed training Improved portability of the distributed training across Intel GPUs, which has been testes on ALCF exascale supercomputer Aurora Inclusion of 2-level fine-grained energy profilers portable across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs to monitor the power and energy consumption associated with different functions executed by the HydraGNN code during data pre-load and training Restructuring of previous examples and inclusion of new sets of examples to illustrate the download, preprocess, and training of HydraGNN models on new large-scale open-source datasets for atomistic materials modeling (e.g., Alexandria, Transition1x, OMat24, OMol25)

Lupo Pasini, Massimiliano [Oak Ridge National Labo↗

Studies of hydrodynamic events in stellar evolution. III Ejection of planetary nebulae

Investigation of the dynamic behavior of the hydrogen-rich envelope (0.101 solar mass) of an evolved star (1.1 solar mass) as the luminosity rises to 19,000 solar luminosities during the second ascent of the red-giant branch. For luminosities in the range 3100 less than L less than 19,000 solar luminosities the H-rich envelope pulsates like a long-period variable (LPV) with periods of the order of a year. As L reaches 19,000 solar luminosities, the entire H-rich envelope is ejected as a shell with speeds of a few times 10 km sec. The ejection occurs on a time scale of a few LPV pulsation periods. This ejection is shown to be related to the formation of a planetary nebula. The computations are based on an implicit hydrodynamic computer code. Tand rho-dependent opacities and excitation and ionization energies are included. As the H-rich envelope is accelerated off the stellar core, the gap between envelope and core is approximated by a vacuum filled with radiation.

Kutter, G. S.↗

Actinide cosmic ray chronometers - Relative abundances and the cosmic ray lifetime

Measurements of ultraheavy cosmic rays will provide radioactive chronometers, including the actinides, which are expected to be present in the source. These primary chronometers differ from the Be-10 secondary chronometer in total inelastic cross-section and decay half-life. A propagation code, which includes nuclear fragmentation, radioactive decay, and ionization energy-loss of cosmic rays is being used to investigate the variations in the fluxes and mean ages which would be expected for various models of cosmic ray propagation. Some preliminary results in the actinide region are presented here which indicate that measurements of the relative abundances of the actinides in the cosmic rays will be very useful for understanding source abundances but less useful for studying propagation effects.

Margolis, S. H.↗

A thick Anger camera for gamma-ray astronomy

The NaI(Tl) Anger camera is a natural candidate for a position sensitive detector in imaging of astrophysical gamma-ray sources. Here laboratory measurements are presented of the response of a relatively thick (5.1 cm) NaI(Tl) Anger camera designed for coded aperture imaging in the 50 keV to 2 MeV energy range. A position resolution of 10.5 mm FWHM at 122 keV and 6.3 mm FWHM at 662 keV. The energy resolution was 7 percent FWHM at 662 keV. The ability of the detector to resolve the depth of the gamma-ray interaction and the use of this depth resolution to reduce back-incident and internal background is discussed.

Cook, W. R.↗

Modeling of impulsive propellant reorientation

The impulsive propellant reorientation process is modeled using the (Energy Calculations for Liquid Propellants in a Space Environment (ECLIPSE) code. A brief description of the process and the computational model is presented. Code validation is documented via comparison to experimentally derived data for small scale tanks. Predictions of reorientation performance are presented for two tanks designed for use in flight experiments and for a proposed full scale OTV tank. A new dimensionless parameter is developed to correlate reorientation performance in geometrically similar tanks. Its success is demonstrated.

Hochstein, John I.↗

Unsteady transonic viscous-inviscid interaction using Euler and boundary-layer equations

The Euler code is used extensively for computation of transonic unsteady aerodynamics. The boundary layer code solves the 3-D, compressible, unsteady, mean flow kinetic energy integral boundary layer equations in the direct mode. Inviscid-viscous coupling is handled using porosity boundary conditions. Some of the advantages and disadvantages of using the Euler and boundary layer equations for investigating unsteady viscous-inviscid interaction is examined.

Pirzadeh, Shahyar↗

Modeling of impulsive propellant reorientation

The impulsive propellant reorientation process is modeled using the Energy Calculations for Liquid Propellants in a Space Environment (ECLIPSE) code. A brief description of the process and the computational model is presented. Code validation is documented via comparison to experimentally derived data for small scale tanks. Predictions of reorientation performance are presented for two tanks designed for use in flight experiments and for a proposed full scale OTV tank. A new dimensionless parameter is developed to correlate reorientation performance in geometrically similar tanks. Its success is demonstrated.

Hochstein, John I.↗

Nonequilibrium radiation and chemistry models for aerocapture vehicle flowfields, volume 1

The following subject areas are covered: the development of detailed nonequilibrium radiation models for molecules along with appropriate models for atoms; the inclusion of nongray radiation gasdynamic coupling in the VSL (Viscous Shock Layer) code; the development and evaluation of various electron-electronic energy models; and an examination of the effects of shock slip.

Carlson, Leland A.↗

The estimation of background production by cosmic rays in high-energy gamma ray telescopes

A calculational method of estimating instrumental background in high-energy gamma-ray telescopes, using the hadronic Monte Carlo code FLUKA87, is presented. The method is applied to the SAS-2 and EGRET telescope designs and is also used to explore the level of background to be expected for alternative configurations of the proposed GRITS telescope, which adapts the external fuel tank of a Space Shuttle as a gamma-ray telescope with a very large collecting area. The background produced in proton-beam tests of EGRET is much less than the predicted level. This discrepancy appears to be due to the FLUKA87 inability to transport evaporation nucleons. It is predicted that the background in EGRET will be no more than 4-10 percent of the extragalactic diffuse gamma radiation.

Edwards, H. L.↗

Design criteria for small coded aperture masks in gamma-ray astronomy

Most theoretical work on coded aperture masks in X-ray and low-energy gamma-ray astronomy has concentrated on masks with large numbers of elements. For gamma-ray spectrometers in the MeV range, the detector plane usually has only a few discrete elements, so that masks with small numbers of elements are called for. For this case it is feasible to analyze by computer all the possible mask patterns of given dimension to find the ones that best satisfy the desired performance criteria. A particular set of performance criteria for comparing the flux sensitivities, source positioning accuracies and transparencies of different mask patterns is developed. The results of such a computer analysis for masks up to dimension 5 x 5 unit cell are presented and it is concluded that there is a great deal of flexibility in the choice of mask pattern for each dimension.

Sembay, S.↗

Response of a supersonic boundary layer to a compression corner

On the basis of direct numerical simulations of rapidly compressed turbulence, Zeman and Coleman have developed a model to represent rapid directional compression contribution to the pressure dilatation term in the turbulent kinetic energy equation. The model has been implemented in the CFD code for simulation of supersonic compression corner flow with an extended separated region. The computational results have shown a significant improvement with respect to the baseline solution given by the standard k- epsilon turbulence model which does not contain any compressibility corrections.

Vandromme, D.↗

Solution of mixed convection heat transfer from isothermal in-line fins

Transient and steady state combined natural and forced convective flows over two in-line finite thickness fins (louvers) in a vertical channel are numerically solved using two methods. The first method of solution is based on the 'Simple Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian' (SALE) technique which incorporates mainly two computational phases: (1) a Lagrangian phase in which the velocity field is updated by the effects of all forces, and (2) an Eulerian phase that executes all advective fluxes of mass, momentum and energy. The second method of solution uses the finite element code entitled FIDAP. In the first part, comparison of the results by FIDAP, SALE, and available experimental work were done and discussed for steady state forced convection over louvered fins. Good agreements were deduced between the three sets of results especially for the flow over a single fin. In the second part and in the absence of experimental literature, the numerical predictions were extended to the transient transports and to the opposing flow where pressure drop is reversed. Results are presented and discussed for heat transfer and pressure drop in assisting and opposing mixed convection flows.

Khalilollahi, Amir↗

Simulation of the prompt energization and transport of radiation belt particles during the March 24, 1991 SSC

We model the rapid (about 1 min) formation of a new electron radiation belt at L about or = 2.5 that resulted from the Storm Sudden Commencement (SSC) of March 24, 1991 as observed by the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite (CRRES) satellite. Guided by the observed electric and magnetic fields, we represent the time-dependent magnetospheric electric field during the SSC by an asymmetric bipolar pulse that is associated with the compression and relaxation of the Earth's magnetic field. We follow the electrons using a relativistic guiding center code. The test-particle simulations show that electrons with energies of a few MeV at L greater than 6 were energized up to 40 MeV and transported to L about or = 2.5 during a fraction of their drift period. The energization process conserves the first adiabatic invariant and is enhanced due to resonance of the electron drift motion with the time-varying electric field. Our simulation results, with an initial W(exp -8) energy flux spectra, reproduce the observed electron drift echoes and show that the interplanetary shock impacted the magnetosphere between 1500 and 1800 MLT.

Li, Xinlin↗

Self-Consistent Magnetosphere-Ionosphere Coupling: Theoretical Studies

A self-consistent ring current (RC) model has been developed that couples electron and ion magnetospheric dynamics with the calculation of the electric field. Two new features were taken into account in order to close the self-consistent magnetosphere- ionosphere coupling loop. First, in addition to the RC ions, we solve an electron kinetic equation in our model. Second, using the relation of Galand and Richmond [2001], we calculate the height integrated ionospheric conductances as a function of the precipitated high energy magnetospheric electrons and ions that are produced by our code. To validate the results of our model we simulate the magnetic storm of May 2, 1986, a storm that has has been comprehensively studied, and compare our results with different theoretical approaches. The self-consistent inclusion of the hot electrons and, their effect on the conductance results in deeper penetration of the magnetospheric electric field. In addition, a slight westward rotation of the potential pattern (compared to previous self-consistent results) is evident in the inner magnetosphere. This changes the hot plasma distribution, especially by allowing increased access of plasma sheet ions and electrons to low L shells.

Khazanov, G. V.↗