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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 91 records · Page 5
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS1989

Real-time cartesian force feedback control of a teleoperated robot

Active cartesian force control of a teleoperated robot is investigated. An economical microcomputer based control method was tested. Limitations are discussed and methods of performance improvement suggested. To demonstrate the performance of this technique, a preliminary test was performed with success. A general purpose bilateral force reflecting hand controller is currently being constructed based on this control method.

Campbell, Perry↗
NASA NTRS1991

An adaptively-refined Cartesian mesh solver for the Euler equations

A method for adaptive refinement of a Cartesian mesh for the solution of the steady Euler equations is presented. The algorithm creates an initial uniform mesh and cuts the body out of that mesh. The mesh is then refined based on body curvature. Next, the solution is converged to a steady state using a linear reconstruction and Roe's approximate Riemann solver. Solution-adaptive refinement of the mesh is then applied to resolve high-gradient regions of the flow. The numerical results presented show the flexibility of this approach and the accuracy attainable by solution-based refinement.

De Zeeuw, Darren↗
NASA NTRS1990

Stable boundary conditions for Cartesian grid calculations

The inviscid Euler equations in complicated geometries are solved using a Cartesian grid. This requires solid wall boundary conditions in the irregular grid cells near the boundary. Since these cells may be orders of magnitude smaller than the regular grid cells, stability is a primary concern. An approach to this problem is presented and its use is illustrated.

Berger, M. J.↗
NASA NTRS1992

Cartesian based grid generation/adaptive mesh refinement

Grid adaptation has recently received attention in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) community as a means to capture the salient features of a flowfield by either moving grid points of a structured or by adding cells in an unstructured manner. An approach based on a background cartesian mesh is investigated from which the geometry is 'cut' out of the mesh. Once the mesh is obtained, a solution on this coarse grid is found, that indicates which cells need to be refined. This process of refining/solving continues until the flow is grid refined in terms of a user specified global parameter (such as drag coefficient etc.). The advantages of this approach are twofold: the generation of the base grid is independent of the topology of the bodies or surfaces around/through which the flow is to be computed, and the resulting grid (in uncut regions) is highly isotropic, so that the truncation error is low. The flow solver (which, along with the grid generation is still under development) uses a completely unstructured data base, and is a finite volume, upwinding scheme. Current and future work will address generating Navier-Stokes suitable grids by using locally aligned and normal face/cell refining. The attached plot shows a simple grid about two turbine blades.

Coirier, William J.↗
NASA NTRS1991

Adaptive Cartesian coordinate control of space based robot manipulators

A Cartesian coordinate robot controller is presented for use when the mass properties of a load are unknown. The mass, center of mass, and moments of inertia of the end-effector are assumed unknown. All other inertial properties of the robot are assumed known. This knowledge of the parameters allows the control of the end-effector in a way similar to the use of reaction wheels to control the orientation of a satellite. This is the primary result of the controller. The basic method of the controller is similar to that used for terrestrial-based robot manipulators. The controller is demonstrated using a new simulation algorithm which is based on Hamilton's form of the equations of motion.

Walker, Michael W.↗
NASA NTRS1993

Time-dependent thermocapillary convection in a Cartesian cavity - Numerical results for a moderate Prandtl number fluid

The present numerical simulation explores a thermal-convective mechanism for oscillatory thermocapillary convection in a shallow Cartesian cavity for a Prandtl number 6.78 fluid. The computer program developed for this simulation integrates the two-dimensional, time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations and the energy equation by a time-accurate method on a stretched, staggered mesh. Flat free surfaces are assumed. The instability is shown to depend upon temporal coupling between large scale thermal structures within the flow field and the temperature sensitive free surface. A primary result of this study is the development of a stability diagram presenting the critical Marangoni number separating steady from the time-dependent flow states as a function of aspect ratio for the range of values between 2.3 and 3.8. Within this range, a minimum critical aspect ratio near 2.3 and a minimum critical Marangoni number near 20,000 are predicted below which steady convection is found.

Peltier, L. J.↗
NASA NTRS1993

3D automatic Cartesian grid generation for Euler flows

We describe a Cartesian grid strategy for the study of three dimensional inviscid flows about arbitrary geometries that uses both conventional and CAD/CAM surface geometry databases. Initial applications of the technique are presented. The elimination of the body-fitted constraint allows the grid generation process to be automated, significantly reducing the time and effort required to develop suitable computational grids for inviscid flowfield simulations.

Melton, John E.↗
NASA NTRS1995

Development and application of a 3D Cartesian grid Euler method

This report describes recent progress in the development and application of 3D Cartesian grid generation and Euler flow solution techniques. Improvements to flow field grid generation algorithms, geometry representations, and geometry refinement criteria are presented, including details of a procedure for correctly identifying and resolving extremely thin surface features. An initial implementation of automatic flow field refinement is also presented. Results for several 3D multi-component configurations are provided and discussed.

Melton, John E.↗
NASA NTRS1996

Solwnd: A 3D Compressible MHD Code for Solar Wind Studies. Version 1.0: Cartesian Coordinates

Solwnd 1.0 is a three-dimensional compressible MHD code written in Fortran for studying the solar wind. Time-dependent boundary conditions are available. The computational algorithm is based on Flux Corrected Transport and the code is based on the existing code of Zalesak and Spicer. The flow considered is that of shear flow with incoming flow that perturbs this base flow. Several test cases corresponding to pressure balanced magnetic structures with velocity shear flow and various inflows including Alfven waves are presented. Version 1.0 of solwnd considers a rectangular Cartesian geometry. Future versions of solwnd will consider a spherical geometry. Some discussions of this issue is presented.

Deane, Anil E.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Progress in the Simulation of Steady and Time-Dependent Flows with 3D Parallel Unstructured Cartesian Methods

The proposed paper will present recent extensions in the development of an efficient Euler solver for adaptively-refined Cartesian meshes with embedded boundaries. The paper will focus on extensions of the basic method to include solution adaptation, time-dependent flow simulation, and arbitrary rigid domain motion. The parallel multilevel method makes use of on-the-fly parallel domain decomposition to achieve extremely good scalability on large numbers of processors, and is coupled with an automatic coarse mesh generation algorithm for efficient processing by a multigrid smoother. Numerical results are presented demonstrating parallel speed-ups of up to 435 on 512 processors. Solution-based adaptation may be keyed off truncation error estimates using tau-extrapolation or a variety of feature detection based refinement parameters. The multigrid method is extended to for time-dependent flows through the use of a dual-time approach. The extension to rigid domain motion uses an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerlarian (ALE) formulation, and results will be presented for a variety of two- and three-dimensional example problems with both simple and complex geometry.

Aftosmis, M. J.↗
NASA NTRS1998

A Domain-Decomposed Multi-Level Method for Adaptively Refined Cartesian Grids with Embedded Boundaries

The work presents a new method for on-the-fly domain decomposition technique for mapping grids and solution algorithms to parallel machines, and is applicable to both shared-memory and message-passing architectures. It will be demonstrated on the Cray T3E, HP Exemplar, and SGI Origin 2000. Computing time has been secured on all these platforms. The decomposition technique is an outgrowth of techniques used in computational physics for simulations of N-body problems and the event horizons of black holes, and has not been previously used by the CFD community. Since the technique offers on-the-fly partitioning, it offers a substantial increase in flexibility for computing in heterogeneous environments, where the number of available processors may not be known at the time of job submission. In addition, since it is dynamic it permits the job to be repartitioned without global communication in cases where additional processors become available after the simulation has begun, or in cases where dynamic mesh adaptation changes the mesh size during the course of a simulation. The platform for this partitioning strategy is a completely new Cartesian Euler solver tarcreted at parallel machines which may be used in conjunction with Ames' "Cart3D" arbitrary geometry simulation package.

Aftosmis, M. J.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Triangle Geometry Processing for Surface Modeling and Cartesian Grid Generation

Cartesian mesh generation is accomplished for component based geometries, by intersecting components subject to mesh generation to extract wetted surfaces with a geometry engine using adaptive precision arithmetic in a system which automatically breaks ties with respect to geometric degeneracies. During volume mesh generation, intersected surface triangulations are received to enable mesh generation with cell division of an initially coarse grid. The hexagonal cells are resolved, preserving the ability to directionally divide cells which are locally well aligned.

Aftosmis, Michael J.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Cartesian-Grid Simulations of a Canard-Controlled Missile with a Free-Spinning Tail

The proposed paper presents a series of simulations of a geometrically complex, canard-controlled, supersonic missile with free-spinning tail fins. Time-dependent simulations were performed using an inviscid Cartesian-grid-based method with results compared to both experimental data and high-resolution Navier-Stokes computations. At fixed free stream conditions and canard deflections, the tail spin rate was iteratively determined such that the net rolling moment on the empennage is zero. This rate corresponds to the time-asymptotic rate of the free-to-spin fin system. After obtaining spin-averaged aerodynamic coefficients for the missile, the investigation seeks a fixed-tail approximation to the spin-averaged aerodynamic coefficients, and examines the validity of this approximation over a variety of freestream conditions.

Murman, Scott M.↗
NASA NTRS2002

Numerical Simulation of Rolling-Airframes Using a Multi-Level Cartesian Method

A supersonic rolling missile with two synchronous canard control surfaces is analyzed using an automated, inviscid, Cartesian method. Sequential-static and time-dependent dynamic simulations of the complete motion are computed for canard dither schedules for level flight, pitch, and yaw maneuver. The dynamic simulations are compared directly against both high-resolution viscous simulations and relevant experimental data, and are also utilized to compute dynamic stability derivatives. The results show that both the body roll rate and canard dither motion influence the roll-averaged forces and moments on the body. At the relatively, low roll rates analyzed in the current work these dynamic effects are modest, however the dynamic computations are effective in predicting the dynamic stability derivatives which can be significant for highly-maneuverable missiles.

Murman, Scott M.↗
NASA NTRS2003

Implicit Approaches for Moving Boundaries in a 3-D Cartesian Method

This work considers numerical simulation of three-dimensional flows with time-evolving boundaries. Such problems pose a variety of challenges for numerical schemes, and have received a substantial amount of attention in the recent literature. Since such simulations are unsteady, time-accurate solution of the governing equations is required. In special cases, the body motion can be treated by a uniform rigid motion of the computational domain. For the more general situation of relative-body motion, however, this simplification is unavailable and the simulations require a mechanism for ensuring that the mesh evolves with the moving boundaries. This involves a "remeshing" of the computational domain (either localized or global) at each physical timestep, and places a premium on both the speed and robustness of the remeshing algorithms. This work presents a method which includes unsteady flow simulation, rigid domain motion, and relative body motion using a time-evolving Cartesian grid system in three dimensions.

Murman, Scott M.↗
NASA NTRS2004

On the Use of CAD and Cartesian Methods for Aerodynamic Optimization

The objective for this paper is to present the development of an optimization capability for Curt3D, a Cartesian inviscid-flow analysis package. We present the construction of a new optimization framework and we focus on the following issues: 1) Component-based geometry parameterization approach using parametric-CAD models and CAPRI. A novel geometry server is introduced that addresses the issue of parallel efficiency while only sparingly consuming CAD resources; 2) The use of genetic and gradient-based algorithms for three-dimensional aerodynamic design problems. The influence of noise on the optimization methods is studied. Our goal is to create a responsive and automated framework that efficiently identifies design modifications that result in substantial performance improvements. In addition, we examine the architectural issues associated with the deployment of a CAD-based approach in a heterogeneous parallel computing environment that contains both CAD workstations and dedicated compute engines. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework for a design problem that features topology changes and complex geometry.

Nemec, M.↗
NASA NTRS2003

CAD-Based Aerodynamic Design of Complex Configurations using a Cartesian Method

A modular framework for aerodynamic optimization of complex geometries is developed. By working directly with a parametric CAD system, complex-geometry models are modified nnd tessellated in an automatic fashion. The use of a component-based Cartesian method significantly reduces the demands on the CAD system, and also provides for robust and efficient flowfield analysis. The optimization is controlled using either a genetic or quasi-Newton algorithm. Parallel efficiency of the framework is maintained even when subject to limited CAD resources by dynamically re-allocating the processors of the flow solver. Overall, the resulting framework can explore designs incorporating large shape modifications and changes in topology.

Nemec, Marian↗