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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

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NASA NTRS1981

Experiment K305: Quantitative analysis of selected bone parameters. Supplement 3A: Trabecular spacing and orientation in the long bones

Values of mean trabecular spacing computed from optical diffraction patterns of 1:1 X-ray micrographs of tibial metaphysis and those obtained by standard image digitization techniques show excellent agreement. Upper limits on values of mean trabecular orientation deduced from diffraction patterns and the images are also in excellent agreement. Values of the ratio of mean trabecular spatial density in a region of 300 micrometers distal to the downwardly directed convexity in the cartilage growth plate to the value adjacent to the plate determined for flight animals sacrificed at recovery were significantly smaller than values for vivarium control animals. No significant differences were found in proximal regions. No significant differences in mean trabecular orientation were detected. Decreased values of trabecular spatial density and of both obsteoblastic activity and trabecular cross-sectional area noted in collateral researches suggest decreased modeling activity under weightlessness.

Judy, M. M.↗

NASA NTRS1983

High resolution schemes and the entropy condition

A systematic procedure for constructing semidiscrete, second order accurate, variation diminishing, five point band width, approximations to scalar conservation laws, is presented. These schemes are constructed to also satisfy a single discrete entropy inequality. Thus, in the convex flux case, convergence is proven to be the unique physically correct solution. For hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, this construction is used formally to extend the first author's first order accurate scheme, and show (under some minor technical hypotheses) that limit solutions satisfy an entropy inequality. Results concerning discrete shocks, a maximum principle, and maximal order of accuracy are obtained. Numerical applications are also presented.

Osher, S.↗

DOE OSTI2023

Reconsidering tympanal-acoustic interactions leads to an improved model of auditory acuity in a parasitoid fly

Although most binaural organisms locate sound sources using neurological structures to amplify the sounds they hear, some animals use mechanically coupled hearing organs instead. One of these animals, the parasitoid fly Ormia ochracea (O. ochracea), has astoundingly accurate sound localization abilities. It can locate objects in the azimuthal plane with a precision of 2°, equal to that of humans, despite an intertympanal distance of only 0.5 mm, which is less than 1/100th of the wavelength of the sound emitted by the crickets that it parasitizes. O. ochracea accomplishes this feat via mechanically coupled tympana that interact with incoming acoustic pressure waves to amplify differences in the signals received at the two ears. In 1995, Miles et al developed a model of hearing mechanics in O. ochracea that represents the tympana as flat, front-facing prosternal membranes, though they lie on a convex surface at an angle from the flies' frontal and transverse planes. The model works well for incoming sound angles less than ±30° but suffers from reduced accuracy (up to 60% error) at higher angles compared to response data acquired from O. ochracea specimens. Despite this limitation, it has been the basis for bio-inspired microphone designs for decades. Here, we present critical improvements to this classic hearing model based on information from three-dimensional reconstructions of O. ochracea's tympanal organ. We identified the orientation of the tympana with respect to a frontal plane and the azimuthal angle segment between the tympana as morphological features essential to the flies' auditory acuity, and hypothesized a differentiated mechanical response to incoming sound on the ipsi- and contralateral sides that depend on these features. We incorporated spatially-varying model coefficients representing this asymmetric response, making a new quasi-two-dimensional (q2D) model. The q2D model has high accuracy (average errors of under 10%) for all incoming sound angles. This improved biomechanical model may inform the design of new microscale directional microphones and other small-scale acoustic sensor systems.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

NASA NTRS1991

Surface reconstruction from scattered data through pruning of unstructured grids

This paper describes an algorithm for reconstructing a surface from a randomly digitized object. Scan data (treated as a cloud of points) is first tesselated out to its convex hull using Delaunay triangulation. The line-of-sight between each surface point and the scanning device is traversed, and any tetrahedra which are pierced by it are removed. The remaining tetrahedra form an approximate solid model of the scanned object. Due to the inherently limited resolution of any scan, this algorithm requires two additional procedures to produce a smooth, polyhedral surface: one process removes long, narrow tetrahedra which span indentations in the surface between digitized points; the other smooths sharp edges. The results for a moderately resolved sample body and a highly resolved aircraft are displayed.

Maksymiuk, C. M.↗

DOE OSTI2025

McCormick envelopes in mixed-integer PDE-constrained optimization

McCormick envelopes are a standard tool for deriving convex relaxations of optimization problems that involve polynomial terms. Such McCormick relaxations provide lower bounds, for example, in branch-and-bound procedures for mixed-integer nonlinear programs but have not gained much attention in PDE-constrained optimization so far. This lack of attention may be due to the distributed nature of such problems, which on the one hand leads to infinitely many linear constraints (generally state constraints that may be difficult to handle) in addition to the state equation for a pointwise formulation of the McCormick envelopes and renders bound-tightening procedures that successively improve the resulting convex relaxations computationally intractable. We analyze McCormick envelopes for a model problem class that is governed by a semilinear PDE involving a bilinearity and integrality constraints. We approximate the nonlinearity and in turn the McCormick envelopes by averaging the involved terms over the cells of a partition of the computational domain on which the PDE is defined. This yields convex relaxations that underestimate the original problem up to an a priori error estimate that depends on the mesh size of the discretization. These approximate McCormick relaxations can be improved by means of an optimization-based bound-tightening procedure. We show that their minimizers converge to minimizers to a limit problem with a pointwise formulation of the McCormick envelopes when driving the mesh size to zero. We provide a computational example, for which we certify all of our imposed assumptions. The results point to both the potential of the methodology and the gaps in the research that need to be closed. Our methodology provides a framework first for obtaining pointwise underestimators for nonconvexities and second for approximating them with finitely many linear inequalities in an infinite-dimensional setting.

Approximations and Expansions↗

DOE OSTI2026

Instabilities and phase transitions in architected metamaterials: a gradient-enhanced continuum approach

Architected metamaterials such as foams and lattices exhibit a wide range of properties governed by microstructural instabilities and emerging phase transitions. Their macroscopic response–including energy dissipation during impact, large recoverable deformations, morphing between configurations, and auxetic behavior–remains difficult to capture with conventional continuum models, which often rely on discrete approaches that limit scalability. In this work, we propose a nonlocal continuum formulation that captures both stable and unstable responses of elastic architected metamaterials. The framework extends anisotropic hyperelasticity by introducing nonlocal variables and internal length scales reflective of microstructural features. Local polyconvex free-energy models are systematically augmented with two families of non-(poly)convex energies, enabling both metastable and bistable responses. Implementation in a finite element framework enables solution using a hybrid monolithic–staggered strategy. Simulations capture densification fronts, forward and reverse transitions, hysteresis loops, imperfection sensitivity, and globally coordinated auxetic modes. Overall, this framework provides a robust foundation for accelerated modeling of instability-driven phenomena in architected metamaterials, while enabling extensions to anisotropic, dissipative, and active systems as well as integration with data-driven and machine learning approaches.

42 ENGINEERING↗

NASA NTRS1987

Design of a grating spectrometer from a 1:1 Offner mirror system

A 1:1 Offner mirror system is modified to work as a grating spectrometer for the infrared by placing a grating on the secondary convex mirror of the system. Slight adjustment of the configuration combined with tilt of the secondary provide the necessary degrees of freedom to correct for astigmatism of the system. Additional control may be obtained by using a holographic optical element (HOE), constructed to add necessary compensating aberrations. Details of the best configuration and the limitations of performance are presented.

Kwo, Deborah↗

DOE OSTI2023

Uncertain characterization of reservoir fluids due to brittleness of equation of state regression

Equations of state (EoS) play a central role in modeling the phase equilibrium of fluid mixtures. Their parameterization involves fitting a model to experimental data, i.e., solving a nonlinear, non-convex, multivariate optimization problem. The latter requires one to select design variables, domains of definition for each variable, and weights assigned to individual measurements. We demonstrate that subjective choices of an optimization algorithm and an initial guess also impact the regression process. Consequently, EoS predictions are fundamentally uncertain even after the EoS tuning to a limited set of experimental data points. We demonstrate this observation for two hydrocarbon reservoir fluids, in which five properties of the heaviest carbon fraction are treated as design variables. While all the optimization algorithms and initial guesses match experimental data for the gas and liquid properties, the resulting EoS parameterizations lead to dramatically different predictions of the fluid’s thermophysical behavior in the unsampled pressure and temperature regions. In conclusion, we propose the probabilistic treatment of design variables to quantify the predictive uncertainty of the resulting fluid models.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

A survey of unsupervised learning methods for high-dimensional uncertainty quantification in black-box-type problems

Constructing surrogate models for uncertainty quantification (UQ) on complex partial differential equations (PDEs) having inherently high-dimensional O(10 n ), n ≥ 2, stochastic inputs (e.g., forcing terms, boundary conditions, initial conditions) poses tremendous challenges. The “curse of dimensionality” can be addressed with suitable unsupervised learning techniques used as a pre-processing tool to encode inputs onto lower-dimensional subspaces while retaining its structural information and meaningful properties. In this work, we review and investigate thirteen dimension reduction methods including linear and nonlinear, spectral, blind source separation, convex and non-convex methods and utilize the resulting embeddings to construct a mapping to quantities of interest via polynomial chaos expansions (PCE). Here, we refer to the general proposed approach as manifold PCE (m-PCE), where manifold corresponds to the latent space resulting from any of the studied dimension reduction methods. To investigate the capabilities and limitations of these methods we conduct numerical tests for three physics-based systems (treated as black-boxes) having high-dimensional stochastic inputs of varying complexity modeled as both Gaussian and non-Gaussian random fields to investigate the effect of the intrinsic dimensionality of input data. We demonstrate both the advantages and limitations of the unsupervised learning methods and we conclude that a suitable m-PCE model provides a cost-effective approach compared to alternative algorithms proposed in the literature, including recently proposed expensive deep neural network-based surrogates and can be readily applied for high-dimensional UQ in stochastic PDEs.

42 ENGINEERING↗

NASA NTRS1977

High pressure flame system for pollution studies with results for methane-air diffusion flames

A high pressure flame system was designed and constructed for studying nitrogen oxide formation in fuel air combustion. Its advantages and limitations were demonstrated by tests with a confined laminar methane air diffusion flame over the pressure range from 1 to 50 atm. The methane issued from a 3.06 mm diameter port concentrically into a stream of air contained within a 20.5 mm diameter chimney. As the combustion pressure is increased, the flame changes in shape from wide and convex to slender and concave, and there is a marked increase in the amount of luminous carbon. The height of the flame changes only moderately with pressure.

Miller, I. M.↗

NASA NTRS1981

Unsteady Newton-Busemann flow theory. I - Airfoils

Newtonian flow theory for unsteady flow at very high Mach numbers is completed by the addition of a centrifugal force correction to the impact pressures. The correction term is the unsteady counterpart of Busemann's centrifugal force correction to impact pressures in steady flow. For airfoils of arbitary shape, exact formulas for the unsteady pressure and stiffness and damping-in-pitch derivatives are obtained in closed form, which require only numerical quadratures of terms involving the airfoil shape. They are applicable to airfoils of arbitrary thickness having sharp or blunt leading edges. For wedges and thin airfoils these formulas are greatly simplified, and it is proved that the pitching motions of thin airfoils of convex shape and of wedges of arbitrary thickness are always dynamically stable according to Newton-Busemann theory. Leading-edge bluntness is shown to have a favorable effect on the dynamic stability; on the other hand, airfoils of concave shape tend toward dynamic instability over a range of axis positions if the surface curvature exceeds a certain limit. As a byproduct, it is also shown that a pressure formula recently given by Barron and Mandl for unsteady Newtonian flow over a pitching power-law shaped airfoil is erroneous and that their conclusion regarding the effect of pivot position on the dynamic stability is misleading.

Hui, W. H.↗

DOE OSTI2026

SODAs: sparse optimization for the discovery of differential and algebraic equations

Differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) integrate ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with algebraic constraints, providing a fundamental framework for developing models of dynamical systems characterized by time-scale separation, conservation laws and physical constraints. While sparse optimization has revolutionized model development by allowing data-driven discovery of parsimonious models from a library of possible equations, existing approaches for dynamical systems assume DAEs can be reduced to ODEs by eliminating variables before model discovery. This assumption limits the applicability of such methods for DAE systems with unknown constraints and time scales. We introduce sparse optimization for differential-algebraic systems (SODAs), a data-driven method for the identification of DAEs in their explicit form. By discovering the algebraic and dynamic components sequentially without prior identification of the algebraic variables, this approach leads to a sequence of convex optimization problems. It has the advantage of discovering interpretable models that preserve the structure of the underlying physical system. To this end, SODAs improves since SODAs is singular numerical stability when handling high correlations between library terms, caused by near-perfect algebraic relationships, by iteratively refining the conditioning of the candidate library. We demonstrate the performance of our method on biological, mechanical and electrical systems, showcasing its robustness to noise in both simulated time series and real-time experimental data.

DAE↗

NASA NTRS1988

Highly automated transmission-edge mapping

Instrumentation and software are described, which are used to determine maps of properties of materials based on optical transmission spectra. In addition to a Fourier transform spectrometer, the hardware includes an xy-stage containing a small stationary aperture and two computer controlled stepper motors for positioning the sample. This idea has been used for years but this implementation is highly automated compared to those previously described. All mapping has been in the 2-15 micron wavelength range but this is not an inherent limitation of the technique. In this spectral range, useful results may be obtained with apertures as small as 25 microns in diameter. The software is described including the algorithm for obtaining the cut-on wavelength from a semiconductor spectrum. Data from both transverse slices and longitudinal slabs of narrow bandgap alloy semiconductors are shown including composition maps for materials solidified with convex and concave growth interfaces.

Szofran, F. R.↗

NASA NTRS2007

Implementation of a Point Algorithm for Real-Time Convex Optimization

The primal-dual interior-point algorithm implemented in G-OPT is a relatively new and efficient way of solving convex optimization problems. Given a prescribed level of accuracy, the convergence to the optimal solution is guaranteed in a predetermined, finite number of iterations. G-OPT Version 1.0 is a flight software implementation written in C. Onboard application of the software enables autonomous, real-time guidance and control that explicitly incorporates mission constraints such as control authority (e.g. maximum thrust limits), hazard avoidance, and fuel limitations. This software can be used in planetary landing missions (Mars pinpoint landing and lunar landing), as well as in proximity operations around small celestial bodies (moons, asteroids, and comets). It also can be used in any spacecraft mission for thrust allocation in six-degrees-of-freedom control.

Acikmese, Behcet↗

DOE OSTI2023

Running decompactification, sliding towers, and the distance conjecture

We study towers of light particles that appear in infinite-distance limits of moduli spaces of 9-dimensional $\mathcal{N}$ = 1 string theories, some of which notably feature decompactification limits with running string coupling. The lightest tower in such decompactification limits consists of the non-BPS Kaluza-Klein modes of Type I' string theory, whose masses depend nontrivially on the moduli of the theory. We work out the moduli-dependence by explicit computation, finding that despite the running decompactification the Distance Conjecture remains satisfied with an exponential decay rate α ≥ 1 / $\sqrt{d-2}$ in accordance with the sharpened Distance Conjecture. The related sharpened Convex Hull Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture also passes stringent tests. Our results non-trivially test the Emergent String Conjecture, while highlighting the important subtlety that decompactifcation can lead to a running solution rather than to a higher-dimensional vacuum.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

DOE OSTI2026

Bio-inspired alula-based winglet design for enhanced heat transfer in high temperature fin-and-tube heat exchangers

Fin-and-tube heat exchangers (FTHEs) are widely used for high-temperature flue-gas heat recovery, but their performance is often limited by wake regions and non-uniform fin-surface temperatures. This study proposes and numerically evaluates four bio-inspired longitudinal vortex generator (VG) configurations in a high-temperature FTHE with flue-gas inlet temperature ∼1230 K: double-delta, curved double-delta, alula, and a new curved-alula geometry. The reference fin is not hydraulically plain; it already incorporates leading-edge separation columns and convex protrusions, so the alula-type winglets are assessed as downstream add-ons acting on a strongly disturbed flow. In a second step, perforations (one, two and three circular holes) are introduced into the curved-alula VGs to further tailor the flow field. Three-dimensional simulations with the Shear Stress Transpor (SST) $k - ω$ model, temperature-dependent flue-gas properties and conjugate conduction are carried out for gas-side Reynolds numbers $Re_g ≈ 8.0$ x $10^2 - 3.6$ x $10^3$ (mass flow rates 0.5 – 2.5 g/s), and the designs are compared in terms of surface heat flux, Nusselt number, friction factor and hydrothermal performance factor (HTPF). For this already-promoted fin, the additional downstream winglets provide moderate, incremental hydrothermal gains. At the highest Reynolds number, the best non-perforated design (curved-alula) increases surface heat flux from 1630.9 to 1794.7 kW/m² (∼ 10 % gain) and the Nusselt number from 227.6 to 242.6 (∼ 7 % gain), while the friction factor rises from 0.26 to about 0.30, yielding HTPF values close to unity (∼ 0.9 – 1.0). Introducing circular perforations into the curved-alula winglets acts mainly as a wake-bleeding refinement: the three-hole configuration provides a heat flux of 1824.7 kW/m² and a pressure drop of 127.9 Pa, with HTPF in the range ∼ 1.03 – 1.14 and a small (∼ 1 – 3 %) improvement over the solid curved-alula design. Flow-field analysis shows that the perforated curved-alula VGs shrink tube-wake regions, thin the thermal boundary layer and homogenize the fin-surface temperature (outlet-gas temperature ∼ 510 – 520 K and fin-surface temperature ∼ 420 – 421 K for the three-hole case). An optimal flue-gas mass flow rate of ∼ 1 g/s ($Re_g ≈ 1.5$ x $10^3$) is identified, beyond which additional heat-transfer gains are offset by rapidly increasing pressure losses. Overall, the results highlight that initial fin geometry and VG placement are as important as VG shape: alula-based winglets are expected to yield larger relative gains on simpler flat-fin layouts or when positioned closer to the fin leading edge and tube

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2023

Grid Optimization Competition on Synthetic and Industrial Power Systems

This paper summarizes a grid optimization (GO) competition effort in the United States to find the best solution strategies for up to interconnect-scale power system networks with around 32,000 buses. The optimization problem is a mixedinteger, non-convex non-linear problem, (MINLP) and includes discrete variables such as unit commitment and line switching, control settings (transformer taps and phase shifters with impedance correction tables), and bus shunts. The case study includes six actual industry grids as well as 16 realistic synthetic grids created by three different dataset teams. The winners are selected and ranked based on scoring criteria, which consider the solution quality (such as objective functions) within time limits. Nine winner teams are selected from 26 competitor teams. The results achieved by different teams are described and the performance of different algorithms on synthetic grids and actual industry grids are compared and analyzed.

mixed-integer non-linear programming↗

DOE OSTI2021

Scattering amplitudes and simple canonical forms for simple polytopes

We provide an efficient recursive formula to compute the canonical forms of arbitrary d-dimensional simple polytopes, which are convex polytopes such that every vertex lies precisely on d facets. For illustration purposes, we explicitly derive recursive formulae for the canonical forms of Stokes polytopes, which play a similar role for a theory with quartic interaction as the Associahedron does in planar bi-adjoint φ 3 theory. As a by-product, our formula also suggests a new way to obtain the full planar amplitude in φ 4 theory by taking suitable limits of the canonical forms of constituent Stokes polytopes.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗