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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2001

The Computational Complexity, Parallel Scalability, and Performance of Atmospheric Data Assimilation Algorithms

The computational complexity of algorithms for Four Dimensional Data Assimilation (4DDA) at NASA's Data Assimilation Office (DAO) is discussed. In 4DDA, observations are assimilated with the output of a dynamical model to generate best-estimates of the states of the system. It is thus a mapping problem, whereby scattered observations are converted into regular accurate maps of wind, temperature, moisture and other variables. The DAO is developing and using 4DDA algorithms that provide these datasets, or analyses, in support of Earth System Science research. Two large-scale algorithms are discussed. The first approach, the Goddard Earth Observing System Data Assimilation System (GEOS DAS), uses an atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) and an observation-space based analysis system, the Physical-space Statistical Analysis System (PSAS). GEOS DAS is very similar to global meteorological weather forecasting data assimilation systems, but is used at NASA for climate research. Systems of this size typically run at between 1 and 20 gigaflop/s. The second approach, the Kalman filter, uses a more consistent algorithm to determine the forecast error covariance matrix than does GEOS DAS. For atmospheric assimilation, the gridded dynamical fields typically have More than 10(exp 6) variables, therefore the full error covariance matrix may be in excess of a teraword. For the Kalman filter this problem can easily scale to petaflop/s proportions. We discuss the computational complexity of GEOS DAS and our implementation of the Kalman filter. We also discuss and quantify some of the technical issues and limitations in developing efficient, in terms of wall clock time, and scalable parallel implementations of the algorithms.

Lyster, Peter M.↗
NASA NTRS2000

Balloon-Borne Observations of the Anisotropy of the Cosmic Microwave'Background on Angular Scales of 0.2 to 40 Degrees'

During this final period, BOOMERANG was deployed to McMurdo Mtn., Antarctica in late 1998 and successfully flew a 10.5 day long duration flight. The experiment returned excellent data, and produced the first resolved images of the early universe. These results, as well as those produced during a test flight over North America in August, 1997, are given in the references below. Analysis of the data from the 1998 flight is continuing. In parallel, we have begun to prepare the payload for a long-duration flight from McMurdo in December 2001. For this flight, the focal plane is being outfitted with polarization sensitive detectors, with the goal of detecting the polarization of the CMB that is predicted to exist at degree angular scales.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2018

The HEP.TrkX Project: Deep Learning for Particle Tracking

Charged particle reconstruction in dense environments, such as the detectors of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) is a challenging pattern recognition problem. Traditional tracking algorithms, such as the combinatorial Kalman Filter, have been used with great success in HEP experiments for years. However, these state-of-the-art techniques are inherently sequential and scale quadratically or worse with increased detector occupancy. The HEP.TrkX project is a pilot project with the aim to identify and develop cross-experiment solutions based on machine learning algorithms for track reconstruction. Machine learning algorithms bring a lot of potential to this problem thanks to their capability to model complex non-linear data dependencies, to learn effective representations of high-dimensional data through training, and to parallelize easily on high-throughput architectures such as FPGAs or GPUs. In this paper we present the evolution and performance of our recurrent (LSTM) and convolutional neural networks moving from basic 2D models to more complex models and the challenges of scaling up to realistic dimensionality/sparsity.

Tsaris, Aristeidis↗
NASA NTRS1986

Eddy processes in the general circulation of the Jovian atmospheres

Two fundamentally different views of the general circulation of Jovian atmospheres have emerged. According to one view, the observed jet streams at the cloud tops are controlled by the vorticity transfers of small scale eddies generated by planetary wave instabilities within a shallow atmospheric layer. According to the alternate point of view, the zonal jets are surface manifestations of deep interior convection organized into cylindrical motion with axes parallel to the planetary rotation axis. Both approaches may be considered in the context of the very different roles assumed by the potential vorticity. A possible reconciliation of the two kinds of dynamical systems is considered in which the interior motion is overlaid with a statically stable cappling layer driven by turbulent energy injection from below. A simple model for the eddy driving of quasi-geostrophic dynamics in the capping layer is presented which is consistent with the tentative evidence for up-gradient momentum flux on Jupiter and IRIS observations of thermal contrast correlations with cyclonic and anticyclonic shear zones. Certain synoptic-scale cloud features in Jupiter's atmosphere are interpreted as breaking waves, which may also influence the lateral mixing of tracers such as the ortho-para hydrogen ratio.

Leovy, Conway↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Development of Large-Scale Thrust Chambers using Laser Powder Directed Energy Deposition

Historical manufacturing methods for liquid propulsion combustion chambers have relied on series of tube-walls or slotted channel walls (subsequently brazed or plated) for regenerative cooling paths. Large-scale additive manufacturing techniques offer strong potential to minimize manufacturing lead times and cost for developing liquid propulsion chambers, while maintaining performance metrics of traditionally manufactured hardware. The benefits expand beyond traditional combustion chambers to lesser considered nuclear thermal propulsion chambers where radiation energizes the singular incoming propellant stream instead of an exothermic chemical reaction. While each subset of liquid propulsion chambers reaps similar benefit, the geometric challenges in each design can vary substantially. This manuscript discusses the challenges of large contraction ratio propulsion chambers, bimetallic liners and closeout jackets, and material selection when considering laser powder directed energy deposition. LP-DED presently offers build volumes unattainable by L-PBF systems, required for large diameter thrust chambers. LP-DED typically has faster deposition time and is capable of overhang angles without support material (due to the ability to tilt the build plate and minimize the actual build angle). These benefits come at the cost of feature resolution. Designers and manufacturers should consider the effects of thick-wall features printed parallel to the primary surface versus perpendicular due to distortion. Thick-wall and thin-wall features printed in the same plane can substantially increase build time. Where large-scale L-PBF overlaps in size, there may be limited benefit in the quantity of powder required for the build due to the low capture rate of LP-DED and a case-by-case examination is required.

LP-DED↗
NASA NTRS1996

Helicopter Blade-Vortex Interaction Noise with Comparisons to CFD Calculations

A comparison of experimental acoustics data and computational predictions was performed for a helicopter rotor blade interacting with a parallel vortex. The experiment was designed to examine the aerodynamics and acoustics of parallel Blade-Vortex Interaction (BVI) and was performed in the Ames Research Center (ARC) 80- by 120-Foot Subsonic Wind Tunnel. An independently generated vortex interacted with a small-scale, nonlifting helicopter rotor at the 180 deg azimuth angle to create the interaction in a controlled environment. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was used to calculate near-field pressure time histories. The CFD code, called Transonic Unsteady Rotor Navier-Stokes (TURNS), was used to make comparisons with the acoustic pressure measurement at two microphone locations and several test conditions. The test conditions examined included hover tip Mach numbers of 0.6 and 0.7, advance ratio of 0.2, positive and negative vortex rotation, and the vortex passing above and below the rotor blade by 0.25 rotor chords. The results show that the CFD qualitatively predicts the acoustic characteristics very well, but quantitatively overpredicts the peak-to-peak sound pressure level by 15 percent in most cases. There also exists a discrepancy in the phasing (about 4 deg) of the BVI event in some cases. Additional calculations were performed to examine the effects of vortex strength, thickness, time accuracy, and directionality. This study validates the TURNS code for prediction of near-field acoustic pressures of controlled parallel BVI.

McCluer, Megan S.↗
NASA NTRS1999

Asian Monsoons: Variability, Predictability, and Sensitivity to External Forcing

In this study, we have addressed the interannual variations of Asian monsoons including both broad-scale and regional monsoon components. Particular attention is devoted to the identities of the South China Sea monsoon and Indian monsoon. We use CPC Merged Analysis of Precipitation and NCEP reanalyses to define regional monsoon indices and to depict the various monsoons. Parallel modeling studies have also been carried out to assess the role of boundary forcing and the potential predictability of the monsoons. Each monsoon is characterized by its unique features. While the South Asian monsoon represents a classical monsoon in which anomalous circulation is governed by Rossby-wave dynamics, the Southeast Asian monsoon symbolizes a "hybrid" monsoon that features multi-cellular meridional circulation over eastern Asia. The broad-scale Asian monsoon links to the basin-wide atmospheric circulation over the Indian-Pacific oceans. Both SST and land surface processes are important for determining the variations of all monsoons. For the broad-scale monsoon, SST anomalies are more important than land surface processes. For regional monsoons, however, land surface processes may become equally important. Both observation and model shows that the broad-scale monsoon is potentially more predictable than regional monsoons, and that the Southeast Asian monsoon may possess higher predictability than the South Asian monsoon.

Yang, Song↗
DOE OSTI2020

The impact of the fiducial cosmology assumption on BAO distance scale measurements

ABSTRACT Standard analysis pipelines for measurements of Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) in galaxy surveys make use of a fiducial cosmological model to guide the data compression required to transform from observed redshifts and angles to the measured angular and radial BAO peak positions. In order to remove any dependence on the fiducial cosmology from the results, all models compared to the data should mimic the compression and its dependence on the fiducial model. In practice, approximations are made when testing models: (1) There is assumed to be no residual dependence on the fiducial cosmology after reconstruction, (2) differences in the distance–redshift relationship are assumed to match a linear scaling, and (3) differences in clustering between true and fiducial models are assumed to be removed by the free parameters used to null the non-BAO signal. We test these approximations using the current standard measurement procedure with a set of halo catalogues from the aemulus suite of N-body simulations, which span a range of wCDM cosmological models. We focus on reconstruction of the primordial BAO and locating the BAO. For the range of wCDM cosmologies covered by the aemulus suite, we find no evidence for systematic errors in the measured BAO shift parameters α∥ and α⊥ to $\lt 0.1\%$. However, the measured errors $\sigma _{\alpha _{\parallel }}$ and $\sigma _{\alpha _{\bot }}$ show a notable absolute increase by up to +0.001 and +0.002, respectively, in the case that the fiducial cosmology does not match the truth. These effects on the inferred BAO scale will be important, given the precision of measurements expected from future surveys including DESI, Euclid, and WFIRST.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Noise-aware optimization in nominally identical manufacturing and measuring systems for high-throughput parallel workflows

Device-to-device variability in experimental noise critically impacts reproducibility, especially in automated, high-throughput systems like additive manufacturing farms. While manageable in small labs, such variability can escalate into serious risks at larger scales, such as architectural 3D printing, where noise may cause structural or economic failures. This contribution presents a noise-aware decision-making algorithm that quantifies and models device-specific noise profiles to manage variability adaptively. It uses distributional analysis and pairwise divergence metrics with clustering to choose between single-device and robust multi-device Bayesian optimization strategies. Unlike conventional methods that assume homogeneous devices or enforce generic robustness, the proposed framework explicitly determines whether shared optimization across devices is appropriate based on the degree of inter-device noise heterogeneity. This enables improved performance, reproducibility, and efficiency. An experimental case study involving three nominally identical 3D printers (same brand, model, and close serial numbers) demonstrates reduced redundancy, lower resource usage, and improved reliability, along with improved convergence stability and solution quality through the selection of the appropriate optimization strategy based on the degree of inter-device noise heterogeneity. Overall, this framework establishes a general approach for precision- and resource-aware optimization in scalable, automated experimental platforms, demonstrated here on a representative multi-device 3D printing case study.

Schenk, Christina↗
NASA NTRS1992

Small-scale fracture patterns on the volcanic plains of Venus

Linear features with a regular spacing of about 1 km in the gridded plains of Guinevere Planitia observed in Magellan radar images of Venus are examined. Many sets of parallel, regularly spaced lineations similar to the closely spaced features of the gridded plains were found. These sets of parallel lineations, which are interpreted to be fractures, typically cover areas with dimensions of hundreds of kilometers. Several examples of these regular lineations are characterized in terms of their average fracture spacing, which is between 1 and 2.5 km; the scatter in individual spacings is about +/- 1/3 the average. It is hypothesized that these features are extension fractures in the brittle upper layers of the volcanic plains material, which formed well after emplacement and solidification of the flows.

Banerdt, W. B.↗
DOE OSTI2020

Advanced sorbents for modular oxygen production for REMS gasifiers

Under a DOE funded effort, Thermosolv LLC has been developing a sorbent-based oxygen production technology for gasification and oxy-combustion applications. The sorbents utilize oxygen-storage properties of certain perovskites to (1) selectively adsorb oxygen at moderate temperature from compressed air and (2) release the adsorbed oxygen into a vacuum or a sweep gas such as CO2 and/or steam. Through cyclic operations of multiple sorbent beds such a process can be made continuous. Pressure drop across the sorbent bed and other similar design considerations dictate that the sorbent be in the form of a high surface-area-to-volume pellet and yet still possess sufficient crush strength and integrity. Process efficiency is determined by the sorption and desorption kinetics and sorbent capacity. Typical process involves cycle times in the order of 100 seconds, a time too short to fully utilize the full volume of the sorbent and the sorption capacity of the sorbent pellets. As a part of this project, Thermosolv LLC undertook the development of oxygen sorbents as a high-surface area supported sorbent on a light-weight inert support to (1) reduce the cost, (2) increase the productivity, and (3) reduce the overall weight of the reactor. Using a previously developed perovskite (LSCF 1991) with its well-characterized performance, composite sorbent pellets each consisting of an inert core coated by a thin layer of the functional perovskite material were produced. Several low-density, inexpensive inert solids supports in the 1/8”-1/4” size were selected to keep the pressure drop across the sorbent bed in the acceptable range. A number of commercial technologies including spray coating, dip coating, incipient impregnation of porous substrate followed by thermal annealing at various temperatures and duration were employed and tested to produce robust composite supported sorbent pellets. A sense of optimum coating thickness was developed by testing sorbent pellets of various increasing diameter pellets. LSCF-1991extrudates ranging in size from 1/32” to 3/16” were tested in a TGA and in a fixed-bed pressure swing test set-up for sorption/desorption cycles of interest. The data show that for the operational conditions of interest the coating thickness for a supported sorbent pellet needs to be approximately 1/32” (about 0.8 mm). Subsequent work thereby concentrated on developing composite pellets of various substrates, shapes and sizes with coating layer of about this size range. Candidate support materials were chosen based on cost, inertness, mechanical strength, thermal expansion and chemical stability with sorbent material, and in a size range to give an acceptable pressure drop in fixed-bad reactor configurations. Coating application methods used for application of the sorbent onto the support included precipitation, spray coating and dip coating from sorbent slurries and sol gels. For all coated supports where we could successfully apply a uniform coating of desired thickness with an acceptable handling performance in terms of exfoliation, TGA-based cyclic sorption/desorption testing was performed to determine cycling capacity of oxygen. Among nearly twenty different support materials tested, best adhesion performance was obtained from stainless saddle supports. In the bench-scale fixed-bad tests stainless steel saddle support composite pellets with a coating thickness in the 0.6 mm or so range, the composite sorbent pellet performance approached up to 95% of that of the 2 mm parent material pellets. In a parallel approach to reducing the cost of the sorbent, alternate sorbent formulations replacing/reducing the amount of cobalt in the LSCF family were also investigated. Successful formulations that could match the performance of LSCF 1991 were identified based on TGA cyclic tests as LSCF 1919 and LSF 1910. In the range of operational envelop of cycle times and other relevant process operating conditions, the reduced Co formulations showed comparable performance in the bench-scale fixed-bad cyclic operations. As a part of this project, we also attempted substitution of La and Sr with Ca and Ba, and Co with Mn, Ni and Cu with little success, but the overall project goal of reducing sorbent cost in terms of raw material and manufacturing expenses was successful.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2018

A non-intrusive parallel-in-time adjoint solver with the XBraid library

In this paper, an adjoint solver for the multigrid-in-time software library XBraid is presented. XBraid provides a non-intrusive approach for simulating unsteady dynamics on multiple processors while parallelizing not only in space but also in the time domain (XBraid: Parallel multigrid in time, http://llnl.gov/casc/xbraid). It applies an iterative multigrid reduction in time algorithm to existing spatially parallel classical time propagators and computes the unsteady solution parallel in time. Techniques from Automatic Differentiation are used to develop a consistent discrete adjoint solver which provides sensitivity information of output quantities with respect to design parameter changes. The adjoint code runs backwards through the primal XBraid actions and accumulates gradient information parallel in time. It is highly non-intrusive as existing adjoint time propagators can easily be integrated through the adjoint interface. The adjoint code is validated on advection-dominated flow with periodic upstream boundary condition. We report it provides similar strong scaling results as the primal XBraid solver and offers great potential for speeding up the overall computational costs for sensitivity analysis using multiple processors.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Scalable DPG multigrid solver for Helmholtz problems: A study on convergence

This paper presents a scalable multigrid preconditioner targeting large-scale systems arising from discontinuous Petrov–Galerkin (DPG) discretizations of high-frequency wave operators. This work is built on previously developed multigrid preconditioning techniques of Petrides and Demkowicz (Comput. Math. Appl. 87 (2021) pp. 12–26) and extends the convergence results from $\mathscr{O}$(10 7 ) degrees of freedom (DOFs) to $\mathscr{O}$(10 9 ) DOFs using a new scalable parallel MPI/OpenMP implementation. Novel contributions of this paper include an alternative definition of coarse-grid systems based on restriction of fine-grid operators, yielding superior convergence results. In the uniform refinement setting, a detailed convergence study is provided, demonstrating h and p robust convergence and linear scaling with respect to the wave frequency. Finally, the paper concludes with numerical results on hp -adaptive simulations including a large-scale seismic modeling benchmark problem with high material contrast.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Hybrid particle-in-cell simulations of electromagnetic coupling and waves from streaming burst debris

Various systems can be modeled as a point-like explosion of ionized debris into a magnetized, collisionless background plasma-including astrophysical examples, active experiments in space, and laser-driven laboratory experiments. Debris streaming from the explosion parallel to the magnetic field may drive multiple resonant and non-resonant ion-ion beam instabilities, some of which can efficiently couple the debris energy to the background and may even support the formation of shocks. We present a large-scale hybrid (kinetic ions + fluid electrons) particle-in-cell simulation, extending hundreds of ion inertial lengths from a 3D explosion, that resolves these instabilities. We show that the character of these instabilities differs notably from the 1D equivalent by the presence of unique transverse structure. Additional 2D simulations explore how the debris beam length, width, density, and speed affect debris-background coupling, with implications for the generation of quasi-parallel shocks.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Toucan: A performance portable, scalable implementation of the DECA algorithm

In the field of additive manufacturing (AM), cellular automata (CA) is extensively used to simulate microstructural evolution during solidification. However, while traditional CA approaches are relatively fast, they still require a substantial number of time steps, are limited to moderate volumes, and are relatively difficult to improve through parallelism due to the highly localized nature of the solidification front. Here, to address these issues of time to solution and load balancing, we introduce Toucan, a parallel, performance-portable, and scalable code written in C++ with the Kokkos library that leverages the discrete event inspired cellular automata (DECA) algorithm to perform parallel-in-time (PinT) grain growth simulations. Toucan effectively mitigates load balancing issues by distributing the computational workload more evenly across processors, enhancing scalability and efficiency. We conduct both strong and weak scaling studies on up to 64 GPUs on the Frontier supercomputer, demonstrating that Toucan significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art, time-stepped CA code, ExaCA, on both single and multi-GPU simulations. Even in AM-specific weak scaling scenarios, Toucan maintains near-ideal scaling, in contrast to the linear increase observed with ExaCA due to the moving laser raster pattern. This study highlights Toucan’s potential to transform microstructural simulations in AM by radically improving both efficiency and scalability over existing methods.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2018

Graphene Oxide‐Template Controlled Cuboid‐Shaped High‐Capacity VS 4 Nanoparticles as Anode for Sodium‐Ion Batteries

Abstract Room‐temperature sodium‐ion batteries have attracted great attentions for large‐scale energy storage applications in renewable energy. However, exploring suitable anode materials with high reversible capacity and cyclic stability is still a challenge. The VS 4 , with parallel quasi‐1D chains structure of V 4+ (S 2 2− ) 2 , which provides large interchain distance of 5.83 Å and high capacity, has showed great potential for sodium storage. Here, the uniform cuboid‐shaped VS 4 nanoparticles are prepared as anode for sodium‐ion batteries by the controllable of graphene oxide (GO)‐template contents. It exhibits superb electrochemical performances of high‐specific charge capacity (≈580 mAh·g −1 at 0.1 A·g −1 ), long‐cycle‐life (≈98% retain at 0.5 A·g− 1 after 300 cycles), and high rates (up to 20 A·g −1 ). In addition, electrolytes are optimized to understand the sodium storage mechanism. It is thus demonstrated that the findings have great potentials for the applications in high‐performance sodium‐ion batteries.

Wang, Sizhe↗
DOE OSTI2023

Robust multi‐loop control of a floating wind turbine

Abstract A principal challenge facing the control of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) is the problem of instability, or “negative damping,” when using blade pitch feedback to control generator speed. This closed‐loop instability can be attributed to non‐minimum phase zeros in the transfer function from blade pitch to generator speed. Standard approaches to improving stability and performance include robust tuning of control gains and introducing multiple feedback loops to respond to platform motion. Combining these approaches is nontrivial because multiple control loops complicate the impact of coupling in the system dynamics. The single‐loop approach to analyzing stability robustness neglects inter‐loop coupling, while a simplistic multi‐loop approach is highly sensitive to dimensional scaling and overestimates the robustness of the single‐loop controller. This work proposes a sensitivity representation that separates some of the natural FOWT dynamic coupling into a parallel feedback loop in the sensitivity function loop to address both of these concerns. The modified robustness measure is used with a simplified linear FOWT model to optimize scheduled multi‐loop control parameters in an automated tuning procedure. This controller is implemented for the 10‐MW Ultraflexible Smart FLoating Offshore Wind Turbine (USFLOWT) and compared against conventional single‐ and multi‐loop controllers tuned using frequency‐domain analysis and high‐fidelity OpenFAST simulations. The multi‐loop robust controller shows the highest overall performance in generator speed regulation and tower load reduction, though consideration of power quality, actuator usage, and other structural loading leads to additional trade‐offs.

Stockhouse, David↗
DOE OSTI2017

Late-time growth rate, mixing, and anisotropy in the multimode narrowband Richtmyer–Meshkov instability: The θ-group collaboration

Turbulent Richtmyer–Meshkov instability (RMI) is investigated through a series of high resolution three-dimensional simulations of two initial conditions with eight independent codes. The simulations are initialised with a narrowband perturbation such that instability growth is due to non-linear coupling/backscatter from the energetic modes, thus generating the lowest expected growth rate from a pure RMI. By independently assessing the results from each algorithm and computing ensemble averages of multiple algorithms, the results allow a quantification of key flow properties as well as the uncertainty due to differing numerical approaches. A new analytical model predicting the initial layer growth for a multimode narrowband perturbation is presented, along with two models for the linear and non-linear regimes combined. Overall, the growth rate exponent is determined as θ=0.292±0.009, in good agreement with prior studies; however, the exponent is decaying slowly in time. Also, θ is shown to be relatively insensitive to the choice of mixing layer width measurements. The asymptotic integral molecular mixing measures Θ=0.792±0.014, Ξ=0.800±0.014, and Ψ=0.782±0.013 are lower than some experimental measurements but within the range of prior numerical studies. The flow field is shown to be persistently anisotropic for all algorithms, at the latest time having between 49% and 66% higher kinetic energy in the shock parallel direction compared to perpendicular and does not show any return to isotropy. The plane averaged volume fraction profiles at different time instants collapse reasonably well when scaled by the integral width, implying that the layer can be described by a single length scale and thus a single θ. In conclusion, quantitative data given for both ensemble averages and individual algorithms provide useful benchmark results for future research.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗