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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 163 records · Page 9
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2011

The Application of Lean Thinking Principles and Kaizen Practices for the Successful Development and Implementation of the Ares I-X Flight Test Rocket and Mission

On October 28, 2009 the Ares I-X flight test rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center and flew its suborbital trajectory as designed. The mission was successfully completed as data from the test, and associated development activities were analyzed, transferred to stakeholders, and well documented. Positive lessons learned from Ares I-X were that the application of lean thinking principles and kaizen practices are effective in streamlining development activities. Ares I-X, like other historical rocket development projects, was hampered by technical, cost, and schedule challenges and if not addressed boldly could have resulted in cancellation of the test. The mission management team conducted nine major meetings, referred to as lean events, across its elements to assess plans, procedures, processes, requirements, controls, culture, organization, use of resources, and anything that could be changed to optimize schedule or reduce risk. The preeminent aspect of the lean events was the focus on value added activities and the removal or at least reduction in non-value activities. Trained Lean Six Sigma facilitators assisted the Ares I-X developers in conducting the lean events. They indirectly helped formulate the mission s own unique methodology for assessing schedule. A core team was selected to lead the events and report to the mission manager. Each activity leveraged specialized participants to analyze the subject matter and its related processes and then recommended alternatives and solutions. Stakeholders were the event champions. They empowered and encouraged the team to succeed. The keys to success were thorough preparation, honest dialog, small groups, adherence to the Ares I-X ground rules, and accountability through disciplined reporting and tracking of actions. This lean event formula was game-changing as demonstrated by the success of Ares I-X. It is highly recommended as a management tool to help develop other complex systems efficiently. The key benefits for Ares I-X were obtaining unambiguous schedule margin, defining enabling options for risk reduction, and most importantly a stronger more unified team.

Askins, B. R.↗
NASA NTRS2011

The Application of Lean Thinking Principles and Kaizen Practices for the Successful Development and Implementation of the Ares I-X Flight Test Rocket and Mission

On October 28, 2009 the Ares I-X flight test rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center and flew its suborbital trajectory as designed. The mission was successfully completed as data from the test, and associated development activities were analyzed, transferred to stakeholders, and well documented. A positive lesson learned from Ares I-X was that the application of lean thinking principles and kaizen practices was very effective in streamlining development activities. Ares I-X, like other historical rocket development projects, was hampered by technical, cost, and schedule challenges and if not addressed boldly could have resulted in cancellation of the test. The mission management team conducted nine major meetings, referred to as lean events, across its elements to assess plans, procedures, processes, requirements, controls, culture, organization, use of resources, and anything that could be changed to optimize schedule or reduce risk. The preeminent aspect of the lean events was the focus on value added activities and the removal or at least reduction in non-value added activities. Trained Lean Six Sigma facilitators assisted the Ares I-X developers in conducting the lean events. They indirectly helped formulate the mission s own unique methodology for assessing schedule. A core team was selected to lead the events and report to the mission manager. Each activity leveraged specialized participants to analyze the subject matter and its related processes and then recommended alternatives and solutions. Stakeholders were the event champions. They empowered and encouraged the team to succeed. The keys to success were thorough preparation, honest dialog, small groups, adherence to the Ares I-X ground rules, and accountability through disciplined reporting and tracking of actions. This lean event formula was game-changing as demonstrated by Ares I-X. It is highly recommended as a management tool to help develop other complex systems efficiently. The key benefits for Ares I-X were obtaining unambiguous schedule margin, defining enabling options for risk reduction, and most importantly a stronger more unified team.

Askins, B. R.↗
NASA NTRS1982

The analysis of the statistical and historical information gathered during the development of the Shuttle Orbiter Primary Flight Software

The results of an effort to thoroughly and objectively analyze the statistical and historical information gathered during the development of the Shuttle Orbiter Primary Flight Software are given. The particular areas of interest include cost of the software, reliability of the software, requirements for the software and how the requirements changed during development of the system. Data related to the current version of the software system produced some interesting results. Suggestions are made for the saving of additional data which will allow additional investigation.

Simmons, D. B.↗
NASA NTRS1977

Feasibility of modern airships - Preliminary assessment

Attention is given to the NASA program, Feasibility Study of Modern Airships, initiated to investigate potential research and technology programs associated with airship development. A historical survey of the program is presented, including the development of past airship concepts, aerodynamical and design improvements, structure and material concepts, and research in controls, avionics, instrumentation, flight operations, and ground handling. A mission analysis was carried out which considered passenger and cargo transportation, heavy-lift, short-haul applications, surveillance missions, and the transportation of natural gas. A vehicle parametric analysis examined the entire range of airship concepts, discussing both conventional airships and hybrids. Various design options were evaluated, such as choice of structural materials, use of boundary-layer control, and choice of lifting gas.

Ardema, M. D.↗
NASA NTRS1995

The development of the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST): A cooperative controller-engineer design approach

Historically, the development of advanced automation for air traffic control in the United States has excluded the input of the air traffic controller until the need of the development process. In contrast, the development of the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST), for the terminal area controller, has incorporated the end-user in early, iterative testing. This paper describes a cooperative between the controller and the developer to create a tool which incorporates the complexity of the air traffic controller's job. This approach to software development has enhanced the usability of FAST and has helped smooth the introduction of FAST into the operational environment.

Lee, Katharine K.↗
DOE OSTI2021

Photographic Mitigation Documentation Related to the Engine Assembly and Disassembly Facility, Area 25, Nevada National Security Site, Nye County, Nevada

This letter report provides documentation in partial fulfillment of the mitigation of adverse effects to the Engine Maintenance Assembly and Disassembly (E-MAD) facility, a major component of the Nuclear Rocket Development Station (NRDS) Historic District located in Area 25 of the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). Construction of the E-MAD facility began in 1962 for the purpose of disassembling and maintaining nuclear-powered rocket engines. Once the building was complete in 1967, the E-MAD facility remained in continuous operation until the nuclear rocket program was terminated in 1973. The mothballed facility was repurposed in 1977 for spent nuclear fuel handling and packaging activities. By the mid-1980s, all activities at the E-MAD facility had ceased (Reno et al. 2019). This submission is intended to comply with Stipulation III.D.1 of the Memorandum of Agreement DE-GM58-20NA25534 between the U.S. Department of Energy and the Nevada State Historic Preservation Officer Regarding Corrective Action Activities and Demolition of the Engine Maintenance Assembly and Disassembly Facility and the Test Cell C Historic District, Major Components of the Nuclear Rocket Development Station Historic District Located in Area 25 at the Nevada National Security Site Nye County (hereafter referred to as the MOA). Stipulation III.D.1 states the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will submit the existing supplementary collection of the large-format, black-and-white photographic prints taken during the 1996 Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) documentation of the E-MAD facility to the Nuclear Testing Archive (NTA), located on the second floor of the Rogers Building at Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Las Vegas, Nevada.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS2016

Active Vibration Reduction of the Advanced Stirling Convertor

Stirling Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS) are being developed as an option to provide power on future space science missions where robotic spacecraft will orbit, flyby, land or rove. A Stirling Radioisotope Generator (SRG) could offer space missions a more efficient power system that uses one fourth of the nuclear fuel and decreases the thermal footprint compared to the current state of the art. The Stirling Cycle Technology Development (SCTD) Project is funded by the RPS Program to developing Stirling-based subsystems, including convertors and controller maturation efforts that have resulted in high fidelity hardware like the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG), Advanced Stirling Convertor (ASC), and ASC Controller Unit (ACU). The SCTD Project also performs research to develop less mature technologies with a wide variety of objectives, including increasing temperature capability to enable new environments, improving system reliability or fault tolerance, reducing mass or size, and developing advanced concepts that are mission enabling. Active vibration reduction systems (AVRS), or "balancers", have historically been developed and characterized to provide fault tolerance for generator designs that incorporate dual-opposed Stirling convertors or enable single convertor, or small RPS, missions. Balancers reduce the dynamic disturbance forces created by the power piston and displacer internal moving components of a single operating convertor to meet spacecraft requirements for induced disturbance force. To improve fault tolerance for dual-opposed configurations and enable single convertor configurations, a breadboard AVRS was implemented on the Advanced Stirling Convertor (ASC). The AVRS included a linear motor, a motor mount, and a closed-loop controller able to balance out the transmitted peak dynamic disturbance using acceleration feedback. Test objectives included quantifying power and mass penalty and reduction in transmitted force over a range of ASC operating parameters and mounting conditions. All tests were performed at three different piston amplitudes, 3.0, 3.75, and 4.5 mm. Overall, the transmitted force was reduced to 2 percent of the total unbalanced force by actively balancing out only the first fundamental frequency, with balancer motor power remaining under 1 watt. The test results will be used to guide future balancer designs.

Balancer↗
NASA NTRS2016

Active Vibration Reduction of the Advanced Stirling Convertor

Stirling Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS) are being developed as an option to provide power on future space science missions where robotic spacecraft will orbit, flyby, land or rove. A Stirling Radioisotope Generator (SRG) could offer space missions a more efficient power system that uses one fourth of the nuclear fuel and decreases the thermal footprint compared to the current state of the art. The Stirling Cycle Technology Development (SCTD) Project is funded by the RPS Program to developing Stirling-based subsystems, including convertors and controller maturation efforts that have resulted in high fidelity hardware like the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG), Advanced Stirling Convertor (ASC), and ASC Controller Unit (ACU). The SCTD Project also performs research to develop less mature technologies with a wide variety of objectives, including increasing temperature capability to enable new environments, improving system reliability or fault tolerance, reducing mass or size, and developing advanced concepts that are mission enabling. Active vibration reduction systems (AVRS), or "balancers", have historically been developed and characterized to provide fault tolerance for generator designs that incorporate dual-opposed Stirling convertors or enable single convertor, or small RPS, missions. Balancers reduce the dynamic disturbance forces created by the power piston and displacer internal moving components of a single operating convertor to meet spacecraft requirements for induced disturbance force. To improve fault tolerance for dual-opposed configurations and enable single convertor configurations, a breadboard AVRS was implemented on the Advanced Stirling Convertor (ASC). The AVRS included a linear motor, a motor mount, and a closed-loop controller able to balance out the transmitted peak dynamic disturbance using acceleration feedback. Test objectives included quantifying power and mass penalty and reduction in transmitted force over a range of ASC operating parameters and mounting conditions. All tests were performed at three different piston amplitudes, 3.0 mm, 3.75 mm, and 4.5 mm. Overall, the transmitted force was reduced to 2% of the total unbalanced force by actively balancing out only the first fundamental frequency, with balancer motor power remaining under one watt. The test results will be used to guide future balancer designs.

Active Vibration Reduction↗
DOE OSTI2026

Quantum block encoding for one-pair semiseparable matrices

Quantum block encoding (QBE) is a crucial step in the development of most quantum algorithms, as it provides an embedding of a given matrix into a suitable larger unitary matrix. Historically, the development of efficient techniques for QBE has mostly focused on sparse matrices; less effort has been devoted to data-sparse (e.g., rank-structured) matrices. In this work we examine a particular case of rank structure, namely, one-pair semiseparable matrices. We present a new block encoding approach that relies on a suitable factorization of the given matrix as the product of triangular and diagonal factors. To encode the matrix, the algorithm needs $2\log(N)+7$ ancillary qubits. Assuming that the data input oracles can be implemented with polylogarithmic depth, or that a QRAM input model is available, our proposed method requires $\mathcal{O}({\rm polylog} (N))$ time and has an error of $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$, where $N$ is the matrix size.

Antonioli, Giacomo [Pisa U.; CERN] (ORCID:00090000↗
NASA NTRS1972

Apollo experience report: Development of guidance targeting techniques for the command module and launch vehicle

The development of the guidance targeting techniques for the Apollo command module and launch vehicle is discussed for four types of maneuvers: (1) translunar injection, (2) translunar midcourse, (3) lunar orbit insertion, and (4) return to earth. The development of real-time targeting programs for these maneuvers and the targeting procedures represented are discussed. The material is intended to convey historically the development of the targeting techniques required to meet the defined target objectives and to illustrate the solutions to problems encountered during that development.

Yencharis, J. D.↗
NASA NTRS2022

Maintenance Human Factors and Flight Safety

This chapter will chronicle the journey of the community of operators, regulators, and researchers who embarked upon the task of identifying critical human factors of maintenance and inspection, establishing a database and research tools, developing practical strategies for reducing the risks of maintenance and inspection errors, and understanding its critical role in preserving flight safety. We will take a historical perspective, developing a timeline that is largely driven by key events such as accidents and regulatory/government actions and initiatives. Part 1 focuses on how the field of maintenance human factors was built, beginning in the late 1980’s. Part 2 describes the development of methods and tools for meeting the maintenance human factors challenges identified. Finally, Part 3 updates the original chapter by focusing on issues that have persisted or emerged since 2010.

maintenance↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Digital Prototyping Methods to Enable Product Development Analysis Cycle Compression in Aerospace Systems

Historically, the product development life cycle (spanning from origination of a systems concept to initial delivery or fielding) for large-scale aerospace systems is 10-25 years. Examples of recent programs exhibiting this timeline are the Space Shuttle (13 years), , International Space Station (18 years), NASA Hubble telescope (16 years), USAF F-35 Strike Fighter (22 years), Missile Defense Agency THAAD (21 years), USAF V-22 Osprey (26 years), USAF B-2 Spirt (19 years), US Army RAH-66 Comanche (22 years, cancelled prior to fielding), James Webb Space Telescope (25 years), Space Launch System (10 years). This list illustrates the challenges of developing and fielding a modern integrated multi-disciplinary aerospace system. These development timelines are often preceded by significant research and development programs and followed by multiple increments, blocks, or spirals to reach planned operational capability. In the modern era of aerospace system acquisition, there is significant pressure to reduce system development timelines to meet system objectives and enable competitiveness in the current industry and landscape. Across the aerospace industry, a range of rapid acquisition and prototyping programs are seeking to achieve system development within timelines considerably less than 10 years. Notably, in September of 2019, NASA issued a solicitation for the development and demonstration of a Human Landing System (HLS) to deliver humans to the lunar surface by 2024 (5 years) and for the development and demonstration of a more sustainable HLS by 2026 (7 years). Lengthy product development cycle timelines are a product of multiple factors ranging from programmatic, sociological, technical, and systems engineering issues. New approaches in systems engineering provide new ways to enable these compressed development timelines. These approaches employ expanded application of advanced systems engineering methods and cross-cutting digital tools to accelerate system development, utilizing digital prototyping to connect maturing sub-system or component technologies into system or system-of-systems hardware prototypes. Approaches such as the use of system integrating physics relationships to reduce the number of design analysis cycle iterations and state analysis modeling to reduce necessary software testing (and improving coverage of system execution scenarios) represent steps forward in reducing the engineering time needed to field new systems. In addition to cost, schedule and performance benefits, expanded digital exploration and demonstration reduce risk in live system test and demonstration. This incremental demonstration approach, where digital prototyping and demonstration leads and informs full system test and demonstration, could be more important for space applications because of the increased difficulty of test and demonstration of space systems and architectures. The Advanced Concepts Office (ACO) at Marshall Space Flight Center merges traditional multi-disciplinary concept definition methods with modern, cross-cutting systems engineering concepts to enable iterative design and analysis of space architectures and systems through coordinated, strategic management of human capital, technical processes, and technology. This paper provides an overview of that approach, including recent examples and a strategic path forward to enabling continued reduction of aerospace system product development life cycles.

Michael D Watson↗
DOE OSTI2025

PubChemLite Plus Collision Cross Section (CCS) Values for Enhanced Interpretation of Nontarget Environmental Data

Finding relevant chemicals in the vast (known) chemical space is a major challenge for environmental and exposomics studies leveraging nontarget high resolution mass spectrometry (NT-HRMS) methods. Chemical databases now contain hundreds of millions of chemicals, yet many are not relevant. This article details an extensive collaborative, open science effort to provide a dynamic collection of chemicals for environmental, metabolomics, and exposomics research, along with supporting information about their relevance to assist researchers in the interpretation of candidate hits. The PubChemLite for Exposomics collection is compiled from ten annotation categories within PubChem, enhanced with patent, literature and annotation counts, predicted partition coefficient (logP) values, as well as predicted collision cross section (CCS) values using CCSbase. Monthly versions are archived on Zenodo under a CC-BY license, supporting reproducible research, and a new interface has been developed, including historical trends of patent and literature data, for researchers to browse the collection. This article details how PubChemLite can support researchers in environmental and exposomics studies, describes efforts to increase the availability of experimental CCS values, and explores known limitations and potential for future developments. The data and code behind these efforts are openly available.

PubChem↗
NASA NTRS2008

Liquid Space Lubricants Examined by Vibrational Micro-Spectroscopy

Considerable effort has been expended to develop liquid lubricants for satellites and space exploration vehicles. These lubricants must often perform under a range of harsh conditions such as vacuum, radiation, and temperature extremes while in orbit or in transit and in extremely dusty environments at destinations such as the Moon and Mars. Historically, oil development was guided by terrestrial application, which did not provide adequate space lubricants. Novel fluids such as the perfluorinated polyethers provided some relief but are far from ideal. With each new fluid proposed to solve one problem, other problems have arisen. Much of the work performed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Glenn Research Center (GRC) in elucidating the mechanisms by which chemical degradation of space oils occur has been done by vibrational micro-spectroscopic techniques such as infrared and Raman, which this review details. Presented are fundamental lubrication studies as well as actual case studies in which vibrational spectroscopy has led to millions of dollars in savings and potentially prevented loss of mission.

Street, Kenneth W., Jr.↗
NASA NTRS1977

Quantitative comparison of combined gas chromatographic/mass spectrometric profiles of complex mixtures

The paper describes a method called HISLIB for automatic quantitative comparison of gas chromatographic/mass spectrometric (GC/MS) results obtained on complex mixtures of organic compounds. The method is based on comparing new mixtures to 'historical' libraries of previous results. Co-occurrence of components is determined by matching relative retention indices (RRIs) and mass spectra after background removal and resolution of overlapping GC components. Internal standards are used to quantify the relative concentrations of components. Applications of HISLIB include validation of analytical procedures to isolate complex mixtures; development of historical libraries which might include complete summaries of all past observations, compilations of controls, or any other selected subset of results; improvement of the quality of existing libraries of mass spectral data; and detection of differences in kind and/or amounts of individual components. Limitations of the method are mentioned along with causes of their occurrence.

Smith, D. H.↗