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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 1,009 records · Page 56
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Semiclassical transition state theory through the lens of the restricted partition function

The wide adoption of transition state theory in resolving the rates of molecular processes relies on the simplification from reducing the formal and numerical expense of dynamics by a geometric constraint. Such a reduction is at odds with the uncertainty in localization that the uncertainty principle requires. While many forms of semiclassical transition state theory (SCTST) have been aimed at addressing this challenge, a popular approach has relied on resolving the underlying phase space structure of the exact rate formula to leverage Bohr–Sommerfeld quantization. Here, the Hernandez–Miller SCTST reframed the thermal rate formula into an integral of the so-called restricted partition function (RPF) over the action associated with the reaction. The density-of-state SCTST has reframed the rate formula in terms of the instanton’s density of states (DoS). Here, we show the relationship between the RPF-SCTST and the DoS-SCTST and derive the latter from the former. In this way, we help unify these branches of SCTST and provide a clearer formalism for future advances.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
NASA NTRS1990

Analysis of faults in an N-version software experiment

The authors have conducted a large-scale experiment in N-version programming. A total of 27 versions of a program were prepared independently from the same specification at two universities. The results of executing the versions revealed that the versions were individually extremely reliable but that the number of input cases in which more than one failed was substantially more than would be expected if they were statistically independent. After the versions had been executed, the failures of each version were examined and the associated faults located. The analysis showed that in some cases the programmers made equivalent logical errors, indicating that some parts of the problem were simply more difficult than others. The authors also found cases in which apparently different logical errors yielded faults that caused statistically correlated failures, indicating that there are special cases in the input space that present difficulty in various parts of the solution. A formal model is presented to explain this phenomenon. It appears that minor differences in the software development environment would not have a major impact in reducing the incidence of faults that cause correlated failures.

Brilliant, Susan S.↗
NASA NTRS1997

Hierarchical Parallelism in Finite Difference Analysis of Heat Conduction

Based on the concept of hierarchical parallelism, this research effort resulted in highly efficient parallel solution strategies for very large scale heat conduction problems. Overall, the method of hierarchical parallelism involves the partitioning of thermal models into several substructured levels wherein an optimal balance into various associated bandwidths is achieved. The details are described in this report. Overall, the report is organized into two parts. Part 1 describes the parallel modelling methodology and associated multilevel direct, iterative and mixed solution schemes. Part 2 establishes both the formal and computational properties of the scheme.

Padovan, Joseph↗
NASA NTRS2003

Threshold Laws for Two-Electron Ejection Processes: A Still Controversial Problem in Atomic Physics

This talk deals with collision processes of the following kind: (a) an ionizing collision of an electron with a neutral atom, (b) a photon incident of a negative ion resulting in two-electron ejection. In both cases the final state is a positive ion and two outgoing electrons, and in principle both processes should be governed by the same form of threshold law. It is generally conceded that this is one of the most difficult basic problems in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics. The standard treatment (due to Wannier) will be briefly reviewed in terms of the derivation of his well- known threshold law for the yield (Q) of positive ions vs. the excess energy (E): Q(sub w) varies as E(exp 1.127...). The derivation is a brilliant analysis based on Newton's equations, leading to the dominance of events in which the two electrons emerge on opposite sides of the residual ion with similar energies. In contrast, I will argue on the basis of quantum mechanical ideas that in the threshold limit the more likely outcome are events in which the electrons emerge with decidedly different energies, leading to a formally different (Coulomb-dipole) threshold law Q(sub CD) varies as E(1 + C sin(alpha ln(E)+mu)]/[ln(E)](exp 2). Additional aspects of that approach will be discussed . Some: experimental results will be presented, and more incisive predictions involving polarized projectiles and targets will be given.

Temkin, Aaron↗
NASA NTRS2019

Integrating Realizability Checking in FRET

Realizability (alternatively referred to as relative consistency or implementability) - checking whether a specification can be implemented by an open system - has been the subject of extensive study. Realizability can be viewed as a stronger analysis method when compared to consistency checking in that it does not only check whether the system works in some environment, but instead whether the system works in all environments. In this report, we experiment and build on the approach presented by Gacek et al. that supports checking realizability of contracts involving infinite theories using SMT solvers. In particular, we 1) extend the Formal Requirements Elicitation Tool (FRET) to support generation of Lustre contracts that can be checked for realizability with the JKind k-induction and fix point generation engines; 2) study a compositional way for checking realizability based on the notion of connected components; and 3) test our approach and the capabilities of the JKind realizability engines on a large subset of the Lockheed Martin Cyber Physical System Challenge Problems.

Kooi, David↗
DOE OSTI2020

Quantification of High-Temperature Transition Al2O3 and Their Phase Transformations

High temperature exposure of ?-Al2O3 can lead to a series of polymorphic transformations, including the formation of ?-Al2O3 and ?-Al2O3. Quantification of the microstructure in the ?/?-Al2O3 formation range represents a formidable challenge as both phases accommodate a high degree of structural disorder. In this work, we explore the use of XRD recursive stacking formalism for quantification of high temperature transition aluminas. We formulate the recursive stacking methodology for modelling of disorder in ?-Al2O3 and twinning in ?-Al2O3 and show that explicitly accounting for the disorder is necessary to reliably model the XRD patterns of high temperature transition alumina. In the second part, we use the recursive stacking approach to study phase transformation during high temperature (1050 ºC) treatment. We show that the two different intergrowth modes of ?-Al2O3 have different transformation characteristics, and that a significant portion of ?-Al2O3 is stabilized with ?-Al2O3 even after prolonged high-temperature exposures. In discussions, we outline the limitation of the current XRD approach and discuss a possible multimodal XRD and NMR approach which can improve analysis of complex transition aluminas. This work was performed in the Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a national scientific user facility sponsored by DOEs Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at PNNL. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences.

Kovarik, Libor↗
DOE OSTI2025

Joint Factorization of QCD and QED Radiation in Lepton-Hadron Scattering

The factorization theorem plays an important role in the analysis of high energy quantum chromodynamic (QCD) processes, separating the nonperturbative hadronic interaction into the universal parton distribution functions (PDFs) and fragmentation functions (FFs) and the process-dependent interactions into short distance perturbative calculations, with any interference power suppressed. With a virtual photon exchange, lepton-hadron deep inelastic scattering (DIS) provides an electromagnetic hard probe for the partonic structure of colliding hadrons and has played an important role in the development of QCD factorization. However, the collision induced QED radiation can change the momentum of the exchanged but unobserved virtual photon, making the photon-hadron frame, where the factorization formalism for DIS and semi-inclusive DIS (SIDIS) was derived, ill defined. A new analogous factorization approach has been introduced to separate the leading power process-independent QED radiative contributions to the single photon exchange by introducing lepton distribution functions (LDFs) and lepton fragmentation functions (LFFs), while process-dependent effects are perturbatively calculated with large logarithms removed [J. High Energ. Phys. 2021, 157 (2021)]. These LDFs and LFFs are considered global, as they appear in many different interactions, such as e+e-, DIS and SIDIS, so data from experiments can be used to fit and describe these functions across a wide range of lepton scattering. In this work, I will apply this new hybrid factorization approach to lepton-hadron DIS and SIDIS. For DIS, I derive the NLO short distance perturbative contribution to the cross section and demonstrate the effects the QED radiation has on the cross section using this approach using the CTEQ parameterization for the QCD functions. As part of the SIDIS analysis, I study the cross-section in two different kinematic regions: (1) the scattered lepton and observed hadron are not near back-to-back, and (2) they are close to back-to-back, where collinear QCD factorization works for (1) and TMD QCD factorization for (2) while collinear QED factorization works for both. As part of this work, I show the effects on the SIDIS cross section using fixed order calculations for the unpolarized structure function by first showing the effect of the radiative corrections on the main kinematic variables, especially how the internal transverse momentum is significantly correlated to the external angular dependence, and then the unpolarized structure function (or cross section) with matching between the descriptions for low and high transverse momentum. This work will impact the calculations for predictions for data from COMPASS and various Jefferson Lab experiments.

Cammarota, Justin [Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington, K↗
NASA NTRS1987

Analysis of adaptive identifiers in the presence of unmodelled dynamics: Averaging and tuned parameters

The behavior of a standard identifier is analyzed for the case in which the plant contains additional dynamics, called unmodeled dynamics, which invalidate the known order assumption. An input richness condition is obtained that does not depend on the order of the unmmodeled dynamics to guarantee persistency of excitation (PE) of the regressor. It is shown that the PE condition leads to a BIBO stability property for the identifier. The method of averaging is used to define formally the notion of tuned parameters as the equilibrium of the identifier-averaged system. It is shown that the tuned parameters always exist and that the actual parameters converge to some neighborhood of the tuned parameters. An explicit expression is derived to calculate and interpret them as the fixed parameter values that minimize the mean-squared output error.

Mason, J. E.↗
DOE OSTI2020

The tensor t‐function: A definition for functions of third‐order tensors

Summary A definition for functions of multidimensional arrays is presented. The definition is valid for third‐order tensors in the tensor t‐product formalism, which regards third‐order tensors as block circulant matrices. The tensor function definition is shown to have similar properties as standard matrix function definitions in fundamental scenarios. To demonstrate the definition's potential in applications, the notion of network communicability is generalized to third‐order tensors and computed for a small‐scale example via block Krylov subspace methods for matrix functions. A complexity analysis for these methods in the context of tensors is also provided.

Lund, Kathryn↗
DOE OSTI2020

Comparing light-front quantization with instant-time quantization

Here in this paper we compare light-front quantization and instant-time quantization both at the level of operators and at the level of their Feynman diagram matrix elements. At the level of operators light-front quantization and instant-time quantization lead to equal light-front time commutation (or anticommutation) relations that appear to be quite different from equal instant-time commutation (or anticommutation) relations. Despite this we show that at unequal times instant-time and light-front commutation (or anticommutation) relations actually can be transformed into each other, with it only being the restriction to equal times that makes the commutation (or anticommutation) relations appear to be so different. While our results are valid for both bosons and fermions, for fermions there are subtleties associated with tip of the light cone contributions that need to be taken care of. At the level of Feynman diagrams we show for non-vacuum Feynman diagrams that the pole terms in four-dimensional light-front Feynman diagrams reproduce the widely used three-dimensional light-front on-shell Hamiltonian Fock space formulation in which the light-front energy and light-front momentum are on shell. Moreover, we show that the contributions of pole terms in non-vacuum instant-time and non-vacuum light-front Feynman diagrams are equal. However, because of circle at infinity contributions we show that this equivalence of pole terms fails for four-dimensional light-front vacuum tadpole diagrams. Then, and precisely because of these circle at infinity contributions, we show that light-front vacuum tadpole diagrams are not only nonzero, they quite remarkably are actually equal to the pure pole term instant-time vacuum tadpole diagrams. Light-front vacuum diagrams are not correctly describable by the on-shell Hamiltonian formalism, and thus not by the closely related infinite momentum frame prescription either. Thus for the light-front vacuum sector we must use the off-shell Feynman formalism as it contains information that is not accessible in the on-shell Hamiltonian Fock space approach. We show that light-front quantization is intrinsically nonlocal, and that for fermions this nonlocality is present in Ward identities. One can project fermion spinors into so-called good and bad components, and both of these components contribute in Ward identities. Central to our analysis is that the transformation from instant-time coordinates and fields to light-front coordinates and fields is a unitary, spacetime-dependent translation. Consequently, not only are instant-time quantization and light-front quantization equivalent, because of general coordinate invariance they are unitarily equivalent.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2021

An Assessment of Global Positioning System Velocity Uncertainty in California

We analyze data from 580 continuous global positioning system (GPS) stations in California to quantify differences in published velocity estimates from five analysis centers. Horizontal and vertical rates for individual stations can differ up to 5 mm/yr, with systematic differences in some areas comparable to deformation rates. Published velocity uncertainties vary between analysis centers and are systematically underreported in the horizontal relative to empirical uncertainties calculated from the scatter of analysis center velocities. In the vertical, published velocity uncertainties are both over and underreported and vary more widely between centers. An interpolated ensemble vertical velocity field shows high-subsidence regions in the Central Valley and Salton Trough have the largest empirical uncertainties, while station density has a modest impact on uncertainties. Applications that rely on subcentimeter GPS accuracy should consider the possibility that formal errors published with velocity rate estimates understate true velocity uncertainties in both the horizontal and vertical.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS1982

The periodic variation of spokes in Saturn's rings

The discovery of a periodic variation in spoke activity in Saturn's rings from the analysis of Voyager images is reported. A Fourier power spectrum was computed using a data set generated by quantifying spoke activity observed on the morning (western) half of the rings in Voyager images spanning 5.5 days (about 12 Saturn rotations). A peak approximately 14 sigma above the noise in the frequency domain was found at a period of 621 + or - 22 min. Within the formal error, this value is consistent with the 639.4-min rotation period of Saturn's magnetic field. Maximum spoke activity is most likely to be observed on the morning half of the rings when a particular magnetic field sector coincides with this area. This magnetic sector contains the region which is aligned with local noon at the time of the emission of the SKR (Saturn kilometric radiation). These results suggest that the fundamental period of spoke variation is that of Saturn's magnetic field, and that spoke activity is associated with the region of the field which gives rise to the SKR. Passage of this region through Saturn's shadow may play a significant role in the creation and/or rejuvenation of spokes.

Porco, C. C.↗
NASA NTRS1994

Automated Test Environment for a Real-Time Control System

An automated environment with hardware-in-the-loop has been developed by Rocketdyne Huntsville for test of a real-time control system. The target system of application is the man-rated real-time system which controls the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME). The primary use of the environment is software verification and validation, but it is also useful for evaluation and analysis of SSME avionics hardware and mathematical engine models. It provides a test bed for the integration of software and hardware. The principles and skills upon which it operates may be applied to other target systems, such as those requiring hardware-in-the-loop simulation and control system development. Potential applications are in problem domains demanding highly reliable software systems requiring testing to formal requirements and verifying successful transition to/from off-nominal system states.

Hall, Ronald O.↗
NASA NTRS2010

NASA Education: Yesterday's Dream...Today's Vision...Tomorrow's Hope

For 50 years, NASA's journeys into air and space have developed humankind's understanding of the universe, advanced technology breakthroughs, enhanced air travel safety and security, and expanded the frontiers of scientific research. These accomplishments share a common genesis: education. Education is a fundamental element of NASA's activities, reflecting a balanced and diverse portfolio of: Elementary and Secondary Education, Higher Education, e-Education, Informal Education, and Minority University Research and Education Programs (MUREP). Previous experience has shown that implementing exciting and compelling NASA missions are critical to inspiring the next generation of explorers, innovators, and leaders. Through partnerships with the Agency's Mission Directorates, other federal agencies, private industries, scientific research, and education/academic organizations, NASA's unique mission and education initiatives (content, people, and facilities) are helping to spark student interest and to guide them toward careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). NASA continues to inspire the next generation of explorers, innovators, and future leaders through its educational investments, which are designed to: (1) Strengthen NASA and the Nation's future workforce -- NASA will identify and develop the critical skills and capabilities needed to ensure achievement of exploration, science, and aeronautics. (2) Attract and retain students in STEM disciplines through a progression of educational opportunities for students, teachers, and faculty -- To compete effectively for the minds, imaginations, and career ambitions of America's young people, NASA will focus on engaging and retaining students in STEM education programs to encourage their pursuit of educational disciplines critical to NASA's future engineering, scientific, and technical missions. 3. Engage Americans in NASA's mission -- NASA will build strategic partnerships and links between formal and informal STEM education providers. Through hands-on, interactive, educational activities, NASA will engage students, educators, families, the general public, and all agency stakeholders in increasing America's science and technology literacy. NASA Education uses multiple methods to assess and evaluate the success of its programs and projects. Methods include strategic planning, management and control, expert evaluations and assessments, competitive acquisition, and analysis of performance measurement data and metrics. Additional control measures are in development. These measures will further improve data collection, assist in assessing return on investments, and provide information for accountability in project and program management. In 2009, NASA directly reached over one million students and over 115,000 educators.

Winterton, Joyce L.↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Validation of Image-Based Neural Network Controllersthrough Adaptive Stress Testing

Neural networks have become state-of-the-art for computer vision problems because of their ability to efficiently model complex functions from large amounts of data. While neural networks can be shown to perform well empirically fora variety of tasks, their performance is difficult to guarantee.Neural network verification tools have been developed that can certify robustness with respect to a given input image; however,for neural network systems used in closed-loop controllers,robustness with respect to individual images does not address multi-step properties of the neural network controller and itsenvironment. Furthermore, neural network systems interacting in the physical world and using natural images are operating in a black-box environment, making formal verification in-tractable. This work combines the adaptive stress testing (AST)framework with neural network verification tools to search for the most likely sequence of image disturbances that cause the neural network controlled system to reach a failure. Anautonomous aircraft taxi application is presented, and results show that the AST method finds failures with more likely image disturbances than baseline methods. Further analysis of AST results revealed an explainable cause of the failure, giving insight into the problematic scenarios that should be addressed.

Adaptive Stress Testing, Marabou, Deep Neural Netw↗
DOE OSTI2019

Sensitivity and Uncertainty Workflow of Full System SIERRA Models Supporting High Consequence Applications

Credibility of end-to-end CompSim (Computational Simulation) models and their agile execution requires an expressive framework to describe, communicate and execute complex computational tool chains representing the model. All stakeholders from system engineering and customers through model developers and V&V partners need views and functionalities of the workflow representing the model in a manner that is natural to their discipline. In the milestone and in this report we define workflow as a network of computation simulation activities executed autonomously on a distributed set of computational platforms. The FY19 ASC L2 Milestone (6802) for the Integrated Workflow (IWF) project was designed to integrate and improve existing capabilities or develop new functionalities to provide a wide range of stakeholders a coherent and intuitive platform capable of defining and executing CompSim modeling from analysis workflow definition to complex ensemble calculations. The main goal of the milestone was to advance the integrated workflow capabilities to support the weapon system analysts with a production deployment in FY20. Ensemble calculations supporting program decisions include sensitivity analysis, optimization and uncertainty quantification. The goal of the L2 milestone aligned with the ultimate goal of the IWF project is to foster cultural and technical shift toward and integrated CompSim capability based on automated workflows. Specific deliverables were defined in five broad categories: 1) Infrastructure, including development of distributed-computing workflow capability, 2) integration of Dakota (Sandia's sensitivity, optimization and UQ engine) with SAW (Sandia Analysis Workbench), 3) ARG (Automatic Report Generator introspecting analysis artifacts and generating human-readable extensible and archivable reports), 4) Libraries and Repositories aiding capability reuse, and 5) Exemplars to support training, capturing best practices and stress testing of the platform. A set of exemplars was defined to represent typical weapon system qualification CompSim projects. Analyzing the required capabilities and using the findings to plan implementation of required capabilities ensured optimal allocation of development resources focused on production deployment after the L2 is completed. It was recognized early that the end-to-end modeling applications pose a considerable number of diverse risks, and a formal risk tracking process was implemented. The project leveraged products, capabilities and development tasks of IWF partners. SAW, Dakota, Cubit, Sierra, Slycat, and NGA (NexGen Analytics, a small business) contributed to the integrated platform developed during this milestone effort. New products delivered include: a) NGW (Next Generation Workflow) for robust workflow definition and execution, b) Dakota wizards, editor and results visualization, and c) the automatic report generator ARG. User engagement was initiated early in the development process eliciting concrete requirements and actionable feedback to assure that the integrated CompSim capability will have high user acceptance and impact. The current integrated capabilities have been demonstrated and are continually being tested by a set of exemplars ranging from training scenarios to computationally demanding uncertainty analyses. The integrated workflow platform has been deployed on both SRN (Sandia Restricted Network) and SCN (Sandia Classified Network). Computational platforms where the system has been demonstrated span from Windows (Creo the CAD platform chosen by Sandia) to Trinity HPC (Sierra and CTH solvers). Follow up work will focus on deployment at SNL and other sites in the nuclear enterprise (LLNL, KCNSC), training and consulting support to democratize the analysis agility, process health and knowledge management benefits the NGW platform provides.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2020

Status of the KRUSTY Benchmark Modeling and Uncertainty Analysis

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) desire for a small nuclear reactor for space applications led to a prototype assembly, Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology (KRUSTY). The KRUSTY experiments included four phases: component critical, cold critical, warm critical, and high temperature. The KRUSTY benchmark described in this paper includes five configurations from the component critical experiments that were performed at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) beginning in November 2017. Preliminary results have been reported. The benchmark is now nearing completion (although it is still preliminary until formally accepted by the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project [ICSBEP] working group). In this paper, we present the updated benchmark and its uncertainties. These results were computed using MCNP6.2 ® with ENDF/B-VIII.0 cross sections.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2017

2017 DOE Vehicle Technologies Office Annual Merit Review

The 2017 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program and Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) Annual Merit Review and Peer Evaluation Meeting (AMR) was held June 5-9, 2017, in Washington, DC. The review encompassed work done by the Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program and VTO: 263 individual activities were reviewed for VTO by 191 reviewers. Exactly 1,241 individual review responses were received for the VTO technical reviews. The objective of the meeting was to review the accomplishments and plans for VTO over the previous 12 months, and provide an opportunity for industry, government, and academia to give inputs to DOE with a structured and formal methodology. The meeting also provided attendees with a forum for interaction and technology information transfer.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗