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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 145 records · Page 8

Evaluation of WRF-Solar Cloud Forecast Using the NSRDB: Preprint

Cloud forecast is a crucial component in predicting solar irradiance from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Assessing cloud properties from the NWP models requires significant work due to the need for high-quality data, spatial analysis covering model extent, and detailed analysis of model performance for different types of clouds. This study presents an evaluation of the WRF-Solar cloud forecast using the National Solar Radiation Database (NSRDB). We propose an evaluation framework applied to a single model prediction as well as ensemble-based forecasts. Various cloud detection metrics are calculated when comparing with the satellite-derived dataset. The mismatched clouds from the WRF-Solar model are quantified using nine cloud types classified by cloud top height and cloud optical depth. The results based on the WRF-Solar forecasts covering the entire U.S. for the full year of 2018 shows mismatched cloud frequency in the range of 8% - 46% for thick and high-level (deep convective) to thin and low-level (cumulus) clouds.

cloud mask forecast↗

DOE Advanced Gas Reactor Fuel Development and Qualification Program Overview

AGR-3/4 post-irradiation examination and data analysis AGR-5/6/7 PIE and safety testing Supplemental fuel microanalysis and method development Fuel oxidation testing Air/moisture Ingress Experiment (AMIX) system development (deployed in FY23) Single particle testing in FITT Data management and analysis Fuel performance modeling

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

Thermal Management of Wide-Bandgap Semiconductor Amplifiers Used for Plasma Heating and Control

Princeton Fusion Systems (PFS) has designed, built, and tested a Load Switch printed circuit board (PCB) to demonstrate the capabilities of 2 kV silicon carbide (SiC) cascodes in development by Qorvo towards plasma heating and control applications. Initial tests have been conducted at low power (~100 W) for validation with thermal finite element analysis (FEA) modeling performed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Comparisons of experimental data with the thermal modeling results, along with considerations for operating in plasma systems, will be discussed.

CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND SU↗

Test and validation for robot arm control dynamics simulation

The Flight Telerobotic Servicer (FTS) program will require an ability to develop, in a cost effective manner, many simulation models for design, analysis, performance evaluation, and crew training. Computational speed and the degree of modeling fidelity associated with each simulation must be commensurate with problem objectives. To demonstrate evolving state-of-the-art general purpose multibody modeling capabilities, to validate these by laboratory testing, and to expose their modeling shortcomings, two focus problems at the opposite ends of the simulation spectrum are defined: (1) Coarse Acquisition Control Dynamics. Create a real time man-in-the-control-loop simulator. Provide animated graphical display of robot arm dynamics and tactile feedback sufficient for cueing the operator. Interface simulator software with human operated tactile feedback controller; i.e., the Kraft mini-master. (2) Fine, Precision Mode Control Dynamics. Create a high speed, high fidelity simulation model for the design, analysis, and performance evaluation of autonomous 7 degree-of-freedom (DOF) trajectory control algorithms. This model must contain detail dynamic models for all significant dynamics elements within the robot arm, such as joint drive mechanisms.

Yae, K. Harold↗

Marin County Wildland Fires: Examining Fuel Load and Land Cover Change to Inform Fire Prevention and Suppression Decisions in Marin County, CA

Heightened occurrence of severe wildfires in the Western United States is increasing the need to better understand regions of high potential wildfire severity and develop methodologies for identifying the best locations for fuels reduction and active wildfire suppression, especially in populated regions such as Marin County, California. Marin County, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, has had significant development in the wildland-urban interface and periods of highly wildfire-prone conditions. The NASA DEVELOP team collaborated with Fire Foundry (a Marin-based fire service workforce development program) and the Marin County Fire Department to develop models to assist with fire management. Using data from Sentinel-2A, PlanetScope, ECOSTRESS, a county-wide LiDAR mapping effort, Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+), and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), our team developed a number of input data layers for three different models to evaluate wildfire severity. One model performed a suitability analysis with weights based on scientific literature; another model utilized a U-Net Convolutional Neural Network trained on previous fires in Marin and neighboring Sonoma County to predict the difference normalized burn severity; and the third inputted data layers into the FlamMap tool that outputs risk categories. We compared model outputs and performed a weighted overlay analysis to identify specific locations where a fireline could be constructed to interrupt the progress of an active fire. These tools will assist partners in preparing for and managing active wildfire situations.

Remote sensing↗

Dark Energy Survey year 1 results: Joint analysis of galaxy clustering, galaxy lensing, and CMB lensing two-point functions

We perform a joint analysis of the auto and cross-correlations between three cosmic fields: the galaxy density field, the galaxy weak lensing shear field, and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) weak lensing convergence field. These three fields are measured using roughly 1300 sq. deg. of overlapping optical imaging data from first year observations of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and millimeter-wave observations of the CMB from both the South Pole Telescope Sunyaev-Zel’dovich survey and Planck. We present cosmological constraints from the joint analysis of the two-point correlation functions between galaxy density and galaxy shear with CMB lensing. We test for consistency between these measurements and the DES-only two-point function measurements, finding no evidence for inconsistency in the context of flat Λ CDM cosmological models. Performing a joint analysis of five of the possible correlation functions between these fields (excluding only the CMB lensing autospectrum) yields S 8 ≡ σ 8 $\sqrt{Ω_{m}}/0.3$ = 0.782$^{+0.019}_{-0.025}$ and Ω m = 0.260$^{+0.029}_{-0.019}$. We test for consistency between these five correlation function measurements and the Planck -only measurement of the CMB lensing autospectrum, again finding no evidence for inconsistency in the context of flat Λ CDM models. Combining constraints from all six two-point functions yields S 8 = 0.776$^{+0.014}_{-0.021}$ and Ω m = 0.271$^{+0.022}_{-0.016}$. These results provide a powerful test and confirmation of the results from the first year DES joint-probes analysis.

Abbott, T. M. C.↗

Information Extraction for System-Software Safety Analysis: Calendar Year 2007 Year-End Report

This annual report describes work to integrate a set of tools to support early model-based analysis of failures and hazards due to system-software interactions. The tools perform and assist analysts in the following tasks: 1) extract model parts from text for architecture and safety/hazard models; 2) combine the parts with library information to develop the models for visualization and analysis; 3) perform graph analysis on the models to identify possible paths from hazard sources to vulnerable entities and functions, in nominal and anomalous system-software configurations; 4) perform discrete-time-based simulation on the models to investigate scenarios where these paths may play a role in failures and mishaps; and 5) identify resulting candidate scenarios for software integration testing. This paper describes new challenges in a NASA abort system case, and enhancements made to develop the integrated tool set.

Malin, Jane T.↗

Mars 2020 Site-Specific Mission Performance Analysis: 1. Science exploration and sol type modeling

We developed a scenario-based mission performance model for the Mars 2020 Rover to help identify project-wide productivity and operability challenges and opportunities. We have modeled science exploration combining high-fidelity resource modeling, science strategies, and modular science activity scenarios. This is proving to be an effective way of incorporating science activities into an engineering-based performance model.

Ono, Masahiro↗

Development of a helicopter rotor/propulsion system dynamics analysis

A time-domain analysis of coupled engine/drive train/rotor dynamics of a twin-engine, single main rotor helicopter model has been performed. The analysis incorporates an existing helicopter model with nonlinear simulations of a helicopter turboshaft engine and its fuel controller. System dynamic behavior is studied using the resulting simulation which included representations for the two engines and their fuel controllers, drive system, main rotor, tail rotor, and aircraft rigid body motions. Time histories of engine and rotor RPM response to pilot control inputs are studied for a baseline rotor and propulsion system model. Sensitivity of rotor RPM droop to fuel controller gain changes and collective input feed-forward gain changes are studied. Torque-load-sharing between the two engines is investigated by making changes in the fuel controller feedback paths. A linear engine model is derived from the nonlinear engine simulation and used in the coupled system analysis. This four-state linear engine model is then reduced to a three-state model. The effect of this simplification on coupled system behavior is shown.

Warmbrodt, W.↗

Hardware Verification and Validation for a Navigation Sensor Software Model in Support of Flight Vehicle Performance Analysis

… or, “It’s in the details, how to make complicated software perform like complicated hardware.” In attempts to minimize development time and quickly build an operational vehicle, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) has had to be intentional about integrated testing. Constraints on budget and schedule have required balance between testing needs and the desire for an integrated flight vehicle as soon as possible. To provide key insights early in design and analysis cycles, a large amount of effort has shifted into maturing and validating models at the component level with integrated testing as a means to validate their integration. In terms of SLS Navigation, this, and the model-based design approach have pushed explicit requirements for sensor models to be validated against flight hardware to high precision. This paper covers the approach taken to verify and validate the models for the two key navigation sensors on the SLS vehicle, the Redundant Inertial Navigation Sensor and the Rate Gyro Assembly. These models are used in performance evaluation, fault detection, and operations development extensively. Using a mix of data from hardware vendor documentation and testing reports, limited in-house testing, and integration activities, these models were able to be validated against flight hardware at multiple levels, from the internal software design to statistical behavior at the raw sensor and integrated box levels. The high level of insight into the hardware elements is instrumental to support flight certification activities and building confidence in SLS Navigation capability. Focused testing enabled additional insight and validation that proved invaluable and the resulting insights were used to focus and mature models. Additionally, of having validated performance-based hardware models enables a wide breadth of activities including detailed fault detection studies and integration into future vehicle frameworks, such as an upper stage and provide a valuable asset to continued SLS analysis and design.

Evan J Anzalone↗

Hardware Verification and Validation for a Navigation Sensor Software Model in Support of Flight Vehicle Performance Analysis

… or, “It’s in the details, how to make complicated software perform like complicated hardware.” In attempts to minimize development time and quickly build an operational vehicle, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) has had to be intentional about integrated testing. Constraints on budget and schedule have required balance between testing needs and the desire for an integrated flight vehicle as soon as possible. To provide key insights early in design and analysis cycles, a large amount of effort has shifted into maturing and validating models at the component level with integrated testing as a means to validate their integration. In terms of SLS Navigation, this, and the model-based design approach have pushed explicit requirements for sensor models to be validated against flight hardware to high precision. This paper covers the approach taken to verify and validate the models for the two key navigation sensors on the SLS vehicle, the Redundant Inertial Navigation Sensor and the Rate Gyro Assembly. These models are used in performance evaluation, fault detection, and operations development extensively. Using a mix of data from hardware vendor documentation and testing reports, limited in-house testing, and integration activities, these models were able to be validated against flight hardware at multiple levels, from the internal software design to statistical behavior at the raw sensor and integrated box levels. The high level of insight into the hardware elements is instrumental to support flight certification activities and building confidence in SLS Navigation capability. Focused testing enabled additional insight and validation that proved invaluable and the resulting insights were used to focus and mature models. Additionally, of having validated performance-based hardware models enables a wide breadth of activities including detailed fault detection studies and integration into future vehicle frameworks, such as an upper stage and provide a valuable asset to continued SLS analysis and design.

Thomas Park↗

Study of Gamma-ray Production from Neutron-induced Activity on Spacecraft for DIORAMA

The Distributed Infrastructure Offering Real{Time Access to Modeling and Analysis (DIORAMA) software provides performance modeling capabilities of the United States Nuclear Detonation Detection System (USNDS) with a focus on the characterization of Space{Based Nuclear Detonation Detection (SNDD) instrument performance [1]. A study was conducted investigating the neutron activation on spacecraft caused by cosmic{ray and trapped proton{induced spallation, and by direct irradiation from hypothetical nuclear detonations as a background component to be incorporated into DIORAMA. The neutron activation background study amasses a database of pre-calculated Monte Carlo data that reflects the delayed gamma-ray production from activated nuclei as a function of incident cosmic or neutron flux, incident energy, material volume, etc. CINDER2008 coupled with MCNPX and the Activation Analysis Tools in the Activation in Accelerator Radiation Environments (AARE) distribution along with a suite of Python scripts are used to calculate and assemble the Monte Carlo database [2{6]. The neutron activation background study improves the fidelity of DIORAMA by providing the neutron-induced activation component to the background of the instruments on-board the spacecraft, and has implications for future instrument design studies.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Marin County Wildland Fires: Examining Fuel Load and Land Cover Change to Inform Fire Prevention and Suppression Decisions in Marin County, CA

Heightened occurrence of severe wildfires in the Western United States is increasing the need to better understand regions of high potential wild fire severity and develop methodologies for identifying the best locations for fuels reduction and active wildfire suppression, especially in populated regions such as Marin County, California. Marin County, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, has had significant development in the wildland-urban interface and periods of highly wildfire-prone conditions. The NASA DEVELOP team collaborated with Fire Foundry, a Marin-based fire service work force development program, to develop new models to assist with fire management. Using data from Sentinel-2A, Planet Scope, ECOSTRESS, a county-wide LiDAR mapping effort, Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+), and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), the team developed several input data layers to three models evaluating wild fire severity. One model performed a suitability analysis with weights based on scientific literature, another utilized machine learning based on past fires in Marin and neighboring Sonoma County to predict the difference normalized burn ratio, and the third inputted data layers into the Flam Map tool, which outputs risk categories. The team compared model outputs and, using the best-fit model, performed fuzzy logic analysis to identify specific locations where a fire break could be constructed to interrupt the progress of an active fire. These tools were proven useful and will assist partners in preparing for and managing an active wildfire event.

Suhani Dalal↗

Pretraining Billion-Scale Geospatial Foundational Models on Frontier

As AI workloads increase in scope, generalization capability becomes challenging for small task-specific models and their demand for large amounts of labeled training samples increases. On the contrary, Foundation Models (FMs) are trained with internet-scale unlabeled data via self-supervised learning and have been shown to adapt to various tasks with minimal fine-tuning. Although large FMs have demonstrated significant impact in natural language processing and computer vision, efforts toward FMs for geospatial applications have been restricted to smaller size models, as pretraining larger models requires very large computing resources equipped with state-of-the-art hardware accelerators. Current satellite constellations collect 100+TBs of data a day, resulting in images that are billions of pixels and multimodal in nature. Such geospatial data poses unique challenges opening up new opportunities to develop FMs. We investigate billion scale FMs and HPC training profiles for geospatial applications by pretraining on publicly available data. We studied from end-to-end the performance and impact in the solution by scaling the model size. Our larger 3B parameter size model achieves up to 30% improvement in top1 scene classification accuracy when comparing a 100M parameter model. Moreover, we detail performance experiments on the Frontier supercomputer, America's first exascale system, where we study different model and data parallel approaches using PyTorch's Fully Sharded Data Parallel library. Specifically, we study variants of the Vision Transformer architecture (ViT), conducting performance analysis for ViT models with size up to 15B parameters. By discussing throughput and performance bottlenecks under different parallelism configurations, we offer insights on how to leverage such leadership-class HPC resources when developing large models for geospatial imagery applications.

Tsaris, Aristeidis (aris)↗

CityBES v2021

City Buildings, Energy, and Sustainability (CityBES) is a web-based data and computing platform, focusing on energy modeling and analysis of a city's building stock to support district or city-scale building energy efficiency programs. CityBES uses an international open data standard, CityGML, to represent and exchange 3D city models. CityBES employs EnergyPlus to simulate building energy use and savings from energy efficient retrofits. Other CityBES features include energy benchmarking, district heating and cooling system modeling, rooftop PV analysis, building performance visualization, heat resilience modeling, as well as urban scale mapping of microclimate and heat vulnerability at census tract level. Different from other tools, CityBES uses integrated open and standard 3D city building data and models each individual building using EnergyPlus. CityBES can be used by urban planners, city energy managers, building owners, utilities, energy consultants and researchers.

Hong, Tianzhen↗

Trade Study for Neutron Transport at Low Earth Orbit: Adding Fidelity to DIORAMA

The Distributed Infrastructure Offering Real-Time Access to Modeling and Analysis (DIORAMA) software provides performance modeling capabilities of the United States Nuclear Detonation Detection System (USNDS) with a focus on the characterization of Space-Based Nuclear Detonation Detection (SNDD) instrument performance [1]. A case study was done to add the neutron propagation capabilities of DIORAMA to low earth orbit (LEO), and compare the back-calculated incident energy from the time-of- ight (TOF) spectrum with the scored incident energy spectrum. As the scoring altitude lowers, the time increase due to scattering takes up much more of the fraction of total TOF; whereas at geosynchronous earth orbit (GEO), the time increase due to scattering is a negligible fraction of the total TOF [2]. The scattering smears out the TOF enough to make the back-calculation of the initial energy spectrum from the TOF spectrum very convoluted.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Quantitative risk assessment system (QRAS)

A quantitative risk assessment system (QRAS) builds a risk model of a system for which risk of failure is being assessed, then analyzes the risk of the system corresponding to the risk model. The QRAS performs sensitivity analysis of the risk model by altering fundamental components and quantifications built into the risk model, then re-analyzes the risk of the system using the modifications. More particularly, the risk model is built by building a hierarchy, creating a mission timeline, quantifying failure modes, and building/editing event sequence diagrams. Multiplicities, dependencies, and redundancies of the system are included in the risk model. For analysis runs, a fixed baseline is first constructed and stored. This baseline contains the lowest level scenarios, preserved in event tree structure. The analysis runs, at any level of the hierarchy and below, access this baseline for risk quantitative computation as well as ranking of particular risks. A standalone Tool Box capability exists, allowing the user to store application programs within QRAS.

Weinstock, Robert M↗

Evaluation of SSME test data reduction methods

Accurate prediction of hardware and flow characteristics within the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) during transient and main-stage operation requires a significant integration of ground test data, flight experience, and computational models. The process of integrating SSME test measurements with physical model predictions is commonly referred to as data reduction. Uncertainties within both test measurements and simplified models of the SSME flow environment compound the data integration problem. The first objective of this effort was to establish an acceptability criterion for data reduction solutions. The second objective of this effort was to investigate the data reduction potential of the ROCETS (Rocket Engine Transient Simulation) simulation platform. A simplified ROCETS model of the SSME was obtained from the MSFC Performance Analysis Branch . This model was examined and tested for physical consistency. Two modules were constructed and added to the ROCETS library to independently check the mass and energy balances of selected engine subsystems including the low pressure fuel turbopump, the high pressure fuel turbopump, the low pressure oxidizer turbopump, the high pressure oxidizer turbopump, the fuel preburner, the oxidizer preburner, the main combustion chamber coolant circuit, and the nozzle coolant circuit. A sensitivity study was then conducted to determine the individual influences of forty-two hardware characteristics on fourteen high pressure region prediction variables as returned by the SSME ROCETS model.

Santi, L. Michael↗