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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
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1981

Engine dynamic analysis with general nonlinear finite-element codes. I Overall approach and development of bearing damper element

NASA-sponsored research on engine dynamic simulation using general finite element nonlinear time transient computer codes available on the open market is reviewed. The approach taken was to develop software packages to model engine components which are not typically found on dynamical structures and are therefore not already computer codes. The software package developed for squeeze-film bearing dampers is outlined, and the results of a parametric study of damper pressure for a variety of specified circular orbits are presented for both long-bearing and short-bearing solutions. The data from a four-degree-of-freedom rotor-damper-stator model under conditions of small rotor unbalance through large rotor unbalance are also given.

Adams, M. L.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Development of the KIVA-2 CFD code for rocket propulsion applications

The KIVA-2 code, originally developed to solve computational fluid dynamics problems in internal combustion engines, has been developed to solve rocket propulsion type flows. The objective of the work was to develop a code such that both liquid and solid particle motion could be simulated for arbitrary geometry and high speed as well as low speed reacting flows. Modification to the original code include: incorporating independently specific supersonic and subsonic inflows and outflows; symmetric as well as periodic boundary conditions; and the capability to use generalized single or multi-specie thermodynamic data and transport coefficients allowing the user to specify arbitrary wall temperature/heat flux distributions. This code has been shown to successfully solve rocket propulsion flows as well as flows with entrained particles for several different rocket nozzles.

Shannon, Robert V., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1981

Numerical solution of supersonic viscous flow over blunt delta wings

A general parabolized Navier-Stokes code has been developed to compute the steady supersonic viscous flow around arbitrary body shapes at high angles of attack. A nonorthogonal three-dimensional coordinate frame permits the code to march with solution surfaces which are the most appropriate. The code has been used to calculate the laminar flow over a slab delta wing with 70 deg sweep at angles of attack up to 41.5 deg and Mach numbers of 6.8 and 9.6. The computed shock shapes, surface pressures and heat transfer coefficients are compared with experiment and show agreement.

Tannehill, J. C.↗
NASA NTRS2010

GUI to Facilitate Research on Biological Damage from Radiation

A graphical-user-interface (GUI) computer program has been developed to facilitate research on the damage caused by highly energetic particles and photons impinging on living organisms. The program brings together, into one computational workspace, computer codes that have been developed over the years, plus codes that will be developed during the foreseeable future, to address diverse aspects of radiation damage. These include codes that implement radiation-track models, codes for biophysical models of breakage of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) by radiation, pattern-recognition programs for extracting quantitative information from biological assays, and image-processing programs that aid visualization of DNA breaks. The radiation-track models are based on transport models of interactions of radiation with matter and solution of the Boltzmann transport equation by use of both theoretical and numerical models. The biophysical models of breakage of DNA by radiation include biopolymer coarse-grained and atomistic models of DNA, stochastic- process models of deposition of energy, and Markov-based probabilistic models of placement of double-strand breaks in DNA. The program is designed for use in the NT, 95, 98, 2000, ME, and XP variants of the Windows operating system.

Cucinotta, Frances A.↗
NASA NTRS2019

NASA's Role in Gas Turbine Technology Development: Accelerating Technical Progress via Collaboration Between Academia, Industry, and Government Agencies

Given the maturity of the gas turbine engine since its invention and also considering the limited and flattened level of resources expected to be allocated for NASA aeronautics research and development, we ask the question are NASA technology investments still needed to enable future turbine engine-based propulsion systems? If so, what is NASA’s unique role to justify NASA’s investment? To address this topic, we will first review the accomplishments and the impact that NASA Glenn Research Center has made on turbine engine technologies over the last 78 years. Specifically, this paper discusses NASA’s role and contributions to turbine engine development, specific to both 1) NASA’s role in conducting experiments to understand flow physics and provide relevant benchmark validation experiments for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code development, validation, and assessment; and 2) the impact of technologies resulting from NASA collaborations with industry, academia, and other government agencies. Note that the scope of the discussion is limited to the NASA technology contributions with which the author was intimately associated, and does not represent the entirety of the NASA contributions to turbine engine technology. The specific research, development, and demonstrations discussed herein were selected to both 1) provide a comprehensive review and reference list of the technology and its impact, and 2) identify NASA’s unique role and highlight how NASA’s involvement resulted in additional benefit to the gas turbine engine community. Secondly, we will discuss current NASA collaborations that are in progress and provide a status of the results. Finally, we discuss the challenges anticipated for future turbine engine-based propulsion systems for civil aviation and identify potential opportunities for collaboration where NASA involvement would be beneficial. Ultimately, the gas turbine engine community will decide if NASA involvement is needed to contribute to the development of the design and analysis tools, databases, and technology demonstration programs to meet these challenges for future turbine engine-based propulsion systems.

Suder, Kenneth L.↗
NASA NTRS1983

A multi-grid method for the computation of viscid/inviscid interactions on airfoils

An improved version of the 'GRUMFOIL' code has been developed for the computation of airfoil flows. The method employs a conservative difference scheme for the potential equation, integral methods for the boundary layer, and viscous coupling conditions that fully account for the wake and strong interaction effects at trailing edges. The improved version uses Jameson's 'MAD' scheme to accelerate convergence of the inviscid solution, an improved 2nd order artificial viscosity and far field 'TARE' correction to reduce spatial truncation errors and Carter's semi-inverse method for the viscous solution. Results are presented which demonstrate a factor of ten reduction in computing cost.

Melnik, R. E.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Predictive Modeling of Carbon Ablators

Efforts to build a Predictive Material Modeling (PMM) framework from the micro-scale to the macro-scale are presented in this abstract. To reduce the need for extensive testing, accelerate the design cycle process, and reduce uncertainty margins applied to final designs, NASA is developing simulation and modeling tools that enable characterization of material properties and response to high-enthalpy environments. The Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA) code has been developed for computing macroscale (volume averaged) properties of porous materials using microscale images from micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). Microscale modeling requires a realistic representation of a material microstructure; these are obtained either synthetically during the design of the material or through X-ray micro-CT. Volume averaged properties are then used to inform macroscale material response models, such as those implemented in the Porous-material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFOAM (PATO) software, also actively developed by NASA. The computational model in PATO is a generic heat and mass transfer model for porous reactive materials containing several solid phases and a single gas phase. The detailed chemical interactions occurring between the solid phases and the gas phase are modeled at the pore scale assuming local thermal equilibrium. These tools were developed to efficiently interface with other pre-existing codes such as SPARTA (direct simulation Monte Carlo), DPLR (hypersonic CFD), NEQAIR (radiative transport) and DAKOTA (uncertainty quantification and optimization). Detailed flight data (Mars Science Laboratory [MSL] Entry Descent and Landing Instrument [MEDLI]) is critical for validating these computational tools for NASA applications. Examples of modeling ablative material response using these codes will be presented including 3D simulations of the full-scale heatshield of the MSL capsule. The simulations demonstrate the ability of the modern material response code, PATO, to handle the material response of geometrically complex and large domains, through the use of massively parallel computations.

Thermal Protection Systems↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Predictive Modeling of Carbon Ablators Using Micro and Macro-Scale Modeling

Efforts to build a Predictive Material Modeling (PMM) framework from the micro-scale to the macro-scale are presented in this abstract. To reduce the need for extensive testing, accelerate the design cycle process, and reduce uncertainty margins applied to final designs, NASA is developing simulation and modeling tools that enable characterization of material properties and response to high-enthalpy environments. The Porous Microstructure Analysis (PuMA) code has been developed for computing macroscale (volume averaged) properties of porous materials using microscale images from micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). Microscale modeling requires a realistic representation of a material microstructure; these are obtained either synthetically during the design of the material or through X-ray micro-CT. Volume averaged properties are then used to inform macroscale material response models, such as those implemented in the Porous-material Analysis Toolbox based on OpenFOAM (PATO) software, also actively developed by NASA. The computational model in PATO is a generic heat and mass transfer model for porous reactive materials containing several solid phases and a single gas phase. The detailed chemical interactions occurring between the solid phases and the gas phase are modeled at the pore scale assuming local thermal equilibrium. These tools were developed to efficiently interface with other pre-existing codes such as SPARTA (direct simulation Monte Carlo), DPLR (hypersonic CFD), NEQAIR (radiative transport) and DAKOTA (uncertainty quantification and optimization). Detailed flight data (Mars Science Laboratory [MSL] Entry Descent and Landing Instrument [MEDLI]) is critical for validating these computational tools for NASA applications. Examples of modeling ablative material response using these codes will be presented including 3D simulations of the full-scale heatshield of the MSL capsule. The simulations demonstrate the ability of the modern material response code, PATO, to handle the material response of geometrically complex and large domains, through the use of massively parallel computations.

Thermal Protection Systems↗
NASA NTRS1987

A new PNS code for chemical nonequilibrium flows

A new parabolized Navier-Stokes (PNS) code has been developed to compute the hypersonic laminar flow of a multicomponent, chemically reacting mixture of thermally perfect gases over two-dimensional and axisymmetric bodies. The new PNS code solves the gas dynamic and species conservation equations in a coupled manner using a noniterative, implicit, space-marching finite-difference method. The conditions for well-posedness of the space-marching method have been derived from an eigenvalue analysis of the governing equations. The code has been used to compute hypersonic laminar flow of chemically reacting air over wedges and cones. The results of these computations are in good agreement with the results of reacting boundary-layer calculations.

Prabhu, D. K.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Radiative properties of molecular nitrogen ions produced by helium Penning ionization and argon effects

The development of hypersonic aerospace vehicles requires a better understanding on the thermal and chemical nonequilibrium kinetics of participating species in shock layers. The computational fluid dynamic (CFD) codes developed for such flowfields overestimate the radiation in the spectral region of 300 - 600 nm. A speculation for this overestimation is that inclusion of Ar, CO2, and H2O at the upper atmosphere flight region makes a significant impact on radiative kinetics of molecular nitrogen ions. To define the effects of minority species on the radiative kinetics of N2(+), an experimental setup was made by using the helium Penning ionization. The vibrational and rotational temperature were measured by mapping the vibrational and rotational distributions of N2(+) emission with high spectroscopic resolution and absolute intensity measurements. Measured vibrational temperatures were in the range from 18,000 to 36,000 K, and rotational temperatures were in the range from 300 to 370 K. The irradiance of 391.44 nm line and rotational and vibrational temperatures were analyzed to define argon and CO2 effects on the N2(+) emission. When Ar or CO2 is injected with N2, the rotational temperature did not change. The irradiances were reduced by 34 percent and 78 percent for the 50 percent of mixture of Ar and CO2, respectively. The vibrational temperatures were increased by 24.1 percent and 82.9 percent for the 50 percent of mixture of Ar and CO2, respectively. It appears that there are no significant effects from small concentrations of Ar and CO2 at the upper atmosphere flight region.

Miller, George, III↗
NASA NTRS1998

A Parallel Non-Overlapping Domain-Decomposition Algorithm for Compressible Fluid Flow Problems on Triangulated Domains

This paper considers an algebraic preconditioning algorithm for hyperbolic-elliptic fluid flow problems. The algorithm is based on a parallel non-overlapping Schur complement domain-decomposition technique for triangulated domains. In the Schur complement technique, the triangulation is first partitioned into a number of non-overlapping subdomains and interfaces. This suggests a reordering of triangulation vertices which separates subdomain and interface solution unknowns. The reordering induces a natural 2 x 2 block partitioning of the discretization matrix. Exact LU factorization of this block system yields a Schur complement matrix which couples subdomains and the interface together. The remaining sections of this paper present a family of approximate techniques for both constructing and applying the Schur complement as a domain-decomposition preconditioner. The approximate Schur complement serves as an algebraic coarse space operator, thus avoiding the known difficulties associated with the direct formation of a coarse space discretization. In developing Schur complement approximations, particular attention has been given to improving sequential and parallel efficiency of implementations without significantly degrading the quality of the preconditioner. A computer code based on these developments has been tested on the IBM SP2 using MPI message passing protocol. A number of 2-D calculations are presented for both scalar advection-diffusion equations as well as the Euler equations governing compressible fluid flow to demonstrate performance of the preconditioning algorithm.

Barth, Timothy J.↗
NASA NTRS1996

Study of Gear Dynamic Forces Completed

Gearbox-generated noise and vibration is objectionable in many vehicles, particularly helicopters. This noise excitation is caused by the load fluctuation as gear teeth enter and leave mesh. In high-quality gears, a common technique to reduce gear noise and vibration is to modify the tooth profile. Gear noise reduction is a NASA and U.S. Army goal, and a NASA/U.S. Army research project sponsored development of gear dynamics computer codes to help design quiet gears. As part of this project, a series of experiments was performed in the NASA Lewis Research Center's Gear Noise Rig to develop a data base of dynamic test data and to validate the predictions of the codes for several gear designs under a variety of test conditions.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1996

Research in Parallel Algorithms and Software for Computational Aerosciences

Phase 1 is complete for the development of a computational fluid dynamics CFD) parallel code with automatic grid generation and adaptation for the Euler analysis of flow over complex geometries. SPLITFLOW, an unstructured Cartesian grid code developed at Lockheed Martin Tactical Aircraft Systems, has been modified for a distributed memory/massively parallel computing environment. The parallel code is operational on an SGI network, Cray J90 and C90 vector machines, SGI Power Challenge, and Cray T3D and IBM SP2 massively parallel machines. Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is the message passing protocol for portability to various architectures. A domain decomposition technique was developed which enforces dynamic load balancing to improve solution speed and memory requirements. A host/node algorithm distributes the tasks. The solver parallelizes very well, and scales with the number of processors. Partially parallelized and non-parallelized tasks consume most of the wall clock time in a very fine grain environment. Timing comparisons on a Cray C90 demonstrate that Parallel SPLITFLOW runs 2.4 times faster on 8 processors than its non-parallel counterpart autotasked over 8 processors.

Domel, Neal D.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Composite load spectra for select space propulsion structural components

The objective of this program is to develop generic load models with multiple levels of progressive sophistication to simulate the composite load spectra that are induced in space propulsion system components, representative of Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME), such as transfer ducts, turbine blades, and liquid oxygen (LOX) posts and system ducting. These models will be developed using two independent approaches. The first approach consists of using state-of-the-art probabilistic methods to describe the individual loading conditions and combinations of these loading conditions to synthesize the composite load spectra simulation. The methodology required to combine the various individual load simulation models (hot-gas dynamic, vibrations, instantaneous position, centrifugal field, etc.) into composite load spectra simulation models will be developed under this program. A computer code incorporating the various individual and composite load spectra models will be developed to construct the specific load model desired. The second approach, which is covered under the options portion of the contract, will consist of developing coupled models for composite load spectra simulation which combine the (deterministic) models for composite load dynamic, acoustic, high-pressure and high rotational speed, etc., load simulation using statistically varying coefficients. These coefficients will then be determined using advanced probabilistic simulation methods with and without strategically selected experimental data. This report covers the efforts of the third year of the contract. The overall program status is that the turbine blade loads have been completed and implemented. The transfer duct loads are defined and are being implemented. The thermal loads for all components are defined and coding is being developed. A dynamic pressure load model is under development. The parallel work on the probabilistic methodology is essentially completed. The overall effort is being integrated in an expert system code specifically developed for this project.

Newell, J. F.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Algorithm and code development for unsteady three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations

Aeroelastic tests require extensive cost and risk. An aeroelastic wind-tunnel experiment is an order of magnitude more expensive than a parallel experiment involving only aerodynamics. By complementing the wind-tunnel experiments with numerical simulations, the overall cost of the development of aircraft can be considerably reduced. In order to accurately compute aeroelastic phenomenon it is necessary to solve the unsteady Euler/Navier-Stokes equations simultaneously with the structural equations of motion. These equations accurately describe the flow phenomena for aeroelastic applications. At ARC a code, ENSAERO, is being developed for computing the unsteady aerodynamics and aeroelasticity of aircraft, and it solves the Euler/Navier-Stokes equations. The purpose of this cooperative agreement was to enhance ENSAERO in both algorithm and geometric capabilities. During the last five years, the algorithms of the code have been enhanced extensively by using high-resolution upwind algorithms and efficient implicit solvers. The zonal capability of the code has been extended from a one-to-one grid interface to a mismatching unsteady zonal interface. The geometric capability of the code has been extended from a single oscillating wing case to a full-span wing-body configuration with oscillating control surfaces. Each time a new capability was added, a proper validation case was simulated, and the capability of the code was demonstrated.

Obayashi, Shigeru↗
NASA NTRS1992

HSCT mission analysis of waverider designs

In the second quarter the development of the two waverider design tools was continued, and the groundwork necessary for the incorporation of waverider technology into the realm of the High Speed Civil Transports (HSCT's) was laid out. Advances in each of these areas is summarized. Work on the WIPAR code included the addition of an upper surface geometry generator and characteristic flow solver and the inclusion of viscous analysis in the performance computations. Details of these changes are given. In the course of the second project quarter, much of the analysis performed during the first quarter was incorporated into a working computer code. To date, utilities were developed for the definition of arbitrary 3-D shock surfaces, the computation of post-shock flow conditions, and the marching of the solution in a roughly cross-stream direction away from the shock surface. These utilities are briefly described. During the second quarter groundwork for the analysis of complete configurations was initiated. This involved the development of computational utilities for the integration of powerplants with the waverider forebodies, and the acquisition of a number of configuration analysis software packages. Work in these areas is discussed.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1985

Report of the Technology and Test Panel

The state of technology relative to the Tethered Satellite System (TSS) was reviewed. The technology areas which could benefit from the TSS were defined. To support TSS design studies it is necessary to develop tether dynamic model computer codes for definition of mission and tether requirements. Present major codes are very elaborate, expensive to run, and not very user friendly. An additional technology concern was related to the manufacturing of tethers. The development of complex tethers (nonconducting-taper/double taper long 100 km, conducting-embedded conduction, fiber optics, and superconducting) and their applications to space stations requires the development of manufacturing capabilities for both Earth-based as well as space-based systems.

Siemers, P.↗