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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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DOE OSTI2017

The Institute for Sustained Performance, Energy, and Resilience Final Project Report

Over the course of the five years of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computation (SciDAC-3) program, computational scientists working on behalf of the Department of Energy's Office of Science (DOE SC) exploited a new generation of petascale computing resources to make previously inaccessible discoveries in a broad range of disciplines including physics, chemistry, and materials science. The computing systems underpinning this work increased in performance potential from tens to hundreds of PFlop/s, but in the process evolving significantly from architectures in 2011, when SciDAC-3 began. Although Moore's law continues unabated, the end of Dennard scaling has necessitated a fundamental shift in computer architecture focused on power efficiency. To that end, processors are increasingly varied as they strive to satisfy performance, productivity, reliability, and energy efficiency in the face of divergent computational requirements. The diversity among these machines presents a number of challenges to merely porting today's scientific applications, much less achieving good performance. Therefore, at the beginning of SciDAC-3, USC and its collaborators anticipated that both vastly increased scale (e.g., more chips, more cores per chip, wider SIMD) and heterogeneity would exacerbate performance optimization challenges while simultaneously promoting the issues of energy and heterogeneity will exacerbate performance optimization challenges while simultaneously promoting the issues of energy consumption and resilience to the forefront. To ensure that DOE's computational scientists could successfully exploit emerging high performance computing (HPC) systems, DOE SC’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program (ASCR) funded the SciDAC-3 Institute for Sustained Performance, Energy, and Resilience (SUPER). Led by USC, this was a broadly based project with expertise in compilers and system tools, performance engineering, energy management, and resilience. SUPER followed the successful model developed in the previous SciDAC-2 Performance Engineering Research Institute (PERI) of leveraging the research investments DOE and others have made and integrating the results to create new capabilities beyond the reach of any one group. To accomplish this, SUPER was organized into multi-institution teams conducting the research activities in performance portability, energy efficiency, exascale resilience, and overall optimization. SUPER researchers also collaborated with other SciDAC-3 institutes, 13 of the 19 Scientific Computation Application Partnerships (SAP), as well as the broader DOE computational sciences community. These collaborations both focused our research on the real challenges facing petascale scientific computing as well as ensured the broad and immediate impact of the results of our research.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

NASA NTRS1991

Applications of diamond films and related materials; Proceedings of the 1st International Conference, Auburn, AL, Aug. 17-22, 1991

The present conference discusses the nucleation and growth of diamond from hydrocarbons, the cutting tool performance of CVD thick-film diamond, the characterization of CVD diamond grinding powder, industrial applications of crystalline diamond-coated tools, standardized SEM tribometry of diamond-coated substrates, residual stress in CVD diamond films, the optical properties of CVD diamond films, polycrystalline diamond films for optical applications, and diamond growth on ferrous metals. Also discussed are ion beam-irradiation smoothing of diamond films, electronic circuits on diamond substrates, diamond-laminated surfaces for evaporative spray cooling, electron devices based on the unique properties of diamond, diamond cold cathodes, thin-film diamond microstructure applications, Schottky diodes from flame-grown diamond, diamond films for thermionic applications, methods of diamond nucleation and selective deposition, high-rate/large-area diamond film production, halogen-assisted diamond growth, the economics of diamond technology, and the optical and mechanical properties of diamondlike films.

Tzeng, Yonhua↗

NASA NTRS2008

MRO Sequence Checking Tool

The MRO Sequence Checking Tool program, mro_check, automates significant portions of the MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) sequence checking procedure. Though MRO has similar checks to the ODY s (Mars Odyssey) Mega Check tool, the checks needed for MRO are unique to the MRO spacecraft. The MRO sequence checking tool automates the majority of the sequence validation procedure and check lists that are used to validate the sequences generated by MRO MPST (mission planning and sequencing team). The tool performs more than 50 different checks on the sequence. The automation varies from summarizing data about the sequence needed for visual verification of the sequence, to performing automated checks on the sequence and providing a report for each step. To allow for the addition of new checks as needed, this tool is built in a modular fashion.

Fisher, Forest↗

DOE OSTI2018

Human performance benefits gained by dynamic instructions compared to smart PDFs

Human performance benefits gained by dynamic instructions compared to smart PDFs In recent years multiple nuclear utilities have deployed an electronic work management solution to replace the traditional paper-based processes. There are many benefits of electronic work management solutions compared to paper processes, such as a more streamlined review and approval process of work packages and a better way to track and resolve any potential bottlenecks causing delays in the review process. These benefits have been recognized where electronic work management solutions have been successfully deployed. However the utilities also hoped the new solution would help the field worker conduct his/her job more efficiently, correctly, and safely. Unfortunately, the industry is now realizing that the deployed solutions did not fully help them reach that goal. The electronic work management solutions present the work instructions as an electronic copy (i.e., a portable document format (PDF)) of the paper instruction. The PDF versions used in these electronic work management solutions have some ability for data input, notes, and mark-ups, but are unable to provide many additional benefits compared to using paper. In fact, conducting work using a PDF on a tablet can be more cumbersome than with a paper instruction. For example, flipping back and forth in a paper instruction can be time consuming, but it is not at all as frustrating as scrolling back and forth on a tablet or continuously having to navigate between tabs. The researchers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) approached the next step beyond smart PDFs from a human factors perspective. In close collaboration with multiple utilities they investigated how to present instruction content and how to design the interaction with the instruction to improve the workers performance and efficiency. Their solution is a dynamic presentation of the instruction that guides the worker through the correct path as well as ensuring the worker is on the correct component. The solution also automatically validates input and provides guidance if unexpected conditions are identified. A well-designed solution has the opportunity to vastly reduce the risk of human errors in the field, such as preventing actions on incorrect component or unintentionally skipping steps. The human factors researchers at INL leveraged their expertise, existing human performance tools, and a great amount of involvement from field workers in multiple utilities to develop and evaluate design concepts that will provide the human performance and efficiency benefits that the electronic work management solutions fall short to deliver. This paper will describe in detail how these new design concepts improve human performance.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

NASA NTRS1986

Multipurpose Scribing and Drawing Tool

Two-part tool reconfigured for variety of jobs. Tool performs several functions useful in layout. Lines, curves, and angles made visible as either bright scribe marks or as dark pencil (or ink) marks. Multipurpose tool speeds up laying out of patterns on sheet metal, wood, plastic, or paper. Tool is carried in pocket, then quickly assembled for service as height gauge, pair of dividers, protractor, surface gauge, or square.

Ellis, J. M.↗

NASA NTRS2017

Image Navigation and Registration Performance Assessment Evaluation Tools for GOES-R ABI and GLM

The GOES-R Flight Project has developed an Image Navigation and Registration (INR) Performance Assessment Tool Set (IPATS) for measuring Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) and Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) INR performance metrics in the post-launch period for performance evaluation and long term monitoring. IPATS utilizes a modular algorithmic design to allow user selection of data processing sequences optimized for generation of each INR metric. This novel modular approach minimizes duplication of common processing elements, thereby maximizing code efficiency and speed. Fast processing is essential given the large number of sub-image registrations required to generate INR metrics for the many images produced over a 24 hour evaluation period. This paper describes the software design and implementation of IPATS and provides preliminary test results.

Image registration↗

NASA NTRS2017

Image Navigation and Registration Performance Assessment Evaluation Tools for GOES-R ABI and GLM

image registration↗

DOE OSTI2025

srlife : a software tool for estimating the life of high temperature concentrating solar receivers. Part I – metallic receivers

Here, this paper introduces srlife, a tool for estimating the structural service life of concentrating solar power (CSP) receivers operating at high temperatures. Supporting both metallic and ceramic receiver designs, srlife is available as open-source software at https://github.com/applied-material-modeling/srlife and can be installed via the PyPi package manager (https://pypi.org). Given basic receiver geometry and incident heat flux, the tool performs thermohydraulic and structural analysis and estimates the life of a receiver. Designed for easy integration into a software stack, including solar field and levelized cost analysis, the tool can be utilized for optimizing receiver designs to meet service life and economic targets. This paper is Part I in a two-part series. Part I discusses the analysis process used to estimate the life of metallic receivers, along with a description of the required input data. Additionally, several heuristics applied within srlife can reduce analysis time significantly while maintaining accurate life estimations for metallic receivers when compared to full analyses. Several examples demonstrating the utility of srlife in receiver design are also discussed. Part II focuses on the life estimation of ceramic receivers, using time-dependent reliability analysis and various ceramic failure models implemented in srlife.

Creep-fatigue analysis↗

DOE OSTI2018

SciDAC3 SUPER Performance Institute, University of Oregon Contributions (Final Report)

The SciDAC-3 Institute for Sustained Performance, Energy, and Resilience (SUPER) focused on developing technology and leveraging expertise towards ensuring that computational scientists could successfully exploit existing and emerging DOE high performance computing systems. To achieve this goal, SUPER was organized into research thrusts focusing on performance engineering, auto-tuning, performance tools, energy efficiency, resilience and multi-objective optimization, with a target of facilitating effective utilization of near term HPC systems. As described in this summary document, our teams’ significant insights into both application- and architecture-awareness drove numerous innovations across our stated research areas, while significantly improving the performance, portability, and functionality of numerous SciDAC partnership applications, enabling scientific simulation at unprecedented scale. Additionally, the tools, methodologies, and collaborations developed under this project will continue paying dividends as we face the challenges of forthcoming multi-petascale and exascale computing technologies.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

NASA NTRS2012

Challenges in Achieving Trajectory-Based Operations

In the past few years much of the global ATM research community has proposed advanced systems based on Trajectory-Based Operations (TBO). The concept of TBO uses four-dimensional aircraft trajectories as the base information for managing safety and capacity. Both the US and European advanced ATM programs call for the sharing of trajectory data across different decision support tools for successful operations. However, the actual integration of TBO systems presents many challenges. Trajectory predictors are built to meet the specific needs of a particular system and are not always compatible with others. Two case studies are presented which examine the challenges of introducing a new concept into two legacy systems in regards to their trajectory prediction software. The first case describes the issues with integrating a new decision support tool with a legacy operational system which overlap in domain space. These tools perform similar functions but are driven by different requirements. The difference in the resulting trajectories can lead to conflicting advisories. The second case looks at integrating this same new tool with a legacy system originally developed as an integrated system, but diverged many years ago. Both cases illustrate how the lack of common architecture concepts for the trajectory predictors added cost and complexity to the integration efforts.

Cate, Karen Tung↗

NASA NTRS2000

Developing Conceptual Hypersonic Airbreathing Engines Using Design of Experiments Methods

Designing a hypersonic vehicle is a complicated process due to the multi-disciplinary synergy that is required. The greatest challenge involves propulsion-airframe integration. In the past, a two-dimensional flowpath was generated based on the engine performance required for a proposed mission. A three-dimensional CAD geometry was produced from the two-dimensional flowpath for aerodynamic analysis, structural design, and packaging. The aerodynamics, engine performance, and mass properties arc inputs to the vehicle performance tool to determine if the mission goals were met. If the mission goals were not met, then a flowpath and vehicle redesign would begin. This design process might have to be performed several times to produce a "closed" vehicle. This paper will describe an attempt to design a hypersonic cruise vehicle propulsion flowpath using a Design of' Experiments method to reduce the resources necessary to produce a conceptual design with fewer iterations of the design cycle. These methods also allow for more flexible mission analysis and incorporation of additional design constraints at any point. A design system was developed using an object-based software package that would quickly generate each flowpath in the study given the values of the geometric independent variables. These flowpath geometries were put into a hypersonic propulsion code and the engine performance was generated. The propulsion results were loaded into statistical software to produce regression equations that were combined with an aerodynamic database to optimize the flowpath at the vehicle performance level. For this example, the design process was executed twice. The first pass was a cursory look at the independent variables selected to determine which variables are the most important and to test all of the inputs to the optimization process. The second cycle is a more in-depth study with more cases and higher order equations representing the design space.

Ferlemann, Shelly M.↗

DOE OSTI2017

PIPER: Performance Insight for Programmers and Exascale Runtimes: Guiding the Development of the Exascale Software Stack

The PIPER project set out to develop methodologies and software for measurement, analysis, attribution, and presentation of performance data for extreme-scale systems. Goals of the project were to support analysis of massive multi-scale parallelism, heterogeneous architectures, multi-faceted performance concerns, and to support both post-mortem performance analysis to identify program features that contribute to problematic performance and on-line performance analysis to drive adaptation. This final report summarizes the research and development activity at Rice University as part of the PIPER project. Producing a complete suite of performance tools for exascale platforms during the course of this project was impossible since both hardware and software for exascale systems is still a moving target. For that reason, the project focused broadly on the development of new techniques for measurement and analysis of performance on modern parallel architectures, enhancements to HPCToolkit’s software infrastructure to support our research goals or use on sophisticated applications, engaging developers of multithreaded runtimes to explore how support for tools should be integrated into their designs, engaging operating system developers with feature requests for enhanced monitoring support, engaging vendors with requests that they add hardware measure- ment capabilities and software interfaces needed by tools as they design new components of HPC platforms including processors, accelerators and networks, and finally collaborations with partners interested in using HPCToolkit to analyze and tune scalable parallel applications.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2018

Fuel performance of chromium-coated zirconium alloy and silicon carbide accident tolerant fuel claddings

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Accident Tolerant Fuel program is focused on extending the time for fuel failure during postulated severe accidents compared to the standard UO2-Zr alloy fuel system. This research investigates the feasibility of two different chromium-coated cladding concepts, one of which is zirconium-alloy based and the other is composite-SiC based. Both claddings had 50µm coatings, deducted from the base layer thicknesses. The claddings were reported on, using the multi- physics fuel performance tool BISON, under steady-state PWR operating conditions as well as two transients: power ramp and a loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA). The chromium-coated claddings showed comparable thermo-mechanical performance to the reference Zircaloy-4 cladding. As chromium is reported to provide an order of magnitude improvement in oxidation resistance, it is expected to be a better alternative in accident scenarios. Simulation results for both concepts call for further experimental investigation as well as modeling of beyond design-basis accidents.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2017

GOTCHA

GOTCHA is a runtime API intercepting function calls between shared libraries. It is intended to be used by HPC Tools (i.e., performance analysis tools like Open/SpeedShop, HPCToolkit, TAU, etc.). 2:18 PMThese other tools can use Gotch to intercept interesting functions, such as MPI functions, and collect performance metrics about those functions. We intend for this to be open-source software that gets adopted by other open-s0urse tools that are used at LLNL.

Poliakoff, David↗

DOE OSTI2021

Machine learning application to single channel design of molten salt reactor

This study proposes a robust approach to quickly design a nuclear reactor core and explores the best performing machine learning (ML) technique for predicting feature parameters of the core. Here we implemented the approach into a hypothetical channel of molten salt reactors to demonstrate the applicability of the method. We prepared a Python tool, named Plankton, which couples to a reactor physics code and an optimization tool, and imports ML methods. The tool performs three consecutive phases: reactor database generation, machine learning application, and design optimization. We identified the extra trees method as the best performing estimator. With the estimator, we found nine optimum designs in total, one for each fuel-salt pair, and estimated all the performance metrics of the designs with a <5% prediction error compared to their actual values. U-Pu-NaCl fuel-salt gave promising results with the highest conversion ratio, the most negative feedback coefficient, and the lowest fast flux.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

DOE OSTI2023

LANL contribution to ryujin, an open source finite element solver

Ryujin (https://github.com/conservation-laws/ryujin) is a high-performance finite-element software for solving mathematical partial differential equations (PDEs) with dominant hyperbolic structures. The author of this request, Eric Tovar, is using Ryujin as a high-performance tool for his Mark Kac postdoctoral fellowship research at LANL. Eric would like to contribute openly to the ryujin software without changing its core functionality. This includes: (i) bug fixes; (ii) re-organization of code for performance and syntactic updates including documentation; (iii) implementation of new PDE numerical methods that align with the core solver; (iv) implementation of new initial state configurations for target applications.

Tovar, Eric↗

DOE OSTI2022

SBbadger: biochemical reaction networks with definable degree distributions

Abstract Motivation An essential step in developing computational tools for the inference, optimization and simulation of biochemical reaction networks is gauging tool performance against earlier efforts using an appropriate set of benchmarks. General strategies for the assembly of benchmark models include collection from the literature, creation via subnetwork extraction and de novo generation. However, with respect to biochemical reaction networks, these approaches and their associated tools are either poorly suited to generate models that reflect the wide range of properties found in natural biochemical networks or to do so in numbers that enable rigorous statistical analysis. Results In this work, we present SBbadger, a python-based software tool for the generation of synthetic biochemical reaction or metabolic networks with user-defined degree distributions, multiple available kinetic formalisms and a host of other definable properties. SBbadger thus enables the creation of benchmark model sets that reflect properties of biological systems and generate the kinetics and model structures typically targeted by computational analysis and inference software. Here, we detail the computational and algorithmic workflow of SBbadger, demonstrate its performance under various settings, provide sample outputs and compare it to currently available biochemical reaction network generation software. Availability and implementation SBbadger is implemented in Python and is freely available at https://github.com/sys-bio/SBbadger and via PyPI at https://pypi.org/project/SBbadger/. Documentation can be found at https://SBbadger.readthedocs.io. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

NASA NTRS2015

Wind Tunnel Interference Effects on Tilt Rotor Testing Using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Experimental techniques to measure rotorcraft aerodynamic performance are widely used. However, most of them are either unable to capture interference effects from bodies, or require an extremely large computational budget. The objective of the present research is to develop an XV-15 Tilt Rotor Research Aircraft rotor model for investigation of wind tunnel wall interference using a novel Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) solver for rotorcraft, RotCFD. In RotCFD, a mid-fidelity URANS solver is used with an incompressible flow model and a realizable k-ε turbulence model. The rotor is, however, not modeled using a computationally expensive, unsteady viscous body-fitted grid, but is instead modeled using a blade element model with a momentum source approach. Various flight modes of the XV-15 isolated rotor, including hover, tilt and airplane mode, have been simulated and correlated to existing experimental and theoretical data. The rotor model is subsequently used for wind tunnel wall interference simulations in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex (NFAC) at NASA Ames Research Center in California. The results from the validation of the isolated rotor performance showed good correlation with experimental and theoretical data. The results were on par with known theoretical analyses. In RotCFD the setup, grid generation and running of cases is faster than many CFD codes, which makes it a useful engineering tool. Performance predictions need not be as accurate as high-fidelity CFD codes, as long as wall effects can be properly simulated. For both test sections of the NFAC wall interference was examined by simulating the XV-15 rotor in the test section of the wind tunnel and with an identical grid but extended boundaries in free field. Both cases were also examined with an isolated rotor or with the rotor mounted on the modeled geometry of the Tiltrotor Test Rig (TTR). A 'quasi linear trim' was used to trim the thrust for the rotor to compare the power as a unique variable. Power differences between free field and wind tunnel cases were found from -7 % to 0 % in the 80- by 120-Foot Wind Tunnel test section and -1.6 % to 4.8 % in the 40- by 80-Foot Wind Tunnel, depending on the TTR orientation, tunnel velocity and blade setting. The TTR will be used in 2016 to test the Bell 609 rotor in a similar fashion to the research in this report.

CFD↗