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At least 91 records · Page 5

Error norms for the adaptive solution of the Navier-Stokes equations

The adaptive solution of the Navier-Stokes equations depends upon the successful interaction of three key elements: (1) the ability to flexibly select grid length scales in composite grids, (2) the ability to efficiently control residual error in composite grids, and (3) the ability to define reliable, convenient error norms to guide the grid adjustment and optimize the residual levels relative to the local truncation errors. An initial investigation was conducted to explore how to approach developing these key elements. Conventional error assessment methods were defined and defect and deferred correction methods were surveyed. The one dimensional potential equation was used as a multigrid test bed to investigate how to achieve successful interaction of these three key elements.

Forester, C. K.

Error induced by coordinate systems

It is pointed out that the choice of a curvilinear coordinate system can have a substantial effect on the error in the numerical solution of a partial differential equation. The truncation error is dependent not only on the higher order derivatives of the solution and the local grid spacing, but also on the rate-of-change of the grid spacing and on the departure of the grid from orthogonality. In connection with the present investigation, an analysis is conducted of the local truncation error in the approximation of first and second order derivatives on a curvilinear grid. Attention is given to a number of examples which illustrate the two fundamental sources of truncation error in the numerical solution of partial differential equations on curvilinear coordinate systems. The first is the grid spacing and changes in grid spacing which is measured by the first and second order derivatives of the functions defining the coordinate system. The second source is the higher order derivatives of the solution itself.

Mastin, C. W.

Theory and implementation of high-order adaptive hp methods for analysis of incompressible viscous flows

An account is given of 'smart' algorithms for CFD which change in structure and performance with during flow calculations to accommodate changing properties of the solution. Such algorithms prominently include adaptive FEM methods, which are designed to adjust mesh parameters for the control of numerical error; attention is presently given to those which change the mesh size h and the local spectral order p in order to achieve high accuracies with minimal numbers of degrees of freedom. These 'hp methods' produce exponentially convergent approximations through which flow features are resolved by automatically distributing element sizes and spectral orders. This leads to calculation of the local (elementwise) error in the approximation.

Oden, J. T.

Geometrical correction factors for heat flux meters

General formulas are derived for determining gage averaging errors of strip-type heat flux meters used in the measurement of one-dimensional heat flux distributions. The local averaging error e(x) is defined as the difference between the measured value of the heat flux and the local value which occurs at the center of the gage. In terms of e(x), a correction procedure is presented which allows a better estimate for the true value of the local heat flux. For many practical problems, it is possible to use relatively large gages to obtain acceptable heat flux measurements.

Baumeister, K. J.

Geometrical correction factors for heat flux meters

General formulas are derived for determining gage averaging errors of strip-type heat flux meters used in the measurement of one-dimensional heat flux distributions. The local averaging error e(x) is defined as the difference between the measured value of the heat flux and the local value which occurs at the center of the gage. In terms of e(x), a correction procedure is presented which allows a better estimate for the true value of the local heat flux. For many practical problems, it is possible to use relatively large gages to obtain acceptable heat flux measurements.

Baumeister, K. J.

Topex orbit determination and gravity recovery using GPS data from repeat orbits

A covariance analysis is presented for a differential GPS-based technique for satellite tracking and gravity recovery to be demonstrated on Topex in the early 1990's. The technique employs data from an ensemble of repeat ground tracks to recover a unique satellite epoch state for each track and a set of invariant local gravity parameters common to all tracks. For satellites above about 800 km altitude, where gravity modeling is the dominant systematic error, averaging of random error over many arcs and adjustment of the gravity model reduces the final satellite position error. The local gravity parameters can then be used to produce a refined global gravity model. The analysis indicates that errors ranging from 5 to 8 cm in Topex altitude and 0.05 to 0.2 mgal for the gravity field can be achieved, depending on the number of repeat arcs used.

Wu, Jiun-Tsong

Fault-tolerant optical interconnects for neutral-atom arrays

We analyze the use of photonic links to enable large-scale fault-tolerant connectivity of locally error-corrected modules based on neutral atom arrays. Our approach makes use of recent theoretical results showing the robustness of surface codes to boundary noise and combines recent experimental advances in atom-array quantum computing with logical qubits with optical quantum networking techniques. We find the conditions for fault tolerance can be achieved with local two-qubit Rydberg gate and nonlocal Bell-pair errors below 1% and 10%, respectively, without requiring distillation or space-time overheads. Realizing the interconnects with a lens, a single optical cavity, or an array of cavities enables—with sufficient multiplexing—a Bell-pair generation rate in the 1–50 MHz range. When directly interfacing logical qubits, this rate translates to error-correction cycles in the 25–2000 kHz range, satisfying all requirements for fault tolerance and in the upper range fast enough for 100 kHz logical clock cycles. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Sinclair, Josiah (ORCID:0000000215238295)

Noisy Approach to Intrinsically Mixed-State Topological Order

We propose a general framework for studying two-dimensional (2D) topologically ordered states subject to local correlated errors and show that the resulting mixed state can display (imTO)—topological order that is not expected to occur in the ground state of 2D local gapped Hamiltonians. Specifically, we show that decoherence, previously interpreted as anyon condensation in a doubled Hilbert space, is more naturally phrased as, and provides a physical mechanism for, “gauging out” anyons in the original Hilbert space. We find that gauging out anyons generically results in imTO, with the decohered mixed state strongly symmetric under certain anomalous 1-form symmetries. This framework lays bare a striking connection between the decohered density matrix and , which can appear as anomalous surface states of three-dimensional topological orders. Through a series of examples, we show that the decohered state can display a classical memory, encode logical qubits (i.e., exhibit a quantum memory), and even host chiral or nonmodular topological order. We argue that a partial classification of imTO is given in terms of nonmodular braided-fusion categories. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Sohal, Ramanjit (ORCID:0000000292975715)

Development of an unstructured solution adaptive method for the quasi-three-dimensional Euler and Navier-Stokes equations

A general solution adaptive scheme based on a remeshing technique is developed for solving the two-dimensional and quasi-three-dimensional Euler and Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. The numerical scheme is formulated on an unstructured triangular mesh utilizing an edge-based pointer system which defines the edge connectivity of the mesh structure. Jameson's four-stage hybrid Runge-Kutta scheme is used to march the solution in time. The convergence rate is enhanced through the use of local time stepping and implicit residual averaging. As the solution evolves, the mesh is regenerated adaptively using flow field information. Mesh adaptation parameters are evaluated such that an estimated local numerical error is equally distributed over the whole domain. For inviscid flows, the present approach generates a complete unstructured triangular mesh using the advancing front method. For turbulent flows, the approach combines a local highly stretched structured triangular mesh in the boundary layer region with an unstructured mesh in the remaining regions to efficiently resolve the important flow features. One-equation and two-equation turbulence models are incorporated into the present unstructured approach. Results are presented for a wide range of flow problems including two-dimensional multi-element airfoils, two-dimensional cascades, and quasi-three-dimensional cascades. This approach is shown to gain flow resolution in the refined regions while achieving a great reduction in the computational effort and storage requirements since solution points are not wasted in regions where they are not required.

Jiang, Yi-Tsann

Development of an unstructured solution adaptive method for the quasi-three-dimensional Euler and Navier-Stokes equations

A general solution adaptive scheme-based on a remeshing technique is developed for solving the two-dimensional and quasi-three-dimensional Euler and Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. The numerical scheme is formulated on an unstructured triangular mesh utilizing an edge-based pointer system which defines the edge connectivity of the mesh structure. Jameson's four-stage hybrid Runge-Kutta scheme is used to march the solution in time. The convergence rate is enhanced through the use of local time stepping and implicit residual averaging. As the solution evolves, the mesh is regenerated adaptively using flow field information. Mesh adaptation parameters are evaluated such that an estimated local numerical error is equally distributed over the whole domain. For inviscid flows, the present approach generates a complete unstructured triangular mesh using the advancing front method. For turbulent flows, the approach combines a local highly stretched structured triangular mesh in the boundary layer region with an unstructured mesh in the remaining regions to efficiently resolve the important flow features. One-equation and two-equation turbulence models are incorporated into the present unstructured approach. Results are presented for a wide range of flow problems including two-dimensional multi-element airfoils, two-dimensional cascades, and quasi-three-dimensional cascades. This approach is shown to gain flow resolution in the refined regions while achieving a great reduction in the computational effort and storage requirements since solution points are not wasted in regions where they are not required.

Jiang, Yi-Tsann

A Starshade Petal Error Budget for Exo-Earth Detection and Characterization

We present a starshade error budget with engineering requirements that are well within the current manufacturing and metrology capabilities. The error budget is based on an observational scenario in which the starshade spins about its axis on timescales short relative to the zodi-limited integration time, typically several hours. The scatter from localized petal errors is smoothed into annuli around the center of the image plane, resulting in a large reduction in the background flux variation while reducing thermal gradients caused by structural shadowing. Having identified the performance sensitivity to petal shape errors with spatial periods of 3-4 cycles/petal as the most challenging aspect of the design, we have adopted and modeled a manufacturing approach that mitigates these perturbations with 1-meter-long precision edge segments positioned using commercial metrology that readily meets assembly requirements. We have performed detailed thermal modeling and show that the expected thermal deformations are well within the requirements as well. We compare the requirements for four cases: a 32 meter diameter starshade with a 1.5 meter telescope, analyzed at 75 and 90 milliarcseconds, and a 40 meter diameter starshade with a 4 meter telescope, analyzed at 60 and 75 milliarcseconds.

error budget

The role of a low Earth orbiter in intercontinental time synchronization via GPS satellites

Time synchronization between two sites using differential GPS has been investigated by a number of researchers. When the two sites are widely separated, the common view period of any GPS satellite becomes shorter; low elevation observations are inevitable. This increase the corrupting effects of the atmospheric delay and, at the same time, narrows the window for such time synchronization. This difficulty can be alleviated by synchronization. This difficulty can be alleviated by using a transit site located midway between the two main sites. The main sites can now look at different GPS satellites which are also in view at the transit site. However, a ground transit site may not always be conveniently available, especially across the Pacific Ocean; also, the inclusion of a ground transit site introduce additional errors due to its location error and local atmospheric delay. An alternative is to use a low Earth orbiter (LEO) as the transit site. A LEO is superior to a ground transit site in three ways: (1) It covers a large part of the Earth in a short period of time and, hence, a single LEO provides worldwide transit services; (2) it is above the troposphere and thus its inclusion does not introduce additional tropospheric delay error; and (3) it provides strong dynamics needed to improve GPS satellite positions which are of importance to ultraprecise time synchronization.

Wu, S. C.

Adaptive grid methods for RLV environment assessment and nozzle analysis

Rapid access to highly accurate data about complex configurations is needed for multi-disciplinary optimization and design. In order to efficiently meet these requirements a closer coupling between the analysis algorithms and the discretization process is needed. In some cases, such as free surface, temporally varying geometries, and fluid structure interaction, the need is unavoidable. In other cases the need is to rapidly generate and modify high quality grids. Techniques such as unstructured and/or solution-adaptive methods can be used to speed the grid generation process and to automatically cluster mesh points in regions of interest. Global features of the flow can be significantly affected by isolated regions of inadequately resolved flow. These regions may not exhibit high gradients and can be difficult to detect. Thus excessive resolution in certain regions does not necessarily increase the accuracy of the overall solution. Several approaches have been employed for both structured and unstructured grid adaption. The most widely used involve grid point redistribution, local grid point enrichment/derefinement or local modification of the actual flow solver. However, the success of any one of these methods ultimately depends on the feature detection algorithm used to determine solution domain regions which require a fine mesh for their accurate representation. Typically, weight functions are constructed to mimic the local truncation error and may require substantial user input. Most problems of engineering interest involve multi-block grids and widely disparate length scales. Hence, it is desirable that the adaptive grid feature detection algorithm be developed to recognize flow structures of different type as well as differing intensity, and adequately address scaling and normalization across blocks. These weight functions can then be used to construct blending functions for algebraic redistribution, interpolation functions for unstructured grid generation, forcing functions to attract/repel points in an elliptic system, or to trigger local refinement, based upon application of an equidistribution principle. The popularity of solution-adaptive techniques is growing in tandem with unstructured methods. The difficultly of precisely controlling mesh densities and orientations with current unstructured grid generation systems has driven the use of solution-adaptive meshing. Use of derivatives of density or pressure are widely used for construction of such weight functions, and have been proven very successful for inviscid flows with shocks. However, less success has been realized for flowfields with viscous layers, vortices or shocks of disparate strength. It is difficult to maintain the appropriate mesh point spacing in the various regions which require a fine spacing for adequate resolution. Mesh points often migrate from important regions due to refinement of dominant features. An example of this is the well know tendency of adaptive methods to increase the resolution of shocks in the flowfield around airfoils, but in the incorrect location due to inadequate resolution of the stagnation region. This problem has been the motivation for this research.

Thornburg, Hugh J.

Application of the Global Positioning System to crustal deformation measurement. II - The influence of errors in orbit determination networks

The errors introduced into GPS measurements of a geodetic network by means of adopting different sets of stations in central and southern California as fixed points (termed fiducial stations) were investigated. Solutions for a crustal deformation network spanning distances up to 350 km were computed with a variety of fiducial networks, using fiducial coordinates determined from VLBI. Results showed that three receivers collocated with VLBI sites provide a stable reference system at a few millimeter level in the horizontal components and at 10 mm in the vertical components, indicating that local survey errors between VLBI and GPS markers at fiducial sites do not severely affect the estimates of interstation vectors.

Larson, Kristine M.

Robust Implicit Adaptive Low Rank Time-Stepping Methods for Matrix Differential Equations

In this work, we develop implicit rank-adaptive schemes for time-dependent matrix differential equations. The dynamic low rank approximation (DLRA) is a well-known technique to capture the dynamic low rank structure based on Dirac–Frenkel time-dependent variational principle. In recent years, it has attracted a lot of attention due to its wide applicability. Our schemes are inspired by the three-step procedure used in the rank adaptive version of the unconventional robust integrator (the so called BUG integrator) (Ceruti et al. in BIT Numer Math 62(4):1149–1174, 2022) for DLRA. First, a prediction (basis update) step is made computing the approximate column and row spaces at the next time level. Second, a Galerkin evolution step is invoked using an implicit solves for the small core matrix. Finally, a truncation is made according to a prescribed error threshold. Since the DLRA is evolving the differential equation projected on to the tangent space of the low rank manifold, the error estimate of the BUG integrator contains the tangent projection (modeling) error which cannot be easily controlled by mesh refinement. This can cause convergence issue for equations with cross terms. To address this issue, we propose a simple modification, consisting of merging the row and column spaces from the explicit step truncation method together with the BUG spaces in the prediction step. In addition, we propose an adaptive strategy where the BUG spaces are only computed if the residual for the solution obtained from the prediction space by explicit step truncation method, is too large. Here, we prove stability and estimate the local truncation error of the schemes under assumptions. We benchmark the schemes in several tests, such as anisotropic diffusion, solid body rotation and the combination of the two, to show robust convergence properties.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING

U-net architected deep material network training with microstructure local field information

The Deep Material Network (DMN) has recently emerged as a powerful reduced-order modeling framework for simulating the mechanical response of heterogeneous materials such as composites. Unlike most data-driven approaches that directly learn a material’s response under prescribed loading, the DMN acts as a homogenization operator, learning the kinematic constraints and mechanical interactions of the underlying microstructure. However, traditional DMN training relies exclusively on homogenized effective properties derived from Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS), discarding the rich local field data that govern microstructural interactions. In this work, we extend the DMN framework to incorporate such local field information into the offline training process. Utilizing a U-Net architecture, we augment the DMN training objective to include the first and second statistical moments of the local stress fields obtained from linear DNS. This ensures that the learned network topology not only fits the effective stiffness but also accurately reflects the internal local stress and strain partitioning of the microstructure. The results confirm that supervising the localization process during training yields a superior surrogate model, reducing local prediction errors by an order of magnitude and significantly improving generalization to unseen nonlinear constitutive behaviors compared to traditional DMNs.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE

Resolving discrepancies in bang-time predictions for indirect-drive ICF experiments on the NIF: Insights from the Build-A-Hohlraum campaign

This study investigated discrepancies between measured and simulated x-ray drive in Indirect-Drive Inertial Confinement Fusion (ID-ICF) hohlraums at the National Ignition Facility. Despite advances in radiation-hydrodynamic simulations, a consistent “drive deficit” remains. Experimentally measured ID-ICF capsule bang-times are systematically 400–700 ps later than simulations predict. The Build-A-Hohlraum (BAH) campaign explored potential causes for this discrepancy by systematically varying hohlraum features, including laser entrance hole (LEH) windows, capsules, and gas fills. Overall, the agreement between simulated and experimental x-ray drive was found to be largely unaffected by these changes. The data allow us to exclude some hypotheses put forward to potentially explain the discrepancy. Errors in the local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) atomic modeling, errors in the modeling of LEH closure, and errors due to a lack of plasma species mix physics in simulations are shown to be inconsistent with our measurements. Instead, the data support the hypothesis that errors in NLTE emission modeling are a significant contributor to the discrepancy. X-ray emission in the 2–4 keV range is found to be approximately 30% lower than in simulations. This is accompanied by higher than predicted electron temperatures in the gold bubble region, pointing to errors in non-LTE modeling. Introducing an opacity multiplier of 0.87 on energy groups above 1.8 keV improves agreement with experimental data, reducing the bang-time discrepancy from 300 to 100 ps. These results underscore the need for refined NLTE opacity models to enhance the predictive power of hohlraum simulations.

Band emission

Deterministic High-Fidelity Neutronics Simulation of Pebble Bed Reactors Using Pebble Tracking Transport

The pebble tracking transport (PTT) algorithm offers a high-fidelity deterministic approach for neutron transport for pebble bed reactors (PBRs). This approach requires the mesh for the active-core region to consist exclusively of tetrahedral elements, where each node in the pebble-packing region represents a pebble centroid. This paper investigates the application of PTT for full-scale PBRs, considering both the isothermal and the temperature-dependent core conditions. Macroscopic cross sections are generated using Serpent 2 full-core eigenvalue simulations where pebbles are grouped into disjoint subsets using machine learning. To minimize the need for individual cross-section sets for each pebble in the core, K-means clustering is used to group pebbles by temperature and neutronic environment parameters. Here, we compare the multiplication factor and power rate distributions between PTT simulations using the Griffin reactor physics software and reference solutions from Serpent 2. Our analysis shows that a full-core, high-fidelity PTT calculation produces accurate results with minimal local (pebblewise) errors. Additionally, timing results indicate that PTT simulations converge rapidly on modern supercomputing platforms.

Griffin