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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 649 records · Page 36
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1986

Development of a new instrument for direct skin friction measurements

A device developed for the direct measurement of wall shear stress generated by flows is described. Simple and symmetric in design with optional small moving mass and no internal friction, the features employed in the design eliminate most of the difficulties associated with the traditional floating element balances. The device is basically small and can be made in various sizes. Vibration problems associated with the floating element skin friction balances were found to be minimized due to the design symmetry and optional damping provided. The design eliminates or reduces the errors associated with conventional floating element devices: such as errors due to gaps, pressure gradient, acceleration, heat transfer, and temperature change. The instrument is equipped with various sensing systems and the output signal is a linear function of the wall shear stress. Dynamic measurements could be made in a limited range and measurements in liquids could be performed readily. Measurement made in the three different tunnels show excellent agreement with data obtained by the floating element devices and other techniques.

Vakili, A. D.↗
NASA NTRS2006

New Developments at NASA's Instrument Synthesis & Analysis Laboratory (ISAL)

This viewgraph document reviews the work of NASA's Instrument Synthesis and Analysis Laboratory (ISAL). The work of the ISAL has substantially reduced the time required to develop an instrument concept. The document reviews the design process in detail and planned interaction with the end user of the instrument.

Wood, H. John↗
NASA NTRS1982

Development and test of a Microwave Ice Accretion Measurement Instrument (MIAMI)

The development of an ice accretion measurement instrument that is a highly sensitive, accurate, rugged and reliable microprocessor controlled device using low level microwave energy for non-instrusive real time measurement and recording of ice growth history, including ice thickness and accretion rate is discussed. Data is displayed and recorded digitally. New experimental data is presented, obtained with the instrument, which demonstrates its ability to measure ice growth on a two-dimensional airfoil. The device is suitable for aircraft icing protection. It may be mounted flush, non-intrusively, on any part of an aircraft skin including rotor blades and engine inlets.

Magenheim, B.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Guidelines for Successful Use and Communication of Instrument Heritage in Early Mission Development with a Focus on Spectrometers

Heritage is important for both cost and risk related issues and as such, it is heavily discussed in NASA proposal evaluations. If used and communicated efficiently, heritage can lower both the perception of risk and the associated costs. Definitions of heritage vary between engineering, cost, and scientific communities, but when applied appropriately, heritage provides a benefit to the proposed mission. By making an instrument at least once before, the cost of producing it again can be reduced. The time and effort needed to develop the instrument concept and test the product represent an expense that can be lowered through the use of a previously built and developed instrument. This same thought can be applied when using a flight spare or build-to-print model of the heritage instrument. The lowered perception of risk is a result of the confidence gained in the instrument through successful use in the target environment. This is extremely important in early mission development to the evaluation board. This analysis will use JPL-managed proposals from 2003 to 2011, including Discovery, New Frontiers, and Mars Scout missions. Through the examination of these proposals and their associated debriefs, a set of guidelines have been created for successful use and communication of instrument heritage in early mission development

specrtometers↗
NASA NTRS1923

Aeronautic instruments. Section VIII : recent developments and outstanding problems

This report is section VIII of a series of reports on aeronautic instruments. The preceding reports in this series have discussed in detail the various types of aeronautic instruments which have reached a state of practical development such that they have already found extensive use. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss briefly some of the more recent developments in the field of aeronautic instrument design and to suggest some of the outstanding problems awaiting solution.

Hunt, F L↗
NASA NTRS1998

MAMA Detector

Work carried out under this grant led to fundamental discoveries and over one hundred publications in the scientific literature. Fundamental developments in instrumentation were made including all the instrumentation on the EUVE satellite, the invention of a whole new type of grazing instrument spectrometer and the development of fundamentally new photon counting detectors including the Wedge and Strip used on EUVE and many other missions and the Time Delay detector used on OREFUS and FUSE. The Wedge and Strip and Time Delay detectors were developed under this grant for less than two million dollars and have been used in numerous missions most recently for the FUSE mission. In addition, a fundamentally new type of diffuse spectrometer has been developed under this grant which has been used in instrumentation on the MMSAT spacecraft and the Lewis spacecraft. Plans are underway to use this instrumentation on several other missions as well.

Bowyer, Stuart↗
NASA NTRS2014

Detector Array Assembly Development for the ATLAS Instrument on the ICESat-2 Mission

This paper describes the development of the Detector Array Assembly (DAA) structure for the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System (ATLAS) on the ICESat2 Mission built at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). It describes the challenges faced in designing a structure to protect sensitive detectors with limited data available for the detectors and the environment, including shock. The paper shows the successful re-design and testing that was performed to allow for a design to handle launch, shock and thermal environments with flexibility to incorporate design changes.

0000↗
NASA NTRS2007

Smart Payload Development for High Data Rate Instrument Systems

This slide presentation reviews the development of smart payloads instruments systems with high data rates. On-board computation has become a bottleneck for advanced science instrument and engineering capabilities. In order to improve the computation capability on board, smart payloads have been proposed. A smart payload is a Localized instrument, that can offload the flight processor of extensive computing cycles, simplify the interfaces, and minimize the dependency of the instrument on the flight system. This has been proposed for the Mars mission, Mars Atmospheric Trace Molecule Spectroscopy (MATMOS). The design of this system is discussed; the features of the Virtex-4, are discussed, and the technical approach is reviewed. The proposed Hybrid Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has been shown to deliver breakthrough performance by tightly coupling hardware and software. Smart Payload designs for instruments such as MATMOS can meet science data return requirements with more competitive use of available on-board resources and can provide algorithm acceleration in hardware leading to implementation of better (more advanced) algorithms in on-board systems for improved science data return

Virtex-4↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA’s PACE Ocean Color Instrument Thermal Design Evolution: from Goddard’s Instrument Design Lab through Flight Development

NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, set to launch in 2024, seeks to provide data continuity for the ocean color, aerosol and cloud measurements acquired by NASA’s on-orbit Earth Science observatories since the 1990s. It will accomplish this through its Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), an optical spectrometer being developed for hyper-spectral measurements in the ultraviolet-to-near-infrared band between 340 nm and 2260 nm. Although OCI’s instrument architecture will provide greater insight and resolution than its predecessors in this wavelength range, the engineering required to achieve this also poses a greater challenge. In thermal engineering, this translates to a more complex thermal control approach to address high heat dissipations, stringent stabilities, the volume of heat that requires transport, and changing thermal environments due to tilting of the entire instrument ±20° twice per orbit. This current work explores how the PACE OCI instrument design has evolved from its initial conception in NASA Goddard’s Instrument Design Laboratory (IDL) to the current iteration of its flight design. The IDL studies explored three separate instrument configurations and two spatial resolutions per configuration, which were then down selected to a single instrument type and spatial resolution for flight instrument development. OCI subsequently went through major project milestones, including Preliminary Design Review (PDR), Critical Design Review (CDR), Pre-Environmental Review (PER) and Pre-Ship Review (PSR), with significant design updates along the way. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive account of OCI’s thermal control architecture evolution and the engineering drivers that have shaped it, with the goal of identifying trends spanning the full instrument development timeline to inform and advance future instrument thermal designs.

PACE↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA’s PACE Ocean Color Instrument Thermal Design Evolution: from Goddard’s Instrument Design Lab through Flight Development

NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission, set to launch in 2024, seeks to provide data continuity for the ocean color, aerosol and cloud measurements acquired by NASA’s on-orbit Earth Science observatories since the 1990s. It will accomplish this through its Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), an optical spectrometer being developed for hyper-spectral measurements in the ultraviolet-to-near-infrared band between 340 nm and 2260 nm. Although OCI’s instrument architecture will provide greater insight and resolution than its predecessors in this wavelength range, the engineering required to achieve this also poses a greater challenge. In thermal engineering, this translates to a more complex thermal control approach to address high heat dissipations, stringent stabilities, the volume of heat that requires transport, and changing thermal environments due to tilting of the entire instrument ±20° twice per orbit. This current work explores how the PACE OCI instrument design has evolved from its initial conception in NASA Goddard’s Instrument Design Laboratory (IDL) to the current iteration of its flight design. The IDL studies explored three separate instrument configurations and two spatial resolutions per configuration, which were then down selected to a single instrument type and spatial resolution for flight instrument development. OCI subsequently went through major project milestones, including Preliminary Design Review (PDR), Critical Design Review (CDR), Pre-Environmental Review (PER) and Pre-Ship Review (PSR), with significant design updates along the way. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive account of OCI’s thermal control architecture evolution and the engineering drivers that have shaped it, with the goal of identifying trends spanning the full instrument development timeline to inform and advance future instrument thermal designs.

PACE↗
NASA NTRS2002

Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Spectra Information from Multiple Independent Astrophysics Data Sets

The Maximum Likelihood (ML) statistical theory required to estimate spectra information from an arbitrary number of astrophysics data sets produced by vastly different science instruments is developed in this paper. This theory and its successful implementation will facilitate the interpretation of spectral information from multiple astrophysics missions and thereby permit the derivation of superior spectral information based on the combination of data sets. The procedure is of significant value to both existing data sets and those to be produced by future astrophysics missions consisting of two or more detectors by allowing instrument developers to optimize each detector's design parameters through simulation studies in order to design and build complementary detectors that will maximize the precision with which the science objectives may be obtained. The benefits of this ML theory and its application is measured in terms of the reduction of the statistical errors (standard deviations) of the spectra information using the multiple data sets in concert as compared to the statistical errors of the spectra information when the data sets are considered separately, as well as any biases resulting from poor statistics in one or more of the individual data sets that might be reduced when the data sets are combined.

Howell, Leonard W., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS2001

AIRS-Light Instrument Concept and Critical Technology Development

Understanding Earth's climate, atmospheric transport mechanisms, and the hydrologic cycle requires a precise knowledge of global atmospheric circulation, temperature profiles, and water vapor distribution. The accuracy of advanced sounders such as AIRS/AMSU/HSB on NASA's Aqua spacecraft can match radiosonde accuracy. It is essential to fold those capabilities fully into the NPOESS, enabling soundings of radiosonde accuracy, every 6 hours around the globe on an operational basis. However, the size, mass, power demands, and thermal characteristics of the Aqua sounding instrument suite cannot be accommodated on the NPOESS spacecraft. AIRS-Light is an instrument concept, developed under the Instrument Incubator Program, which provides IR sounding performance identical to the AIRS instrument, but uses advances in HgCdTe FPA technology and pulse tube cooler technology, as well as design changes to dramatically reduce the size, mass, and power demand, allowing AIRS-Light to meet all NPOESS spacecraft interface requirements. The instrument concept includes substantial re-use of AIRS component designs, including the complex AIRS FPA, to reduce development risk and cost. The AIRS-Light Instrument Incubator program fostered the development of photovoltaic-mode HgCdTe detector array technology for the 13.5-15.4 micron band covered by photoconductive-mode HgCdTe arrays in AIRS, achieved state of the art results in this band, and substantially reduced the development risk for this last new technology needed for AIRS-Light implementation, A demonstration of a prototype 14.5-15.4 micron band IRFPA in a reduced heat-load dewar together with the IMAS pulse tube cryocooler is in progress.

Maschhoff, Kevin↗
NASA NTRS1990

Development of the CLAES instrument aperture door system

The design, assembly, and test processes followed in developing a space-qualified aperture door system are described. A blackbody calibration source is mounted inside the door, requiring the assembly to open and close a minimum of 150 cycles for instrument recalibration. Within the door system are four separate mechanisms, three of which are redundant; a pyro launch latch, a hinge bearing assembly, and a pair of pivot mechanisms. Decoupling devices within the pivot mechanisms allow an active drive unit to automatically overdrive a failed drive unit. The door is also stowable for possible Shuttle retrieval and re-entry. Illustrations and photographs of the flight hardware help acquaint the reader with the design. The aim is to pass on lessons learned in all phases of developing this spaceflight mechanism.

Stubbs, D. M.↗
NASA NTRS1981

Research analysis of Space Shuttle Orbiter entry aerothermodynamic flight data at the NASA Langley Research Center

The methods used to analyze the aerothermodynamic data gathered from the Shuttle protoflights are reviewed. Trajectory and atmospheric reconstruction allow an accurate definition of the freestream environment through which the Shuttle has flown. The reconstructions, combined with aerodynamic coefficient and convective heating rate determinations, provide predictive capability for comparison with future flights. Data are acquired by operational instrumentation (12,000 parameters), development flight instrumentation (4500 measurements), and Orbiter experiments instrumentation; tracking and meteorological data are also included in the analyses. The aerothermodynamic and aerodynamic technology base for large, winged, lifting body entry vehicles is being expanded by the analysis efforts. Sensor locations on the Shuttle and data management techniques are described.

Throckmorton, D. A.↗
NASA NTRS1985

Development of observational and instrumental techniques in hard X-ray and medium energy gamma-ray astronomy

The technical activities, scientific results, related space hardware projects and personnel of the high energy astrophysics program are reported. The development of observational and instrumental techniques in hard X-ray (0.001 to 100 keV) and medium energy gamma-ray (0.1 to 10 MeV) astronomy are examined. Many of these techniques were developed explicitly for use on high altitude balloons where most of the scientific results were obtained. The extensive observational activity using balloons are tabulated. Virtually every research activity will eventually result in a major space hardware development effort.

Pelling, M.↗
NASA NTRS1974

Analytical techniques and instrumentation: A compilation

Technical information on developments in instrumentation is arranged into four sections: (1) instrumentation for analysis; (2) analysis of matter; (3) analysis of electrical and mechanical phenomena; and (4) structural analysis. Patent information for two of the instruments described is presented.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2019

Enhancement of EM Pump Performance through Modeling and Testing

Liquid sodium has seen development as a nuclear reactor coolant in the United States for over 50 years. While sodium has many desirable characteristics as a heat transfer fluid, its reactivity poses numerous engineering challenges for even the most basic plant components like pumps. Despite the challenges, mechanical pumps have seen success in sodium service albeit at the expense of simplicity and flexibility. In fact, significant failures of these pumps have been recorded which can be attributed to their complexity. Notwithstanding the complexity, mechanical pumps are still widely proposed for the main circuit pump of sodium cooled reactors. However, an alternative to mechanical pumps are Electromagnetic Induction Pumps (EMIPs) which use the principle of the Lorentz Force. EMIPs avoid mechanically moving parts in contact with sodium which simplifies the design by avoiding mechanical wear and seals. Therefore, these pumps are generally safer and more reliable than their mechanical counterparts. That being said, EMIPs suffer from relatively low efficiencies that range from 5% to 45%. Some of the inefficiencies are inherent to the EMIPs pumps; namely, inefficiencies arise in the form of resistive heating losses in the fluid itself. However, other inefficiencies arise from Edge Effects which include Finite Length and Finite Width effects. Due to the significant safety advantages EMIPs have compared to mechanical pumps, there is a strong motivation to integrate these technologies into the design of Generation IV liquid-metal-cooled nuclear power plants. However, EMIPs have low efficiencies partly attributed to Edge Effects. Much of the literature focusing on Edge Effects is dated or simply does not exist in the public domain. More recently, numerical models of EMIPs have shown promising results. However, these models are often custom solvers or use complex software suits which limit their application. This report describes the work completed to understand Edge Effects in two EMIPs designs. These designs are the Annular Linear Induction Pump (ALIP) and Permanent Magnet Induction Pump (PMIP) also known as a Moving Magnet Pump (MMP). The methodology developed during this project aim at measuring key performance parameters (pressure-flowrate and efficiency-slip performance) using high temperature liquid-sodium. Baseline experimental measurements were then used to verify the accuracy of numerical models developed in the software suit ANSYS/FLUENT. On the experimental side, instrumentation was developed to characterize the pressure-flowrate and efficiency-slip performance of both the ALIP and PMIP in high-temperature liquid-sodium. Additionally, instrumentation was developed to measure potential output pressure pulsations and the magnetic field distributions. Moreover, a specialized ALIP was constructed to study the impacts magnetic field tapering, also known as coil grading, on the Finite Length Effect. Lastly, experimental performance curves of the PMIP were collected at 300 oC and 600 oC and compared to analytical theory which accounted for Finite Width Effects. These results showed that the Finite Width Effect and non-uniform magnetic field in a PMIP impact the performance. On the numerical side, models were developed using the software suit FLUENT/ANSYS. These methods were initially compared against a simple MHD flow in a Permanent Magnet Electromagnet Flowmeter (PMEMFM). The results were significant in that they showed agreeance between the numerical model and demonstrated that PMEMFM’s could be calibrated numerically. These modeling methods were then applied to a prototypic PMIP. Results showed that this simple model provided reasonably accurate results of the PMIP p-Q performance.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗