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NASA NTRS2024

Graphene-Based Filtration Media for Spacecraft Potable Water Systems: An Early Investigation

Graphene-based materials have allowed fundamental advances in fields such as energy storage, electronics development, material science, optics, medicine, and water processing due to their unique two-dimensional structure, mechanical robustness, large surface, and high conductivity. However, little to no effort has been devoted to exploiting and studying these materials to develop new water technologies suited for spacecraft applications. One such application is the potential use of graphene-based materials as filtration media for reclaimed water. Therefore, studying the adsorptive performance of these new materials becomes crucial in identifying the opportunity to replace/upgrade state-of-the-art filtration media currently used in space vehicles with water recovery capability; especially if consumable requirements can be lessened as a result of extended filtration capacity. This early Life-Support-Systems investigation pioneers in graphene research by testing a number of graphene-based materials in comparative adsorption and antimicrobial experiments where contaminant removal efficiency, maximum adsorption capacity, and bacterial reduction are probed. This preliminary investigation informs on the practicality of using graphene-based materials as filtration media and provides a discussion on the scaling-up and optimization of this prospective filtration technology for spacecraft potable water systems.

graphene↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Graphene-Based Filtration Media for Spacecraft Potable Water Systems: An Early Investigation

graphene↗

DOE OSTI2017

LDQ10: a compact ultra low-power radiation-hard 4 × 10 Gb/s driver array

Here, a High-speed and low-power VCSEL driver is an important component of the Versatile Link for the high-luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) experiments. A compact low-power radiation-hard 4 × 10 Gb/s VCSEL driver array (LDQ10) has been developed in 65 nm CMOS technology. Each channel in LDQ10 can provide a modulation current up to 8 mA and bias current up to 12 mA. Edge pre-emphasis is employed to compensate for the bandwidth limitations due to parasitic and the turn-on delay of VCSEL devices. LDQ10 occupies a chip area of 1900 μm × 1700 μm and consumes 130 mW power for typical current settings. The modulation amplitude degrades less than 5% after 300 Mrad total ionizing dose. LDQ10 can be directly wire-bonded to the VCSEL array and it is a suitable candidate for the Versatile Link.

42 ENGINEERING↗

NASA NTRS2024

Graphene-Based Filtration Media for Spacecraft Potable Water Systems: An Early Investigation

Graphene-based materials have allowed fundamental advances in fields such as energy storage, electronics development, material science, optics, medicine, and water processing due to its unique two-dimensional structure, mechanical robustness, large surface, and high conductivity. However, little to no effort has been devoted to exploiting and studying these materials to develop new water technologies suited for spacecraft applications. One such application is the potential use of graphene-based materials as filtration media for reclaimed water. Therefore, studying the adsorptive performance of these new materials becomes crucial in identifying the opportunity to replace/upgrade State-of-the-Art filtration media currently used in space vehicles with water-recovery capability; especially if consumable requirements can be lessened as a result of extended filtration capacity. This early life-support-systems investigation pioneers in graphene-research by testing a number of graphene-based materials in comparative adsorption and antimicrobial experiments where contaminant removal efficiency, maximum adsorption capacity, and log reduction are probed. This preliminary investigation informs on the practicability of using graphene-based materials as filtration media and provides a discussion on the scaling-up and optimization of this prospective filtration technology for spacecraft potable water systems.

graphene↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Graphene-Based Filtration Media for Spacecraft Potable Water Systems: An Early Investigation

Graphene-based materials have allowed fundamental advances in fields such as energy storage, electronics development, material science, optics, medicine, and water processing due to its unique two-dimensional structure, mechanical robustness, large surface, and high conductivity. However, little to no effort has been devoted to exploiting and studying these materials to develop new water technologies suited for spacecraft applications. One such application is the potential use of graphene-based materials as filtration media for reclaimed water. Therefore, studying the adsorptive performance of these new materials becomes crucial in identifying the opportunity to replace/upgrade State-of-the-Art filtration media currently used in space vehicles with water-recovery capability; especially if consumable requirements can be lessened as a result of extended filtration capacity. This early life-support-systems investigation pioneers in graphene-research by testing a number of graphene-based materials in comparative adsorption and antimicrobial experiments where contaminant removal efficiency, maximum adsorption capacity, and log reduction are probed. This preliminary investigation informs on the practicability of using graphene-based materials as filtration media and provides a discussion on the scaling-up and optimization of this prospective filtration technology for spacecraft potable water systems.

graphene↗

DOE OSTI2021

Performance Analysis of PIConGPU: Particle-in-Cell on GPUs using NVIDIA’s NSight Systems and NSight Compute

PIConGPU, Particle In Cell on GPUs, is an open source simulations framework for plasma and laser-plasma physics used to develop advanced particle accelerators for radiation therapy of cancer, high energy physics and photon science. While PIConGPU has been optimized for at least 5 years to run well on NVIDIA GPU-based clusters, there has been limited exploration by the development team of potential scalability bottlenecks using recently updated and new tools including NVIDIA’s NVProf tool and the brand-new NVIDIA NSight Suite (Systems and Compute) tools. PIConGPU is a highly optimized application that runs production jobs at scale on a system Oak Ridge Leadership Facility’s (OLCF) Summit supercomputer (using the full machine at 4600 nodes; at 98% of GPU utilization on all ~28000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs). PIConGPU has been selected as one of the the eight applications for OLCF’s coveted Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) program aimed at the facility’s Frontier supercomputer (OLCF’s first exascale system to launch in 2021), to partner with our vendors (primary vendors: AMD and Cray/HPE) ensuring that Frontier will be able to perform large-scale science when it opens to users in 2022. To this effect, performance engineers on the PIConGPU team wanted to dive deep into the application to understand at the finest granularity, which portions of the code could be further optimized to exploit the hardware on Summit at it’s maximum potential and also to elucidate which key kernels should be tracked and optimized for the CAAR effort to port this code to Frontier. Any bottlenecks that are observed via performance profiling on Summit are likely to also impact scalability on the Frontier-dev system and the Frontier Early Access (EA) system. Additionally, the engineers wanted to take a closer look at the newest NVIDIA profiling tools which allows us to identify the most useful features on these tools and will provide an opportunity to compare it to new AMD and Cray’s performance analysis tool releases and provide feedback to our vendor partners on what features are most important and mission critical for CAAR efforts. The primary goal of this report is to focus on the evaluation of PIConGPU’s most time-intensive kernels using NVProf and NSight Suite. Three kernels, Current Deposition (also known as Compute Current), Particle Push (Move and Mark), and Shift Particles are known to be some of the most time-consuming kernels in PIConGPU. The Current xi Deposition kernel and Particle Push kernel both set up the particle attributes for running any physics simulation with PIConGPU, so it is crucial to improve the performance of these two kernels. In this report, we measure single GPU metrics for the three kernels, offer high level takeaways from the conducted analysis, and compare the profiling data from NSight Compute to that of NVProf. This analysis was performed using a grid size of 240 x 272 x 224, and 10 time steps with the Mid-November Figure of Merit (FOM) run setup. The Traveling Wave Electron Acceleration (TWEAC) science case used in this run is a representative science case for PIConGPU. This execution can also be used for baseline analysis on AMD MI50/ MI60 systems. As of the time of writing, the PIConGPU application has limited use for features of NSight Systems, so this report will mainly focus on insights garnered from NSight Compute. For this analysis, we run the “full” metric set available in NSight Compute version 2020.1.2 and use NSight Systems version 2020.3.1 to generate the application timeline.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

NASA NTRS2017

Developing Model Benchtop Systems for Microbial Experimental Evolution

Understanding how microbes impact an ecosystem has improved through advances of molecular and genetic tools, but creating complex systems that emulate natural biology goes beyond current technology. In fact, many chemical, biological, and metabolic pathways of even model organisms are still poorly characterized. Even then, standard laboratory techniques for testing microbial impact on environmental change can have many drawbacks; they are time-consuming, labor intensive, and are at risk of contamination. By having an automated process, many of these problems can be reduced or even eliminated. We are developing a benchtop system that can run for long periods of time without the need for human intervention, involve multiple environmental stressors at once, perform real-time adjustments of stressor exposure based on current state of the population, and minimize contamination risks. Our prototype device allows operators to generate an analogue of real world micro-scale ecosystems that can be used to model the effects of disruptive environmental change on microbial ecosystems. It comprises of electronics, mechatronics, and fluidics based systems to control, measure, and evaluate the before and after state of microbial cultures from exposure to environmental stressors. Currently, it uses four parallel growth chambers to perform tests on liquid cultures. To measure the population state, optical sensors (LED/photodiode) are used. Its primary selection pressure is UV-C radiation, a well-studied stressor known for its cell- and DNA-damaging effects and as a mutagen. Future work will involve improving the current growth chambers, as well as implementing additional sensors and environmental stressors into the system. Full integration of multiple culture testing will allow inter-culture comparisons. Besides the temperature and OD sensors, other types of sensors can be integrated such as conductivity, biomass, pH, and dissolved gasses such as CO and O. Additional environmental stressor systems like temperature (extreme heat or cold), metal toxicity, and other forms of radiation will increase the scale and testing range.

Developing↗

DOE OSTI2018

A Charge Sensitive Pre-Amplifier for Smart Point-of-Care Devices Employing Polymer Based Lab-on-a-Chip

With increasing emphasis on implantable and portable medical devices, low-power, small-chip-area sensor readout system realized in lab-on-a-chip (LOC) platform is gaining more and more importance these days. The main building blocks of the LOC system include a front-end transducer that generates an electrical signal in response to the presence of an analyte of interest, signal processing electronics to process the signal to comply with a specific transmission protocol and a low-power transmitter, all realized in a single integrated circuit platform. Low power consumption and compactness of the components are essential requirements of the LOC system. This paper presents a novel charge sensitive pre-amplifier developed in a standard 180-nm CMOS process suitable for implementing in an LOC platform. The pre-amplifier converts the charge generated by a pyroelectric transducer into a voltage signal, which provides a measurement of the temperature variation in biological fluids. The proposed design is capable of providing 0.8-mV/pC gain while consuming only 2.1 μW of power. Finally, the pre-amplifier composed of integrated components occupies an area of 0.038 mm 2 .

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

NASA NTRS1991

Organic synthesis in the outer Solar System: Recent laboratory simulations for Titan, the Jovian planets, Triton and comets

We tabulate the most abundant gases and their radiation yields, for two experimental pressures: 0.24 mb, more relevant to upper atmosphere excitation, and 17 mb, more relevant to tropospheric, cosmic ray excitation. The yields computed in the 0.24 mb experiment combined with measured electronic fluxes and a simple, eddy diffusion model of Titan's atmosphere predict abundances of detected molecules in agreement with those found by Voyager and for heavier products, in somewhat better agreement with observation than photochemical absolute reaction rate kinetics models. All Voyager organics are accounted for and no detectable products are found that Voyager did not detect. A striking increase of products with multiple bonds is found with decreasing pressure. Hydrocarbon abundances decline slowly with increasing carbon number. Additionally, we list preliminary estimates for the yield of the heteropolymer, which seems to be produced in a quantity comparable (in moles of C+N consumed) to the total amount of gaseous product. The production rate required to sustain Titan's haze against sedimentation also indicates yields of this order. As can be seen from the table, over 10(exp 9) years substantial amounts of these products can accumulate on the surface -- ranging from cm thickness for the (C+N equals 4) species to a meter or more for HCN and C2H2; we also expect a meter or more of tholins. Similar analyses have been or are being done for the Jovian planets and Triton. Charged particle irradiation of hydrocarbon clathrates or mixed hydrocarbon/water ices produces a range of organic products, reddening and darkening of the ices and characteristic infrared spectra. From such spectra, the predicted emission by fine particles in cometary comae well-matches the observed 3.4 micron emission spectra of Comet Halley and other recent comets. Heliocentric evolution of organic emission features in comets is predicted. Organic products of such ice irradiation may account for colors and albedos on some of the satellites in the outer solar system, especially Triton and Pluto, where solid methane is known to exist.

Sagan, C.↗

NASA NTRS2010

Two-Phase Thermal Switching System for a Small, Extended Duration Lunar Science Platform

Issue: extended duration lunar science platforms, using solar/battery or radioisotope power, require thermal switching systems that: a) Provide efficient cooling during the 15-earth-day 390 K lunar day; b) Consume minimal power during the 15-earth-day 100 K lunar night. Objective: carry out an analytical study of thermal switching systems that can meet the thermal requirements of: a) International Lunar Network (ILN) anchor node mission - primary focus; b) Other missions such as polar crater landers. ILN Anchor Nodes: network of geophysical science platforms to better understand the interior structure/composition of the moon: a) Rationale: no data since Apollo seismic stations ceased operation in 1977; b) Anchor Nodes: small, low-power, long-life (6-yr) landers with seismographic and a few other science instruments (see next chart); c) WEB: warm electronics box houses ILN anchor node electronics/batteries. Technology Need: thermal switching system that will keep the WEB cool during the lunar day and warm during the lunar night.

Bugby, D.↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Microbial Methods for Testing a Novel Spacecraft Bioburden Reduction Method

In order to circumvent the contamination of microorganisms in both extraterrestrial and terrestrial environments, spacecraft hardware must often be sterilized. Current sterilization practices are both time-consuming and expensive. Techniques such as dry heat sterilization and scattered/localized electric field enhancements are incompatible with a variety of hardware materials as well as complex surface shapes. Our group is testing a novel femtosecond pulsed laser for the rapid sterilization of spacecraft hardware using high photon fluxes, which is both an efficient and effective technique to ensure a reduced microbial burden aboard spacecraft. This method is likely to be effective because microorganisms have not encountered high photon fluxes in their evolutionary history and thus contain no protective mechanisms against them. To assess the effectiveness of pulsed laser sterilization, we used a combination of scanning electron microscopy and elemental analysis for the examination of damaged spores on metal coupons, as well as microbiology methods for spore assays. The surfaces of metal coupons inoculated with Bacillus subtilis were illuminated with femtosecond pulses at various wavelengths below the damage threshold for the aluminum. After laser treatment, metal coupon samples were sonicated to dislodge spores, serially diluted, and finally plated and incubated. Results show that sterilization efficiency is favorable in some conditions. The NASA standards for spore assays are a preliminary demonstration in establishing the trend in ability to kill spores. The results show potential for the dual pulse illumination method as a sterilization technique for planetary protection applications.

Maha S Ulhaq↗

DOE OSTI2024

Radiolytic evaluation of a new technetium redox control reagent for advanced used nuclear fuel separations

Technetium is a problematic radioisotope for used nuclear fuel (UNF) and subsequent waste management owing to its high environmental mobility and coextraction in reprocessing technologies as the pertechnetate anion (TcO 4 - ). Consequently, several strategies are under development to control the transport of this radioisotope. A proposed approach is to use diaminoguanidine (DAG) for TcO 4 - and transuranic ion redox control. Although the initial DAG molecule is ultimately consumed in the redox process, its susceptibility to radiolysis is currently unknown under envisioned UNF reprocessing conditions, which is a critical knowledge gap for evaluating its overall suitability for this role. To this end, we report the impacts of steady-state gamma irradiation on the rate of DAG radiolysis in water, aqueous 2.0 M nitric acid (HNO 3 ), and in a biphasic solvent system composed of aqueous 2.0 M HNO 3 in contact with 1.5 M N,N-di-(2-ethylhexyl)isobutyramide (DEHiBA) dissolved in n-dodecane. In addition, we report chemical kinetics for the reaction of DAG with key transients arising from electron pulse radiolysis, specifically the hydrated electron (e aq - ), hydrogen atom (H ˙ ), and hydroxyl ( ˙ OH) and nitrate (NO 3 ˙ ) radicals. The DAG molecule exhibited significant reactivity with the ˙ OH and NO 3 ˙ radicals, indicating that oxidation would be the predominant degradation pathway in radiation environments. This is consistent with its role as a reducing agent. Steady-state gamma irradiations demonstrated that DAG is readily degraded within a few hundred kilogray, the rate of which was found to increase upon going from water to HNO 3 containing solutions and solvents systems. This was attributed to a thermal reaction between DAG and the predominant HNO 3 radiolysis product, nitrous acid (HNO 2 ), k(DAG + HNO 2 ) = 5480 ± 85 M -1 s -1 . Although no evidence was found for the radiolysis of DAG altering the radiation chemistry of the contacted DEHiBA/n-dodecane phase in the investigated biphasic system, the utility of DAG as a redox control reagent will likely be limited by significant competition with its degradation by HNO 2 .

38 RADIATION CHEMISTRY, RADIOCHEMISTRY, AND NUCLEA↗

NASA NTRS1994

Ozone as a laundry agent on orbit and on the ground

Ozone (03), is the strongest commercial oxidizing agent for aqueous systems and may be ideal for space station laundering operations. It can be generated electronically from air in situ. It kills virtually all microorganisms, attacks many organics and inorganics, and breaks down stable ring structures of benzene and related oils when coupled with ultra violet radiation. It cleans and disinfects in cold water without the need for detergent. It leaves no residues. Ozone permits up to 90% wash water recycling and it eliminates wash time, water volume, and recycling problems of a detergent rinse. Ozone is self purging and converts spontaneously to oxygen. It can be rapidly purged by well established catalytic and thermal processes. Scaling of an ozone laundering system for space station may have commercial applications in a consumer model for home use.

Agosto, William N.↗

DOE OSTI2024

Hyperspectral Detection of the Fluorescence Shift between Chirality-Sorted Empty and Water-Filled Single-Wall Carbon Nanotube Enantiomers

Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) have extraordinary electronic and optical properties that depend strongly on their exact chiral structure and their interaction with their inner and outer environment. The fluorescence (PL) of semiconducting SWCNTs, for instance, will shift depending on the molecules with which the SWCNT’s hollow core is filled. These interaction-induced shifts are challenging to resolve on the ensemble level in samples containing a mixture of different filling contents due to the relatively large inhomogeneous line width of the ensemble SWCNT PL compared to the size of these shifts. To circumvent this inhomogeneous broadening, single-tube spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging are often applied, which until now required time-consuming statistical studies. Here, we present hyperspectral PL microscopy combined with automated SWCNT segmenting based on either principal component analysis or a convolutional neural network, capable of both spatially and spectrally resolving the PL along the length of many individual SWCNTs at the same time and automatically fitting peak positions and line widths of individual SWCNTs. The methodology is demonstrated by accurately determining the emission shifts and line widths of thousands of left- and right-handed empty and water-filled SWCNTs coated with a chiral surfactant, resulting in four statistical distributions which cannot be resolved in ensemble spectroscopy of unsorted samples. The results demonstrate a robust method to quickly probe ensemble properties with single-enantiomer spectral resolution. Moreover, it promises to be an absolute quantitative method to characterize the relative abundances of SWCNTs with different handedness or filling content in macroscopic samples, simply by counting individual species.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

DOE OSTI2021

Detection of diffusion limited oxidation in thermally aged ethylene propylene rubber cable insulation material

The lifetime prediction of electrical cable insulation in nuclear power plants (NPPs) is primarily based on accelerated aging. Polymeric insulation exposed to accelerated aging at high temperatures may demonstrate diffusion limited oxidation (DLO) where oxygen within the material is consumed faster than can be supplied by diffusion from the surrounding air. This situation leads to equilibrium oxidation at the exposed surfaces and limited oxidation away from the surfaces. Therefore, DLO results in a heterogeneously aged material which can lead to underestimation of lifetime for in-service cable insulation. In this study, the presence of inhomogeneous aging caused by DLO was evaluated on cross-sectioned cable insulation specimens made of ethylene propylene rubber (EPR). The studies were performed on thermally aged specimens (165 °C, 1 day and 165 °C, 16 days) using local measurement techniques including nanoindentation, micro-Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) - energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS). All the results indicate some degree of heterogenous aging, with 165 °C, 16 days, aging demonstrating highest degree of oxidative degradation on the inside edges presumably caused due to copper catalyzed oxidation.

Pallaka, Madhusudhan Reddy↗

NASA NTRS2009

Production of Oxygen from Lunar Regolith by Molten Oxide Electrolysis

This paper describes the use of the molten oxide electrolysis (MOE) process for the extraction of oxygen for life support and propellant, and silicon and metallic elements for use in fabrication on the Moon. The Moon is rich in mineral resources, but it is almost devoid of chemical reducing agents, therefore, molten oxide electrolysis is ideal for extraction, since the electron is the only practical reducing agent. MOE has several advantages over other extraction methods. First, electrolytic processing offers uncommon versatility in its insensitivity to feedstock composition. Secondly, oxide melts boast the twin key attributes of highest solubilizing capacity for regolith and lowest volatility of any candidate electrolytes. The former is critical in ensuring high productivity since cell current is limited by reactant solubility, while the latter simplifies cell design by obviating the need for a gas-tight reactor to contain evaporation losses as would be the case with a gas or liquid phase fluoride reagent operating at such high temperatures. Alternatively, MOE requires no import of consumable reagents (e.g. fluorine and carbon) as other processes do, and does not rely on interfacing multiple processes to obtain refined products. Electrolytic processing has the advantage of selectivity of reaction in the presence of a multi-component feed. Products from lunar regolith can be extracted in sequence according to the stabilities of their oxides as expressed by the values of the free energy of oxide formation (e.g. chromium, manganese, Fe, Si, Ti, Al, magnesium, and calcium). Previous work has demonstrated the viability of producing Fe and oxygen from oxide mixtures similar in composition to lunar regolith by molten oxide electrolysis (electrowinning), also called magma electrolysis having shown electrolytic extraction of Si from regolith simulant. This paper describes recent advances in demonstrating the MOE process by a joint project with participation by NASA KSC and MSFC, and Ohio State University and MIT. Progress in measuring cell efficiency for oxygen production, development of non reacting electrodes, and cell feeding and withdrawal will be discussed.

Curreri, Peter A.↗

DOE OSTI2019

Energy Reporting: Device Demonstration, Communication Protocols, and Codes and Standards

Energy reporting is the principle that all energy-using devices in buildings should be able to track their own energy use and report this to the local network. Energy reporting can provide building owners with easy access to highly granular energy use data. This report makes the case that energy reporting should become a free basic feature of all devices, and reports on a project intended to move us towards that goal. The project collected a set of demonstration devices with energy reporting features, including products that were modified by the project team or the manufacturer, or are already available for sale. To show these devices operating live at meetings and conferences, the team created a management system that queries the energy reporting devices for their data, stores the data, and displays it in compelling visualizations. The devices covered a wide range, including heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (thermostat and air purifier); lighting (individual bulb, task light, and auto-dimming overhead light); a vehicle charger; a water heater; electronics (notebook personal computer and universal serial bus charger); and three external meters (one integral with a dimming light switch). The demonstration uses a variety of communication protocols. The report reviews existing communication protocols that support energy reporting and describes how to use them with a proposed reference data model for energy reporting. It also assesses ways that energy codes and standards processes can be leveraged to drive energy reporting technology into the market. Energy reporting could ultimately save California on the order of 2.5 terawatt-hours per year and about $0.8 billion per year. Energy reporting is a highly practical technology with minimal (sometimes no) cost to consumers and manufacturers. This report discusses creation of the energy reporting devices themselves, analysis and recommendations for data models and protocols for energy reporting, and energy codes and standards implications of energy reporting technology. While energy reporting does not directly save energy, it provides information for better decision-making to save energy in changing equipment operation, maintenance, and replacement.

devices↗

NASA NTRS2007

E-Textile Antennas for Space Environments

The ability to integrate antennas and other radio frequency (RF) devices into wearable systems is increasingly important as wireless voice, video, and data sources become ubiquitous. Consumer applications including mobile computing, communications, and entertainment, as well as military and space applications for integration of biotelemetry, detailed tracking information and status of handheld tools, devices and on-body inventories are driving forces for research into wearable antennas and other e-textile devices. Operational conditions for military and space applications of wireless systems are often such that antennas are a limiting factor in wireless performance. The changing antenna platform, i.e. the dynamic wearer, can detune and alter the radiation characteristics of e-textile antennas, making antenna element selection and design challenging. Antenna designs and systems that offer moderate bandwidth, perform well with flexure, and are electronically reconfigurable are ideally suited to wearable applications. Several antennas, shown in Figure 1, have been created using a NASA-developed process for e-textiles that show promise in being integrated into a robust wireless system for space-based applications. Preliminary characterization of the antennas with flexure indicates that antenna performance can be maintained, and that a combination of antenna design and placement are useful in creating robust designs. Additionally, through utilization of modern smart antenna techniques, even greater flexibility can be achieved since antenna performance can be adjusted in real-time to compensate for the antenna s changing environment.

Kennedy, Timothy F.↗