Human-Autonomy Teaming and Function Allocation
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Aircraft operators rely on gas path analysis techniques for monitoring the performance and health of their gas turbine engine assets. This is accomplished by analyzing discernable shifts in measurement parameters acquired from the engine. This paper reviews the founding mathematical principles of gas path analysis, including conventional approaches applied for estimating engine performance deterioration. Considerations for extending the application of gas path analysis techniques to Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) systems is also discussed, and simulated results from their application to an EAP concept comprised of turbomachinery and electrical system hardware is provided. Results are provided comparing the parameter estimation accuracy offered by taking a whole-system approach towards the problem setup versus that offered by analyzing each subsystem individually. For the latter, the importance of having accurate direct or inferred measurements of external mechanical torque loads placed upon turbomachinery shafts is emphasized.
“What gets measured gets done ”or “measure it to manage it”. The statements have become matter of fact. However, measurement (and even metrics) alone cannot fully communicate an organization’s story without the point of accountability. As a dynamic org, we must measure what is necessary, using the appropriate lenses to analyze the most relevant information that allows robust decision-making. A key function of Program Planning and Control (PP&C) is to assist HRP in the development of such strategy that ensures the proper execution of program research goals. With introspection of the Technical Officer role as defined by 2 CFR(i.e., Part 200, Part 1800)and subsequent governance under the NASA Grant and Cooperative Agreement Manual (GCAM), we’ve realized an obvious disconnect among Principal Investigator’s (PI),technical communication with the elements and some of the administrative/fiduciary requirements that should run parallel to the science work. This find has introduced new program risks as evidenced through incomplete deliverables or other less-than-successful requirements through the lifecycle for work we fund. One solution the Grants Technical Officer proposes is for PP&C to share in the communication with stakeholders of grants administration much earlier in the award process in attempt to reduce programmatic risks; particularly in data, reporting and performance management. As such, the planned IWS 2022 session will focus on(plenary) topics that include (1) definition of the grant lifecycle, (2) anatomy of a grant(NF1687 the award document), and (3)performance measurement/post-award monitoring. As HH&P pursues its strategic objectives to evolve the directorate into a data rich and knowledge rich organization, it has become increasingly important to develop the multiple levels of insight across the program to ensure data and other reporting(qualitative/quantitative), alongside proper administration. And the desired outcome is to make certain HRP meets/exceeds the accountability standard that our research information is received, maintained and accessible in posterity.
Accreting X-ray pulsars (XRPs) undergo luminous X-ray outbursts during which the luminosity-dependent spectral and timing features of the neutron star’s emission can be analyzed in detail, thus shedding light on the accretion regime at work. We took advantage of a monitoring campaign performed with NuSTAR, Swift/XRT, AstroSat and NICER, to follow the Be/X-ray Binary 2S 1553-542 along one of its rare outbursts and trace its spectral and timing evolution. We report the discovery of a luminosity-dependent cyclotron line energy for the first time in this source. The pulse profiles and pulsed fraction also show variability along the outburst, consistently with the interpretation that the source transitions from the sub-critical to the super-critical accretion regime, separated by a critical luminosity ofLcrit≈4×1037erg/s.
The purpose of this Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) is to hold our second of several discussions on select DIP and AES-topics. The first AES- DIP Technical Interchange Meeting was an in-person event in Washington DC. This is a followup meeting to deep dive into some of the areas discussed during the 1st TIM
ESA’s Hera space mission is on its way to the mission target, the binary asteroid (65803) Didymos. HyperScout-H, one of the instruments onboard Hera, is a hyperspectral imager operating in the visible and near-infrared regions between 0.65 and 0.95 μm. HyperScout-H will enable a detailed assessment of the composition of both objects, Didymos and its satellite Dimorphos, the characterization of space weathering effects, and the possible presence of exogenous material on their surfaces. To monitor instrument functionality, calibration exposures are acquired regularly. This article describes the in-flight calibrations carried out for HyperScout-H during the commissioning and cruise phases. Bias and dark exposures, as well as stellar field observations, were acquired several times after launch. We update the calibration data and monitor instrument performance in the space environment. In addition, images of Earth and Moon were acquired from distances of 1.5 × 10 6 to 2.0 × 10 6 km, and Mars and its satellite were imaged during the flyby. In five images, the surface of Mars fills the entire field of view, enabling cross-validation of HyperScout-H results with those reported by other Mars missions. We characterize the detector under in-flight operational conditions. The calibration data indicate that the bias pattern is stable, the dark current remains negligible for short exposures, and the detector response is highly linear. We quantify the field-of-view alignment and geometric distortion, and evaluate the point spread function based on the stellar field observations. Stellar observations and Mars swing-by data provide updated radiometric calibration constants, suggesting that in-flight conditions have slightly modified the detector’s spectral response. In-flight calibrations are essential to ensure data quality and reliability.
Solar water heating systems are not new, but they have not become prevalent in most of the U.S. Most of the country is cold enough that indirect solar thermal systems are required for freeze protection, and average installed cost of these systems is $9,000 to $10,000 for typical systems on single-family homes. These costs can vary significantly in different markets and with different contractors, and federal and regional incentives can reduce these up-front costs by 50% or more. In western Massachusetts, an affordable housing developer built a community of 20 homes with a goal of approaching zero net energy consumption. In addition to excellent thermal envelopes and PV systems, the developer installed a solar domestic water heating system (SDHW) on each home. The Consortium for Advanced Residential Buildings (CARB), a research consortium funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Building America program, commissioned some of the systems, and CARB was able to monitor detailed performance of one system for 28 months.
The U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE) is responsible for remediation of environmental contamination and long-term stewardship of sites associated with the legacy of nuclear weapons production during the Cold War in the United States. Protection of human health and the environment will be required for hundreds or even thousands of years at many legacy sites. USDOE continually evaluates and applies advances in science and technology to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of surface and groundwater remedies (USDOE 2011). This paper is a synopsis of ecological engineering applications that USDOE is evaluating to assess the effectiveness of remedies at former uranium processing sites in the southwestern United States. Ecological engineering remedies are predicated on the concept that natural ecological processes at legacy sites, once understood, can be beneficially enhanced or manipulated. Advances in tools for characterizing key processes and for monitoring remedy performance are demonstrating potential. We present test cases for four ecological engineering remedies that may be candidates for international applications.
The Bellerophon software system supports CHIMERA, a production-level HPC application that simulates the evolution of core-collapse supernovae. Bellerophon enables CHIMERA's geographically dispersed team of collaborators to perform job monitoring and real-time data analysis from multiple supercomputing resources, including platforms at OLCF, NERSC, and NICS. Its multi-tier architecture provides an encapsulated, end-to-end software solution that enables the CHIMERA team to quickly and easily access highly customizable animated and static views of results from anywhere in the world via a cross-platform desktop application.
nuclear power plants. Although the nuclear industry has made steady improvement in outage optimization, each day of a refueling outage still represents an opportunity to save millions of dollars and each day an outage extends past its planned end date represents millions of dollars that may have been spent unnecessarily. Reducing planned outage duration or preventing outage extensions requires careful management of the outage schedule as well as constant oversight and monitoring of work completion during the outage execution. During a typical outage, there are typically more than 10,000 activities on the schedule that, if not managed efficiently, may cause expensive outage delays. Management of outages currently relies largely on paper-based resources and general-purpose office software. A typical tool currently used to monitor work performance is a burn-down curve, where total remaining activities are plotted against the baseline schedule to track bulk work completion progress. While these tools are useful, there is still considerable uncertainty during a typical outage that bulk work progress is adequate and therefore a lot of management time is spent analyzing the situation on a daily basis. This paper describes recent advances made in developing a framework for the design of visual outage information presentation, as well as an overview of the scientific principles that informed the development of the visualizations. To test the utility of advanced visual outage information presentation, an outage management dashboard software application was created as part of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Outage Control Center project. This dashboard is intended to present all the critical information an outage manager would need to understand the current status of a refueling outage. The dashboard presents the critical path, bulk work performance, key performance indicators, outage milestones and metrics relating current performance to historical performance. Additionally, the dashboard includes data analysis tools to allow outage managers to drill down into the underlying data to understand the drivers of the indicators.
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Refueling outages remain one of the largest opportunities for improving capacity factor and reducing costs available to commercial nuclear power plants. Although the nuclear industry has made steady improvement in outage optimization, each day of a refueling outage still represents an opportunity to save millions of dollars and each day an outage extends past its planned end date represents millions of dollars that may have been spent unnecessarily. Reducing planned outage duration or preventing outage extensions requires careful management of the outage schedule as well as constant oversight and monitoring of work completion during the outage execution. During a typical outage, there are typically more than 10,000 activities on the schedule that, if not managed efficiently, may cause expensive outage delays. Management of outages currently relies largely on paper-based resources and general-purpose office software. A typical method currently used to monitor work performance is a burn-down curve, where total remaining activities are plotted against the baseline schedule to track bulk work completion progress. While methods like this are useful, there is still considerable uncertainty during a typical outage whether bulk work progress is adequate and therefore a lot of management time is spent analyzing the situation on a daily basis. This paper is a case study of how new technology, in combination with established human-factors and user-centered design knowledge, can be used to support Outage Control Center (OCC) personnel decision making. In particular, we describe recent advances made in developing a framework for the design of visual outage information presentation, as well as an overview of the human factors principles that informed the development of the visualizations. To test the utility of advanced visual outage information presentation, an outage management dashboard software application was created as part of the Department of Energy's Advanced Outage Control Center project (AOCC). This dashboard is intended to present all the critical information an outage manager would need to understand the current status of a refueling outage. The dashboard presents the critical path, bulk work performance, key performance indicators, outage milestones and metrics relating current performance to historical performance. Additionally, the dashboard includes data analysis tools to allow outage managers to drill down into the underlying data to understand the drivers of the indicators. (authors)
The Department of Energy and Idaho National Laboratory are restarting the TREAT (Transient Reactor Test facility) reactor and are interested in updating the reactor's instrumentation regarding the analysis of the test fuel. Optical fibers' ability to make distributed temperature measurements coupled with its small footprint makes optical fiber a viable candidate to monitor fuel performance in the TREAT reactor. In addition to TREAT reactor, the U.S. Department of Energy and nuclear reactor companies like TerraPower have shown interest in using distributed optically based instrumentation for nuclear instrumentation in Next-Gen reactors. The work presented in this paper focuses on optimizing commercial silica optical fiber so that it can survive the temperatures and radiation fluences of the TREAT reactor and Next-Gen reactors. Temperatures in the TREAT reactor can spike to around 900 - 1000 C and so the goal of this work is to optimize optical fiber to survive these temperatures.
Next-generation radioxenon monitoring systems are reaching maturity and are expected to improve certain aspects of performance in verifying the absence of nuclear tests. To predict the improvement in detecting and locating nuclear releases, thousands of releases all over the globe were simulated and the global detection probability was calculated. This was done for the International Monitoring System network of noble gas samplers as it currently exists (25 certified stations), and how it would be for potential future network sizes of 39 and 79 stations. The probability of detection was calculated for releases ranging from 10 10 Bq to 10 16 Bq of 133 Xe and presented as coverage maps and global integrals for both current and next-generation monitoring systems. Similarly, the number of detecting stations and the number of detecting samples were tabulated to elucidate the possibilities for enhanced location capability. Improvements in global detection coverage are maximized at different release sizes in a way that depends on the station density. For example, for releases of 3×10 14 Bq and 39 stations, the detection probability would rise from 60% to 70% with next-generation systems, while for releases of 10 13 Bq and 79 stations, it would rise from 37% to 52%. Achieving an average of two detecting stations requires a 1015 Bq release for a 39-station network and a 10 14 Bq release for a 79-station network. The largest impact of using next-generation systems may be the confidence, failure tolerance, and location capability that arise from obtaining multiple samples associated with a single release event.
After performing a first multi-model exercise in 2015 a comprehensive and technically more demanding atmospheric transport modelling challenge was organized in 2016. Release data were provided by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization radiopharmaceutical facility in Sydney (Australia) for a one month period. Measured samples for the same time frame were gathered from six International Monitoring System stations in the Southern Hemisphere with distances to the source ranging between 680 (Melbourne) and about 17,000 km (Tristan da Cunha). Participants were prompted to work with unit emissions in pre-defined emission intervals (daily, half-daily, 3-hourly and hourly emission segment lengths) and in order to perform a blind test actual emission values were not provided to them. Despite the quite different settings of the two atmospheric transport modelling challenges there is common evidence that for long-range atmospheric transport using temporally highly resolved emissions and highly space-resolved meteorological input fields has no significant advantage compared to using lower resolved ones. As well an uncertainty of up to 20% in the daily stack emission data turns out to be acceptable for the purpose of a study like this. Model performance at individual stations is quite diverse depending largely on successfully capturing boundary layer processes. No single model-meteorology combination performs best for all stations. Moreover, the stations statistics do not depend on the distance between the source and the individual stations. Finally, it became more evident how future exercises need to be designed. Set-up parameters like the meteorological driver or the output grid resolution should be pre-scribed in order to enhance diversity as well as comparability among model runs.
Surface parameter measurements are routinely used during deep well construction to monitor and guide drilling conditions for improved performance and reduced costs. However, these measurements are of reduced value without a standard to aid in evaluation and decision making. A method is demonstrated whereby drill bit constraint models are used to interpret drilling response parameters. Drill rig parameter data for well GDC-36 at the Geysers Geothermal Field Power were acquired by Geysers Power Company and drilling contractor Kenai Drilling using Pason US DataHub and evaluated. Drilling parameters are evaluated using laboratory-validated rock reduction models for predicting the phenomenological response of drag bits (Detournay and Defourny, 1992) along with other model constraints in computational algorithms. The method is used to evaluate overall bit performance, monitor bit integrity, and detect the presence of drillstring vibrations and other conditions contributing to bit failure; comparisons are made to observations of bit wear and damage. The method will be applied in real-time to improve decision-making on subsequent wells and has applicability to development of advanced analytics on future geothermal wells using real-time electronic drilling recorder (EDR) data for improved performance and reduced drilling costs.
A primary subject of the present research in particle therapy is to ensure the precise irradiation of the target volume. The prompt gamma timing (PGT) method provides one possibility for in vivo range verification during the irradiation of patients. Prompt gamma rays with high energies are emitted promptly due to nuclear reactions of protons with tissue. The arrival time of these gammas to the detector reflects the stopping process of the primary protons in tissue and are directly correlated to the range. Due to the time resolution of the detector and the proton bunch time spread, as well as drifts of the bunch phase with respect to the accelerator frequency, timing spectra are smeared out and compromise the accuracy of range information intended for future clinical applications. Nevertheless, counteracting this limitation and recovering range information from the PGT measured spectra, corrections using a phase beam monitor can be performed. A first prototype of phase beam monitor was tested at GSI Darmstadt, where measurements of the energy profile of the ion bunches were performed. At the ELBE accelerator Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), set up to provide bremsstrahlung photons in very short pulses, a constant fraction algorithm for the incoming digital signals was evaluated, which is used for optimizing the time resolution. Studies of scattering experiments with different thin targets and detector positions are accomplished at Oncoray Dresden, where a clinical proton beam is available. These experiments allow a basic characterization of the proton bunch structure and the detection yield. (authors)