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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 127 records · Page 7

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NASA NTRS1994

Finite element analysis of the Space Shuttle 2.5-inch frangible nut

Finite element analysis of the Space Shuttle 2.5-inch frangible nut was conducted to improve understanding of the current design and proposed design changes to this explosively-actuated nut. The 2.5-inch frangible nut is used in two places to attach the aft end of the Space Shuttle Orbiter to the External Tank. Both 2.5-inch frangible nuts must function to complete safe separation. The 2.5-inch frangible nut contains two explosive boosters containing RDX explosive each capable of splitting the nut in half, on command from the Orbiter computers. To ensure separation, the boosters are designed to be redundant. The detonation of one booster is sufficient to split the nut in half. However, beginning in 1987 some production lots of 2.5-inch frangible nuts have demonstrated an inability to separate using only a single booster. The cause of the failure has been attributed to differences in the material properties and response of the Inconel 718 from which the 2.5-inch frangible nut is manufactured. Subsequent tests have resulted in design modifications of the boosters and frangible nut. Model development and initial analysis was conducted by Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) under funding from NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (NASA-JSC) starting in 1992. Modeling codes previously developed by SNL were transferred to NASA-JSC for further analysis on this and other devices. An explosive bolt with NASA Standard Detonator (NSD) charge, a 3/4-inch frangible nut, and the Super*Zip linear separation system are being modeled by NASA-JSC.

Darin N. McKinnis↗

NASA NTRS1999

Modeling Studies of the Effects of Winds and Heat Flux on the Tropical Oceans

Over a decade ago, funding from this NASA grant supported the development of the Cane-Zebiak ENSO prediction model which remains in use to this day. It also supported our work developing schemes for modeling the air-sea heat flux in ocean models used for studying climate variability. We introduced a succession of simple boundary layer models that allow the fluxes to be computed internally in the model and avoid the need to specify the atmospheric thermodynamic state. These models have now reached a level of generality that allows modeling of the global, rather than just tropical, ocean, including sea ice cover. The most recent versions of these boundary layer models have been widely distributed around the world and are in use by many ocean modeling groups.

Seager, R.↗

NASA NTRS2000

Braided Carbon Fiber Rope Flow Characteristics

I am submitting the following technical subject for consideration as a thesis topic for the master degree: The reusable solid rocket motor (RSRM) nozzle internal joints are being evaluated for the incorporation of a carbon fiber rope (CFR) as a thermal barrier. The CFR is approximately 0.260 in. diameter and is composed of approximately 12,000 carbon fibers, woven in ten sheaths or layers. The CFR is manufactured by a sub-tier vendor and subsequently several of its manufacturing details are proprietary to that vendor. The CFR design intent is to prevent hot motor combustion products and slag from intruding into the joint scaling area while still approaching a vented joint design to avoid the detriments of gas jet impingement. As a member of the Heat Transfer section at Thiokol Propulsion, two main goals exist as part of this NASA funded design effort: (1) development of flow model through the CFR and (2) development of a heat transfer model through the CFR. While both models are needed and most probably interrelated, the gas flow model is being targeted as the subject matter. Essentially, the topic would be "Modeling of Gas Flow through a Braided Carbon Fiber Rope". An AIAA journal or conference paper is being considered through Thiokol/NASA as well. A sub-scale CFR flow test fixture was designed to simulate the relative levels of CFR compression. The test fixture provides the means to measure gas mass flow rate upstream of the CFR and the pressure and temperature both upstream and downstream of the CFR. The test fixture was designed to eliminate the possibility of dynamic gapping at the CFR location and provide minimal flow resistance to ambient for gases exiting the rope. The data collected in the experiment will be evaluated to define a permeability/flow resistance model. Two possibilities exist for the flow characteristics through the CFR from choked flow to strictly friction driven. A test matrix for evaluating the CFR has been compiled, which addresses both of these characteristics. The range of pressures to be tested covers a relatively low delta pressure where non-choked flow is impossible, while the high pressure shown is dictated by the RSRM joint operating pressure where choking is possible. The test matrix, was also designed for a range of rope compressions or test fixture gaps ranging from 0.025" to 0.070". These gaps are controlled by the range of RSRM full-scale hardware joint gaps that will be expected by virtue of the joint design.

Heman, J. R. C.↗

NASA NTRS2001

Chromospheric Structure and Wind Acceleration in Zeta Aur Stars

This NASA grant supported an analysis of the variability of the wind of the supergiant primary star (K4 Ib) in the eclipsing binary Zeta Aurigae (Zeta Aur). In the ultraviolet, the main-sequence companion star (B5 V) dominates the observed flux, and therefore serves as a convenient probe of the cool supergiant's wind. This study utilized the extensive set of (100+) ultraviolet spectroscopic observations obtained with the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) satellite over its operational lifetime of 1978-1995. Although the resolution of IUE is limited (about 25 km/s), it is adequate to resolve variability in the wind features in Zeta Aur's ultraviolet spectrum, which are blueshifted 70 km/s from line center. Our analysis used the tau-v technique of Cardelli and Savage, which makes full use of the available line profile information. We find that the wind column densities vary by up to an order of magnitude over time. These results are being written up for submission to the Astrophysical Journal as the third paper of a series on the chromosphere and wind of Zeta Aurigae. The first two papers report on the construction of mean chromosphere and wind models respectively, based on HST/GHRS observations and funded by STScI. The third paper - this research - reports on variability of the Zeta Aur wind as determined from our analysis of the long IUE time series. This paper will be completed within the next three months; the delay in publication was to allow the completion of Papers 1 and 2, which logically precede the present work. Therefore, an additional no-cost extension was requested in order to ensure budgeted funds remain available for publication of this work. Unfortunately, this request was denied, and so I am forced to write this final report before publication of Paper 3. Regardless, this paper will be submitted for publication within the next three months.

Bennett, Philip D.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Risk Assessment System

FEAT, a software system for evaluating risks, was developed by Lockheed and later enhanced under NASA funding. FEAT uses directed graph - or digraph - models to provide information on cause and effect if a set of failure events occurs. James Miller, the program designer at Lockheed, formed DiGraphics, Inc. to market the software that has evolved from FEAT. The Diquest Analyzer, the company's flagship product, assists product designers in identifying the redundancies and weaknesses of a system. The software has applications in the chemical industry for risk assessment, design evaluation, and change management. Additional markets have been found in operations monitoring diagnostics and training of new personnel.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2017

Cultivating a Grassroots Aerospace Innovation Culture at NASA Ames Research Center

This paper details the adaptation of specific 'knowledge production' methods to implement a first of its kind, grassroots event that provokes a cultural change in how the NASA Ames civil servant community engages in the creation and selection of innovative ideas. Historically, selection of innovative proposals at NASA Ames Research Center is done at the highest levels of management, isolating the views and perspectives of the larger civil servant community. Additionally, NASA innovation programs are typically open to technical organizations and do not engage non-technical organizations to bring forward innovative processes/business practices. Finally, collaboration on innovative ideas and associated solutions tend to be isolated to organizational silos. In this environment, not all Ames employees feel empowered to innovate and opportunities for employee collaboration are limited. In order to address these issues, the 'innovation contest' method was adapted to create the NASA Ames Innovation Fair, a unique, grassroots innovation opportunity for the civil servant community. The Innovation Fair consisted of a physical event with a virtual component. The physical event provided innovators the opportunity to collaborate and pitch their innovations to the NASA Ames community. The civil servant community then voted for the projects that they viewed as innovative and would contribute to NASA's core mission, making this event a truly grassroots effort. The Innovation Fair website provided a location for additional knowledge sharing, discussion, and voting. On March 3rd, 2016, the 'First Annual NASA Ames Innovation Fair' was held with 49 innovators and more than 300 participants collaborating and/or voting for the best innovations. Based on the voting results, seven projects were awarded seed funding for projects ranging from innovative cost models to innovations in aerospace technology. Surveys of both innovators and Fair participants show the Innovation Fair was successful in fostering cross-organizational collaborations, soliciting participation of non-technical innovations, and increasing employee engagement in influencing the future of NASA Ames Research Center. The grassroots component of the Innovation Fair has been bench marked by the agency as a solid foundation for increasing employee engagement in the development of game changing aerospace technology and processes in support of NASA's mission.

Innovation↗

NASA NTRS2024

Lattice Confinement Fusion-Fast-Fission

Lattice Confinement Fusion (LCF) • Published 2020, Physical Review C 1,2 • Patented and Commercialized 2024, Astral Systems • LCF in compact neutron generator 50x increase in neutron flux, 99% from LCF • Produce medical radioisotopes • LCF Fast-Fission Hybrid Reaction • No Enriched Uranium • Demonstrated with US Navy and GEC • Modeling and Scaling under NIAC and NSF funding • Application • Deep space • Power: Icy worlds • Propulsion: Nuclear Electric Propulsion • Planetary Surface Power: Lunar and Mars • Terrestrial • DoD Operational Energy • Onsite power for Data Centers

lattice confinement fusion↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Lattice Confinement Fusion-Fast-Fission

nuclear electric propulsion↗

NASA NTRS2009

Modeling Languages Refine Vehicle Design

Cincinnati, Ohio s TechnoSoft Inc. is a leading provider of object-oriented modeling and simulation technology used for commercial and defense applications. With funding from Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts issued by Langley Research Center, the company continued development on its adaptive modeling language, or AML, originally created for the U.S. Air Force. TechnoSoft then created what is now known as its Integrated Design and Engineering Analysis Environment, or IDEA, which can be used to design a variety of vehicles and machinery. IDEA's customers include clients in green industries, such as designers for power plant exhaust filtration systems and wind turbines.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS1993

Integrated modeling of advanced optical systems

This poster session paper describes an integrated modeling and analysis capability being developed at JPL under funding provided by the JPL Director's Discretionary Fund and the JPL Control/Structure Interaction Program (CSI). The posters briefly summarize the program capabilities and illustrate them with an example problem. The computer programs developed under this effort will provide an unprecedented capability for integrated modeling and design of high performance optical spacecraft. The engineering disciplines supported include structural dynamics, controls, optics and thermodynamics. Such tools are needed in order to evaluate the end-to-end system performance of spacecraft such as OSI, POINTS, and SMMM. This paper illustrates the proof-of-concept tools that have been developed to establish the technology requirements and demonstrate the new features of integrated modeling and design. The current program also includes implementation of a prototype tool based upon the CAESY environment being developed under the NASA Guidance and Control Research and Technology Computational Controls Program. This prototype will be available late in FY-92. The development plan proposes a major software production effort to fabricate, deliver, support and maintain a national-class tool from FY-93 through FY-95.

Briggs, Hugh C.↗

NASA NTRS2011

NASA's Heliophysics Theory Program - Accomplishments in Life Cycle Ending 2011

NASA's Heliophysics Theory Program (HTP) is now into a new triennial cycle of funded research, with new research awards beginning in 2011. The theory program was established by the (former) Solar Terrestrial Division in 1980 to redress a weakness of support in the theory area. It has been a successful, evolving scientific program with long-term funding of relatively large "critical mass groups" pursuing theory and modeling on a scale larger than that available within the limits of traditional NASA Supporting Research and Technology (SR&T) awards. The results of the last 3 year funding cycle, just ended, contributed to ever more cutting edge theoretical understanding of all parts of the Sun-Earth Connection chain. Advances ranged from the core of the Sun out into the corona, through the solar wind into the Earth's magnetosphere and down to the ionosphere and lower atmosphere, also contributing to understanding the environments of other solar system bodies. The HTP contributions were not isolated findings but continued to contribute to the planning and implementation of NASA spacecraft missions and to the development of the predictive computer models that have become the workhorses for analyzing satellite and ground-based measurements.

Grebowsky, J.↗

NASA NTRS2014

Software Simplifies the Sharing of Numerical Models

To ease the sharing of climate models with university students, Goddard Space Flight Center awarded SBIR funding to Reston, Virginia-based Parabon Computation Inc., a company that specializes in cloud computing. The firm developed a software program capable of running climate models over the Internet, and also created an online environment for people to collaborate on developing such models.

Source record↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Addressing CFM Modeling Gaps for Application into NASA’S Future Cutting Edge Missions

NASA, the US industry, and international partners are crafting frameworks to enable sustaining lunar missions. The ongoing programs, led by the agency, and prominent industry players, encompass plans for the sustained use of cryogenic propellants in lunar landers and in-space propellant refueling depots. NASA’s proactive funding initiatives have fueled the advancement of predictive computational models tailored to enhance the storage and transfer of cryogenic propellant. This paper aims to spotlight the latest advancements in this arena and delve into the collaborative efforts surrounding predictive model development within internal NASA programs as well as current and previous collaborations with industry and international partners. The paper presents an overview of recent advancements in cryogenic fluid management model development, along with their correlation with recent microgravity and large-scale cryogenic ground tests. The tests include key experiments such as the ISS Zero-Boil-Off Tank (ZBOT) series of experiments and the (Robotic Refueling Mission 3) RRM3 test during which liquid methane was stored on-orbit for an extended period of five months. The paper also highlights the anchoring of propellant tank pressurized drain tests involving sloshing that were conducted with liquid methane propellant during the Apollo/Saturn Era. Additionally, the paper discusses model anchoring against more recent sloshing tests carried out with liquid hydrogen propellant. Notable large-scale tests, such as a liquid oxygen propellant transfer test conducted by SpaceX were also used to help correlate a two-phase propellant transfer model using the valuable data measured during the test. The paper further showcases model correlations against a substantial oxygen liquefaction test undertaken by NASA to validate In-Situ-Resource-Utilization (ISRU) technologies that will prove pivotal for a sustained lunar presence.

Low-gravity fluid modeling↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Mars Sample Return Earth Entry System Woven Roughness Mach 6 Aeroheating Test

The Mars Sample Return Earth Entry System is the first entry vehicle designed for a NASA flagship mission to utilize a woven thermal protection system as well as a 52.5 degree sphere cone forebody geometry. As a result, no heritage aeroheating experimental data set exists to compare with computational predictions. In order to obtain a set of validation data for computational models, an extensive wind tunnel test campaign was funded by the Mars Sample Return Earth Entry System project. The first entry in the test campaign was completed in April of 2023, which was an investigation of turbulent heating augmentation due to woven thermal protection system roughness on the 52.5 degree Mars Sample Return - Earth Entry System vehicle forebody geometry. This test entry produced the first ever experimental aeroheating data on a 52.5 degree sphere-cone geometry as well as the first NASA experimental aeroheating data on a woven surface roughness pattern. Data obtained from this test campaign is being directly leveraged to support the NASA flight program, as experimental results are being utilized to validate the computational models which characterize the aeroheating environment that the vehicle experiences and predict turbulent surface heating levels and margins across the woven surface.

Jonathan S Cheatwood↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Mars Sample Return Earth Entry System Woven Roughness Mach 6 Aeroheating Test

The Mars Sample Return Earth Entry System is the first entry vehicle designed for a NASA flagship mission to utilize a woven thermal protection system as well as a 52.5 degree sphere cone forebody geometry. As a result, no heritage aeroheating experimental data set exists to compare with computational predictions. In order to obtain a set of validation data for computational models, an extensive wind tunnel test campaign was funded by the Mars Sample Return Earth Entry System project. The first entry in the test campaign was completed in April of 2023, which was an investigation of turbulent heating augmentation due to woven thermal protection system roughness on the 52.5 degree Mars Sample Return - Earth Entry System vehicle forebody geometry. This test entry produced the first ever experimental aeroheating data on a 52.5 deg sphere-cone geometry as well as the first NASA experimental aeroheating data on a woven surface roughness pattern. Data obtained from this test campaign is being directly leveraged to support the NASA flight program, as experimental results are being utilized to validate the computational models which characterize the aeroheating environment that the vehicle experiences and predict turbulent surface heating levels and margins across the woven surface.

Jonathan Cheatwood↗

NASA NTRS1994

Forecast skill of a high-resolution real-time mesoscale model designed for weather support of operations at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Station

NASA funded Mesoscale Environmental Simulations and Operations (MESO), Inc. to develop a version of the Mesoscale Atmospheric Simulation System (MASS). The model has been modified specifically for short-range forecasting in the vicinity of KSC/CCAS. To accomplish this, the model domain has been limited to increase the number of horizontal grid points (and therefore grid resolution) and the model' s treatment of precipitation, radiation, and surface hydrology physics has been enhanced to predict convection forced by local variations in surface heat, moisture fluxes, and cloud shading. The objective of this paper is to (1) provide an overview of MASS including the real-time initialization and configuration for running the data pre-processor and model, and (2) to summarize the preliminary evaluation of the model's forecasts of temperature, moisture, and wind at selected rawinsonde station locations during February 1994 and July 1994. MASS is a hydrostatic, three-dimensional modeling system which includes schemes to represent planetary boundary layer processes, surface energy and moisture budgets, free atmospheric long and short wave radiation, cloud microphysics, and sub-grid scale moist convection.

Taylor, Gregory E.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Mental Models of Software Forecasting

The majority of software engineers resist the use of the currently available cost models. One problem is that the mathematical and statistical models that are currently available do not correspond with the mental models of the software engineers. In an earlier JPL funded study (Hihn and Habib-agahi, 1991) it was found that software engineers prefer to use analogical or analogy-like techniques to derive size and cost estimates, whereas curren CER's hide any analogy in the regression equations. In addition, the currently available models depend upon information which is not available during early planning when the most important forecasts must be made.

Cost Models↗

NASA NTRS2001

A Global Magnetohydrodynamic Model of Jovian Magnetosphere

The goal of this project was to develop a new global magnetohydrodynamic model of the interaction of the Jovian magnetosphere with the solar wind. Observations from 28 orbits of Jupiter by Galileo along with those from previous spacecraft at Jupiter, Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager I and 2 and Ulysses, have revealed that the Jovian magnetosphere is a vast, complicated system. The Jovian aurora also has been monitored for several years. Like auroral observations at Earth, these measurements provide us with a global picture of magnetospheric dynamics. Despite this wide range of observations, we have limited quantitative understanding of the Jovian magnetosphere and how it interacts with the solar wind. For the past several years we have been working toward a quantitative understanding of the Jovian magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind by employing global magnetohydrodynamic simulations to model the magnetosphere. Our model has been an explicit MHD code (previously used to model the Earth's magnetosphere) to study Jupiter's magnetosphere. We continue to obtain important insights with this code, but it suffers from some severe limitations. In particular with this code we are limited to considering the region outside of 15RJ, with cell sizes of about 1.5R(sub J). The problem arises because of the presence of widely separated time scales throughout the magnetosphere. The numerical stability criterion for explicit MHD codes is the CFL limit and is given by C(sub max)(Delta)t/(Delta)x less than 1 where C(sub max) is the maximum group velocity in a given cell, (Delta)x is the grid spacing and (Delta)t is the time step. If the maximum wave velocity is C(sub w) and the flow speed is C(sub f), C(sub max) = C(sub w) + C(sub f). Near Jupiter the Alfven wave speed becomes very large (it approaches the speed of light at one Jovian radius). Operating with this time step makes the calculation essentially intractable. Therefore under this funding we have been designing a new MHD model that will be able to compute solutions in the wide parameter regime of the Jovian magnetosphere.

Walker, Raymond J.↗