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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 73 records · Page 4
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1951

Analysis of Experimental Sea-level Transient Data and Analog Method of Obtaining Altitude Response for Turbine-propeller Engine with Relay-type Speed Control

Correlation has been established between transient engine and control data obtained experimentally and data obtained by simulating the engine and control with an analog computer. This correlation was established at sea-level conditions for a turbine-propeller engine with a relay-type speed control. The behavior of the controlled engine at altitudes of 20,000 and 35,000 feet was determined with an analog computer using the altitude pressure and temperature generalization factors to calculate the new engine constants for these altitudes. Because the engine response varies considerably at altitude some type of compensation appears desirable and four methods of compensation are discussed.

ENGINES, CONTROL↗
NASA NTRS1961

Design and Flight Tests of an Adaptive Control System Employing Normal-Acceleration Command

An adaptive control system employing normal-acceleration command has been designed with the aid of an analog computer and has been flight tested. The design of the system was based on the concept of using a mathematical model in combination with a high gain and a limiter. The study was undertaken to investigate the application of a system of this type to the task of maintaining nearly constant dynamic longitudinal response of a piloted airplane over the flight envelope without relying on air data measurements for gain adjustment. The range of flight conditions investigated was between Mach numbers of 0.36 and 1.15 and altitudes of 10,000 and 40,000 feet. The final adaptive system configuration was derived from analog computer tests, in which the physical airplane control system and much of the control circuitry were included in the loop. The method employed to generate the feedback signals resulted in a model whose characteristics varied somewhat with changes in flight condition. Flight results showed that the system limited the variation in longitudinal natural frequency of the adaptive airplane to about half that of the basic airplane and that, for the subsonic cases, the damping ratio was maintained between 0.56 and 0.69. The system also automatically compensated for the transonic trim change. Objectionable features of the system were an exaggerated sensitivity of pitch attitude to gust disturbances, abnormally large pitch attitude response for a given pilot input at low speeds, and an initial delay in normal-acceleration response to pilot control at all flight conditions. The adaptive system chatter of +/-0.05 to +/-0.10 of elevon at about 9 cycles per second (resulting in a maximum airplane normal-acceleration response of from +/-0.025 g to +/- 0.035 g) was considered by the pilots to be mildly objectionable but tolerable.

McNeill, Water E.↗
NASA NTRS1974

An experimental study of a hybrid adaptive control system

A Liapunov type model reference adaptive control system with five adjustable gains is implemented using a PDP-11 digital computer and an EAI 380 analog computer. The plant controlled is a laboratory type dc servo system. It is made to follow closely a second order linear model. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of implementing this rather complex design using only a minicomputer and a reasonable number of operational amplifiers. Also, it points out that satisfactory performance can be achieved even when certain assumptions necessary for the theory are not satisfied.

Lizewski, E. F.↗
NASA NTRS1986

Ab initio study of the ground state surface of Cu3

The ground state surface of the metallic trimer Cu3 is investigated theoretically. Relativistic and correlation effects are taken into account in ab initio computations, which are calibrated against analogous computations for the 1Sigma(g)+ state of Cu2; the results are presented in tables and analyzed. The Cu3 ground state is found to have a 2B2 C(2v) structure with angle greater than 60 deg, lying 59/cm below a 2A1 C(2v) geometry and 280/cm below the D(3h) equilateral geometry. These findings are shown to be in good agreement with the experimental measurements of Rohlfing and Valentini (1986) and their analysis (in terms of a Jahn-Teller distortion of 2E-prime equilateral-triangle geometry) by Truhlar et al. (1986).

Langhoff, Stephen R.↗
NASA NTRS1991

An experimental study of nonlinear dynamic system identification

A technique based on the Minimum Model Error optimal estimation approach is employed for robust identification of a nonlinear dynamic system. A simple harmonic oscillator with quadratic position feedback was simulated on an analog computer. With the aid of analog measurements and an assumed linear model, the Minimum Model Error Algorithm accurately identifies the quadratic nonlinearity. The tests demonstrate that the method is robust with respect to prior ignorance of the nonlinear system model and with respect to measurement record length, regardless of initial conditions.

Stry, Greselda I.↗
NASA NTRS1972

Design of a specialized computer for on-line monitoring of cardiac stroke volume

The design of a specialized analog computer for on-line determination of cardiac stroke volume by means of a modified version of the pressure pulse contour method is presented. The design consists of an analog circuit for computation and a timing circuit for detecting necessary events on the pressure waveform. Readouts of arterial pressures, systolic duration, heart rate, percent change in stroke volume, and percent change in cardiac output are provided for monitoring cardiac patients. Laboratory results showed that computational accuracy was within 3 percent, while animal experiments verified the operational capability of the computer. Patient safety considerations are also discussed.

Webb, J. A., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1975

A hybrid computer time code reader used to digitize sounding rocket data

A technique is described for utilizing a hybrid computer as a time code reader and digitizer. The NASA 36-bit time code is an absolute time reference for digitizing analog signals to 1 mV resolution at a 1 kHz sampling rate. The analog computer circuit and the operation of the merged analog and digital computer systems is described. A result of this digitization process applied to analog signals recorded on magnetic tape during an auroral sounding rocket flight is given as an example. This is a general technique that could be applied to other areas such as geology, meteorology, oceanography, and seismology.

Dukich, T.↗
NASA NTRS2024

Accelerating Continuous Variable Coherent Ising Machines Via Momentum

The Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) is a non-conventional architecture that takes inspiration from physical annealing processes to solve Ising problems heuristically. Its dynamics are naturally continuous and described by a set of ordinary differential equations that have been proven to be useful for the optimization of continuous variables nonconvex quadratic optimization problems. The dynamics of such Continuous Variable CIMs (CV-CIM) encourage optimization via optical pulses whose amplitudes are determined by the negative gradient of the objective; however, standard gradient descent is known to be trapped by local minima and hampered by poor problem conditioning. In this work, we propose to modify the CV-CIM dynamics using more sophisticated pulse injections based on tried-and-true optimization techniques such as momentum and Adam. Through numerical experiments, we show that the momentum and Adam updates can significantly speed up the CV-CIM’s convergence and improve sample diversity over the original CV-CIM dynamics. We also find that the Adam-CV-CIM’s performance is more stable as a function of feedback strength, especially on poorly conditioned instances, resulting in an algorithm that is more robust, reliable, and easily tunable. More broadly, we identify the CIM dynamical framework as a fertile opportunity for exploring the intersection of classical optimization and modern analog computing.

Ising Model↗