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Heat conductive loss along supporting wires, air conductive loss in evacuated chamber - loss corrections for hemispherical emission measurements by decay method
Auroral luminosities at vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) wavelengths are combined with simultaneous and coincident ionospheric electron density measurements made by the Chatanika radar to relate ionospheric conductances to optical emissions. The auroral luminosities are obtained along the magnetic meridian through Chatanika with the auroral imaging photometers on the Dynamics Explorer 1 satellite as the radar scans in the magnetic meridian to measure electron density and conductivity as a function of altitude and latitude. The observations are used to determine an empirical relationship between the luminosities measured at VUV wavelengths and the Hall and Pedersen conductances.
Electric-field (EF) and radio-frequency (RF) emissions generated in the exhaust plumes of the diagnostic testbed facility thruster (DTFT) and the SSME are examined briefly for potential applications to plume diagnostics and engine health monitoring. Hypothetically, anomalous engine conditions could produce measurable changes in any characteristic EF and RF spectral signatures identifiable with a 'healthly' plumes. Tests to determine the presence of EF and RF emissions in the DTFT and SSME exhaust plumes were conducted. EF and RF emissions were detected using state-of-the-art sensors. Analysis of limited data sets show some apparent consistencies in spectral signatures. Significant emissions increases were detected during controlled tests using dopants injected into the DTFT.
A search has been conducted for 80-350 micron emission from the Tycho, Kepler, and Cas A supernova remnants. The bolometric fluxes are less than 5 x 10 to the -11th, 4 x 10 to the -12th, and 9 x 10 to the -12th W/sq m, respectively, for the entire radio shell, corresponding to luminosities less than 25,000, 1100, and 1500 solar luminosities (within 2 standard deviations). The ratio of dust to gas in Cas A is at least 10 times less than the 'normal' ratio.
An analysis is conducted of the composition and thermal structure of Titan's upper atmosphere, and the relative importance of airglow-excitation processes, on the basis of Voyager 1 UV spectrometer data for solar occultation and airglow. Attention is also given to the Smith et al. (1982) optical depth profiles for the evening terminator, entrance occultation, and asymptotic temperature. A magnetospheric power input figure is obtained that is 25 times smaller than the initial estimate by Strobel and Shemansky (1982).
The low-emissions combustor development described is directed toward advanced high pressure aircraft gas-turbine applications. The emphasis of this research is to reduce nitrogen oxides (NOx) at high-power conditions and to maintain carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons at their current low levels at low power conditions. Low-NOx combustors can be classified into rich-burn and lean-burn concepts. Lean-burn combustors can be further classified into lean-premixed-prevaporized (LPP) and lean direct injection (LDI) concepts. In both concepts, all the combustor air, except for liner cooling flow, enters through the combustor dome so that the combustion occurs at the lowest possible flame temperature. The LPP concept has been shown to have the lowest NOx emissions, but for advanced high-pressure-ratio engines, the possibility of autoignition or flashback precludes its use. LDI differs from LPP in that the fuel is injected directly into the flame zone, and thus, it does not have the potential for autoignition or flashback and should have greater stability. However, since it is not premixed and prevaporized, good atomization is necessary and the fuel must be mixed quickly and uniformly so that flame temperatures are low and NOx formation levels are comparable to those of LPP. The LDI concept described is a multipoint fuel injection/multiburning zone concept. Each of the multiple fuel injectors has an air swirler associated with it to provide quick mixing and a small recirculation zone for burning. The multipoint fuel injection provides quick, uniform mixing and the small multiburning zones provide for reduced burning residence time, resulting in low NOx formation. An integrated-module approach was used for the construction where chemically etched laminates, diffusion bonded together, combine the fuel injectors, air swirlers, and fuel manifold into a single element. The multipoint concept combustor was demonstrated in a 15 sector test. The configuration tested had 36 fuel injectors and fuel-air mixers that replaced two fuel injectors in a conventional dual-annular combustor. During tests, inlet temperatures were up to 870 K and inlet pressures were up to 5400 kPa. A correlation was developed that related the NOx emissions with the inlet temperature, inlet pressure, fuel-air ratio, and pressure drop. At low-power conditions, fuel staging was used so that high combustion efficiency was obtained with only one-fourth of the fuel injectors flowing. The test facility had optical access, and visual images showed the flame to be very short, approximately 25 mm long.
A search was conducted for J = 1 yields 0 CO emission from 22 galaxies, detecting half, as part of a survey to study star formation in small to medium size galaxies. Although substantial variation was found in the star formation efficiencies of the sample galaxies, there is no apparent systematic trend with galaxy size.
NASA Langley Research Center's (LaRC) High Intensity Radiated Fields Laboratory (HIRF Lab) recently conducted a series of electromagnetic radiated emissions tests under a cooperative agreement with Delta Airlines and an interagency agreement with the FAA. The frequency spectrum environment at a commercial airport was measured on location. The environment survey provides a comprehensive picture of the complex nature of the electromagnetic environment present in those areas outside the aircraft. In addition, radiated emissions tests were conducted on portable electronic devices (PEDs) that may be brought onboard aircraft. These tests were performed in both semi-anechoic and reverberation chambers located in the HIRF Lab. The PEDs included cell phones, laptop computers, electronic toys, and family radio systems. The data generated during the tests are intended to support the research on the effect of radiated emissions from wireless devices on aircraft systems. Both tests systems relied on customized control and data reduction software to provide test and instrument control, data acquisition, a user interface, real time data reduction, and data analysis. The software executed on PC's running MS Windows 98 and 2000, and used Agilent Pro Visual Engineering Environment (VEE) development software, Common Object Model (COM) technology, and MS Excel.
Survey observations were conducted for H alpha-emission stars in the Orion region using the Kiso Schmidt telescope and partly the CTIO Curtis Schmidt telescope. In the area of about 25 square degrees, a total of 236 H alpha-emission objects, mostly supposed to be T Tau type stars, have been detected among which 155 are new ones including 6 non-stellar objects. Celestial coordinates and V-magnitude are measured for the detected objects. Eye estimation of the H alpha-emission intensity is also made at three epochs in a time span of about two years, where notable variation of H alpha intensity was found in 68 out of 236 objects. Besides a remarkable concentration along the northern dark cloud complex, a loose concentration is noticed near the Orion Belt region, fairly well coinciding with the distribution of the Orion OBIb association members. A comparison with the Av-map is also made to see the relationship between the distribution of emission-line objects and that of interstellar dust.
We have conducted a study of quasiperiodic emission observed by the plasma wave instrument on board the Galileo spacecraft. These emissions appear as broadband bursts with dominant periods ranging from 10 min to over 40 min. For these emissions we have explicitly analyzed the high-resolution (waveform) data to determine the presence of impulsive, solitary signatures. Our investigations have indicated that the broadband bursts, as well as the background more narrowband continuum emission, are composed of a highly turbulent spectrum. Within the broadband burst, however, there are higher-frequency components present, but no impulsive electrostatic signatures. Also significantly, the broadband bursts show no low-frequency dispersion. We conclude that the bursts are consistent with a distant, electromagnetic source, probably in the near-Jupiter vicinity.
A ground-based test, the Experiment to Characterize Aircraft Volatile Aerosols and Trace Species Emissions (EXCAVATE), was conducted at NASA Langley Research Center, January 26 - 27, 2002, with a Boeing 757 aircraft. The aircraft was anchored on a tarmac and two probes were positioned downstream of the right-side engine, a Rolls Royce RB211-585. One probe was designed and fabricated by Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) and had a 45.6 mm (1.794 in.) ID. A second probe, constructed of 6.4 mm (0.25 in.) stainless-steel tubing at NASA Langley Research Center, had a 6 mm (0.22 in.) ID. The engine was run on JP-5 with three different sulfur concentrations, 810 ppm, 1050 ppm, 1820 ppm; and was operated over a range of power settings from idle to near-full power. Particulate size-distributions and concentrations were measured at four downstream axial locations: 1 m and 10 m with the AEDC particulate probe, and 25 m and 35 m with the Langley probe. Fuel with various sulfur contents was tested to address the long-standing question of the role of sulfur in the formation of volatile species. Several experimental and modeling studies have shown a correlation between fuel sulfur-content and particulate-emissions. The object of EXCAVATE was to further study the effect of sulfur content on particulate number concentration and size-distribution as a function of location in the engine plume and engine operating conditions.
An investigation was conducted to explore the use of infrared and ultraviolet emission-absorption spectroscopy for determination of temperature profiles in flames. Spectral radiances and absorptances were measured in the 2.7-micron H2O band and the 3064-A OH band in H2/O2 flames for several temperature profiles which were directly measured by a sodium line-reversal technique. The temperature profiles, determined by inversion of the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, showed an average disagreement with line-reversal measurements of 50 K for the infrared and 200 K for the ultraviolet at a temperature of 2600 K. The reasons for these discrepancies are discussed in some detail.
The Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing Instrumentation (MEDLI2) sensor suite collected data during entry of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover into Mars’ atmosphere. This suite included a network of MEDLI2 Instrumented Sensor Plugs (MISPs). Each MISP was comprised of a cylinder made of Thermal Protection System (TPS) material with 1-3 embedded thermocouples (TCs), and it was flush mounted into the heatshield or backshell. Data from these in-depth TCs were used to reconstruct the aeroheating environment of the vehicle throughout entry. Surface heating was posed as an inverse problem, with the goal of estimating the surface heating by minimizing an objective function of the difference between MISP temperature measurements during flight and the temperature predictions derived from the Fully Implicit Ablation and Thermal response (FIAT) program. Given an aerothermal environment, FIAT calculates the material response and provides in-depth temperatures throughout the TPS material. To achieve the reverse, an internal tool called FIAT_Opt runs through multiple different environments until the output temperature at the TC depth closely matches the flight data. 95% confidence intervals on the reconstructed surface heating were obtained using Monte Carlo analysis, in which uncertainties in the thermocouple depth and the TPS material properties (e.g., density, thermal conductivity, heat capacity, emissivity) based on flight-lot material testing were included. A variance decomposition method using Sobol indices was employed to assess the sensitivity of the reconstructed peak heating to the TC placement and material property uncertainties. Variance decomposition was found to require tens of thousands of FIAT_Opt runs in order for the Sobol indices to converge. With a single FIAT_Opt run taking on the order of 40 minutes, the required number of computations would take months to complete, even if using multiple CPUs. To mitigate this problem, three machine learning models (ridge regression with cross-validation, random forest regression, and a deep neural network) were trained and tested using the 2000 Monte Carlo runs that were already completed. A subset of 1600 runs were used to train the model (i.e., training set), while the remaining 400 runs were used as the test set. The predictions from the deep neural network (DNN) on the test set showed nearly perfect agreement to the actual values computed with FIAT_Opt (R2 > 0.99). Using the DNN as a surrogate model, the variance decomposition using 50,000 runs was completed within minutes. The resulting Sobol indices showed that the reconstructed peak surface heating was most sensitive to the uncertainties in the thermal conductivity (ST = 0.37) and heat capacity (ST = 0.26). This method can be leveraged to provide requirements for material property measurements needed to improve the accuracy of surface heating prediction and ultimately lead to the reduction of design margins in the future. This presentation will include background on the MEDLI2 suite; the method used for inverse heating estimation; the way that material property uncertainties were accounted for using Monte Carlo analysis; a brief background on variance decomposition; the motivation for using machine learning in this context; how a neural network was trained on the data to enable variance decomposition in a fraction of the time; and the variance decomposition results for one of the MISPs.
A balloon flight from Parana, Argentina, was conducted to observe emissions from discrete or extended sources in the southern sky. The sources observed include GX 304-1, Nor X-2, GX 340+0, GX 354-5, a possibly composite source near the galactic center, and the nova-like source (2U1543-47) in the Lupus-Norma region which has been reported previously only in satellite observations. Data concerning the possibility of line emission near 0.5 MeV from different regions of the southern sky are also presented.
A model for the cooling of solar flare plasmas is considered that makes allowance for atmospheric readjustments and is so formulated that the effects of conduction on the emission measure are evident. This model shows that an increasing emission measure with decreasing temperature is a characteristic feature of those solar flares for which expansion of the cooling volume is negligible. A similar but slower increase in emission measure with decreasing temperature results from pure radiative cooling if the hot region remains isothermal.
Metal-plated butyl rubber seal has been devised for enclosures of electronic equipment that must be maintained under dry, inert atmosphere. Seal prevents gas leakage over prolonged periods, while conductivity suppresses electromagnetic emissions from sealed equipment. Seal is formed by depositing aluminum or gold onto molded-in-place butyl rubber gasket and surrounding areas of flange.
The evaporation rate, vapor pressure, heats of evaporation reaction (sublimation, dissociation), enthalpy, electrical resistance, heat capacity, emissivity, and heat conductivity of various carbides, borides, sulfides, nitrides, selenides, and phosphides were investigated. A set of high temperature high vacuum devices, calorimeters (designed for operation at 400 to 1300 K and from 1200 K), and mass spectrometers, most of which were specially developed for these studies, is described.
Results are presented from an on-going study of the thermal performance of thermal protection systems for a conical drag brake type AOTV. Three types of heatshield are considered: rigid ceramic insulation, flexible ceramic blankets, and ceramic cloths. The results for the rigid insulation apply to other types of AOTV as well. Charts are presented in parametric form so that they may be applied to a variety of missions and vehicle configurations. The parameters considered include: braking maneuver heat flux and total heat load, heatshield material and thickness, heatshield thermal mass and conductivity, absorptivity and emissivity of surfaces, thermal mass of support structure, and radiation transmission through thin heatshields. Results of temperature calculations presented show trends with and sensitivities to these parameters. The emphasis is on providing information that will be useful in estimating the minimum required mass of these heatshield materials.