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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 19 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

Hidden fluid mechanics: Learning velocity and pressure fields from flow visualizations

For centuries, flow visualization has been the art of making fluid motion visible in physical and biological systems. Although such flow patterns can be, in principle, described by the Navier-Stokes equations, extracting the velocity and pressure fields directly from the images is challenging. We addressed this problem by developing hidden fluid mechanics (HFM), a physics-informed deep-learning framework capable of encoding the Navier-Stokes equations into the neural networks while being agnostic to the geometry or the initial and boundary conditions. We demonstrate HFM for several physical and biomedical problems by extracting quantitative information for which direct measurements may not be possible.

Raissi, Maziar↗
DOE OSTI2024

Simulation of Helium Flow Visualization Apparatus for Studies of Blanket Cooling in Fusion Reactors

Flow visualization is essential to understanding helium cooling performance. This article investigates helium flow visualization in an apparatus to support the design of the blanket first wall for a fusion reactor. Helium’s safety advantages make it an attractive coolant, but effective cooling and flow visualization remain challenging. Sophisticated simulations are conducted in different test sections to address three key areas in the design of a test apparatus and cooling channel enhancements: the influence of viewing glass windows on flow patterns, the impact of increased heating, and the effectiveness of cooling structures like baffles. Viewing glass windows introduce flow recirculation region bifurcation and flow asymmetry, affecting flow patterns and necessitating careful analysis in future experiments. Increased heating results in helium flow detachment from the heated surface, leading to hot spots. Cooling structures, particularly baffles, prove effective in maintaining consistent attachment to the heated surface, improving the heat transfer performance. Further, this study also examines a tunable parameter in the turbulence model, highlighting the importance of accurate model tuning for future fusion reactor cooling designs. With an imminent helium flow visualization facility, these simulations will be used to optimize cooling structures on the heated wall to improve flow attachment and heat transfer efficiency. This work serves as a first investigation of the helium flow visualization apparatus for blanket cooling enhancement in fusion reactor design.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Flow visualization in high-energy-density laboratory plasmas

Flow visualization is often essential for evaluating high-energy-density (HED) laboratory plasmas, examining their dynamics, and assessing design strategies. However, imaging at fine phenomenological flow scales is a major challenge. Here, a zone-plate–based radiography system tailored for applications in HED physics is demonstrated. The burst-mode radiography system combines a dual-flash laser-generated x-ray source, a high-magnification zone plate optic, and a multiple frame hybrid complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (hCMOS) sensor for image detection. Operating at a magnification of 42 x⁠, a pair of radiographs is measured in rapid succession, each time gated by a 4.75 keV flash of x rays lasting 100 ps. The system achieves a spatial resolution below 3 μm. The potential of this approach for applications in HED physics is exemplified by observing small-scale spike morphologies at a pusher-foam interface impacted by a strong, laser-driven blast wave.

Flow instabilities↗
DOE OSTI2025

Design Overview of a High-Pressure Helium Flow Visualization Apparatus for Blanket Cooling Studies

Cooling of the fusion blanket first wall remains a significant challenge given the adverse conditions of heat and particle flux encountered near the plasma. Helium emerges as an attractive cooling candidate because of its chemical and neutronic inertness and separability from hydrogenic species (e.g. tritium). Because of the low thermal mass of helium, optimization of these coolant channels is warranted to provide high heat transfer performance at low pumping costs. Increasingly, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations are employed to model and optimize these flow channels, and accompanying experimental data are needed to validate the predictions of these models. To provide the aforementioned experimental data, a high-pressure helium flow visualization upgrade has been designed for the Helium Flow Loop Experiment facility. This apparatus was built to American Society of Mechanical Engineers boiler and pressure vessel standards to withstand operating pressure of 4 MPa and mated to high-pressure glass windows. Seedless flow visualization is performed via high-speed background oriented schlieren (BOS), with image correlation used for time-resolved two-dimensional velocimetry at frequencies in excess of 60 kHz. Rectangular flow channel test articles are additively manufactured via laser powder bed fusion and installed into this visualization apparatus, with one-sided heating supplied by resistive heaters. In conclusion, the chosen test geometries were informed by prior CFD simulations, and the helium flow structures observed via BOS (detachment, recirculation, etc.) will be used for the validation of these accompanying models, in support of the design and optimization of blanket cooling channel configurations.

Helium flow↗
DOE OSTI2017

Compression-based integral curve data reuse framework for flow visualization

Currently, by default, integral curves are repeatedly re-computed in different flow visualization applications, such as FTLE field computation, source-destination queries, etc., leading to unnecessary resource cost. We present a compression-based data reuse framework for integral curves, to greatly reduce their retrieval cost, especially in a resource-limited environment. In our design, a hierarchical and hybrid compression scheme is proposed to balance three objectives, including high compression ratio, controllable error, and low decompression cost. Specifically, we use and combine digitized curve sparse representation, floating-point data compression, and octree space partitioning to adaptively achieve the objectives. Results have shown that our data reuse framework could acquire tens of times acceleration in the resource-limited environment compared to on-the-fly particle tracing, and keep controllable information loss. Moreover, our method could provide fast integral curve retrieval for more complex data, such as unstructured mesh data.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2017

Flow visualization methods for field test verification of CFD analysis of an open gloveport

Anemometer readings alone cannot provide a complete picture of air flow patterns at an open gloveport. Having a means to visualize air flow for field tests in general provides greater insight by indicating direction in addition to the magnitude of the air flow velocities in the region of interest. Furthermore, flow visualization is essential for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) verification, where important modeling assumptions play a significant role in analyzing the chaotic nature of low-velocity air flow. A good example is shown Figure 1, where an unexpected vortex pattern occurred during a field test that could not have been measured relying only on anemometer readings. Here by, observing and measuring the patterns of the smoke flowing into the gloveport allowed the CFD model to be appropriately updated to match the actual flow velocities in both magnitude and direction.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗
DOE OSTI2016

Efficient Unsteady Flow Visualization with High-Order Access Dependencies

We present a novel high-order access dependencies based model for efficient pathline computation in unsteady flow visualization. By taking longer access sequences into account to model more sophisticated data access patterns in particle tracing, our method greatly improves the accuracy and reliability in data access prediction. In our work, high-order access dependencies are calculated by tracing uniformly-seeded pathlines in both forward and backward directions in a preprocessing stage. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is demonstrated through a parallel particle tracing framework with high-order data prefetching. Results show that our method achieves higher data locality and hence improves the efficiency of pathline computation.

Zhang, Jiang↗
DOE OSTI2016

Subsampling-based compression and flow visualization

As computational capabilities increasingly outpace disk speeds on leading supercomputers, scientists will, in turn, be increasingly unable to save their simulation data at its native resolution. One solution to this problem is to compress these data sets as they are generated and visualize the compressed results afterwards. We explore this approach, specifically subsampling velocity data and the resulting errors for particle advection-based flow visualization. We compare three techniques: random selection of subsamples, selection at regular locations corresponding to multi-resolution reduction, and introduce a novel technique for informed selection of subsamples. Furthermore, we explore an adaptive system which exchanges the subsampling budget over parallel tasks, to ensure that subsampling occurs at the highest rate in the areas that need it most. We perform supercomputing runs to measure the effectiveness of the selection and adaptation techniques. Overall, we find that adaptation is very effective, and, among selection techniques, our informed selection provides the most accurate results, followed by the multi-resolution selection, and with the worst accuracy coming from random subsamples.

Agranovsky, Alexy↗
DOE OSTI2017

The Flow Visualization for the Separation of Air-water Bubbly Two-phase Flow Through a Vertical T-junction

T-junction is a typical structure in many industrial systems such as power plants, chemical process, and hydrocarbon production industries. The separation of two-phase flow passing through T-junction is a common flow phenomenon. There are lots of investigations regarding two-phase flow separation in branching tees and wyes tees. The characteristic of the two-phase flow between the two outlets are always non-uniform, and this kind of fluid status may contribute to the unpredictable damage of downstream facilities. For the nuclear power plants, severe accidents analysis is important especially for Light-Water Reactors (LWR) when Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA) occurs. The small break of the pipe may cause the coolant become two-phase flow due to the pressure drop. Under certain conditions, the behavior of T-junction is similar to a gas-liquid separator, as a result of the gas enters the side arm and the liquid flows straight along the run arm. The partial separation of gas-liquid mixtures can reduce the load on the main separator, probably leading to smaller units. The study aims to establish complete visual observations for the benchmark of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model. As a consequence, a vertical T-junction (D = 26 mm) experimental loop was set up for the purpose of elaborating the complex two-phase fluid phenomena. In this experiment, variables were manipulated under highly controlled conditions and a photographic method was proposed to analyze the images of phase separation. Furthermore, the images obtained by camera have been discussed to receive valuable information about the two phase flow behavior around the T-junction.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2019

Extreme-Scale Stochastic Particle Tracing for Uncertain Unsteady Flow Visualization and Analysis

We present an efficient and scalable solution to estimate uncertain transport behaviors-stochastic flow maps (SFMs)-for visualizing and analyzing uncertain unsteady flows. Computing flow maps from uncertain flow fields is extremely expensive because it requires many Monte Carlo runs to trace densely seeded particles in the flow. We reduce the computational cost by decoupling the time dependencies in SFMs so that we can process shorter sub time intervals independently and then compose them together for longer time periods. Adaptive refinement is also used to reduce the number of runs for each location. We parallelize over tasks-packets of particles in our design-to achieve high efficiency in MPI/thread hybrid programming. Such a task model also enables CPU/GPU coprocessing. We show the scalability on two supercomputers, Mira (up to 256K Blue Gene/Q cores) and Titan (up to 128K Opteron cores and 8K GPUs), that can trace billions of particles in seconds.

CPU-GPU hybrid parallelism↗
DOE OSTI2019

Quench-Spot Detection for Superconducting Accelerator Cavities Via Flow Visualization in Superfluid Helium-4

Superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities, cooled by superfluid helium-4 (He II), are key components in modern particle accelerators. Quenches in SRF cavities caused by Joule heating from local surface defects can severely limit the maximum achievable accelerating field. Existing methods for quench-spot detection include temperature mapping and second-sound triangulation. These methods are useful but also have known limitations. Here we describe an alternative method for surface quench-spot detection by visualizing the heat transfer in He II via tracking He2 molecular tracer lines. A proof-of-concept experiment is conducted, in which a miniature heater mounted on a plate is pulsed on to simulate a surface quench spot. A He2 tracer line created nearby the heater deforms due to the counterflow heat transfer in He II. By analyzing the tracer-line deformation, we well reproduce the heater location within a few hundred microns, which clearly demonstrates the feasibility of this alternative technology. Our analysis also reveals that the heat content transported in He II is only a small fraction of the total input heat energy. We show that the remaining energy is essentially consumed in the formation of a cavitation zone near the heater. By estimating the size of this cavitation zone, we discuss how the existence of the cavitation zone may explain a decades-long puzzle observed in many past second-sound triangulation experiments.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Pool boiling on metal-foam enhanced tube bundle: heat transfer characteristics and flow visualization

A flooded evaporator configuration is common in large central air conditioning or process cooling systems. It is basically a shell and tube heat exchanger, in which a secondary fluid (brine or water) circulates inside the tube bundle and is cooled by the vaporization of the refrigerant on the outside surface of the tubes. The enhanced pool boiling process enables the compact design of flooded evaporators, which substantially reduces the refrigerant charge. High-porosity metal foam, with a large surface-area-to-volume ratio, could provide an extended heat transfer area and a high-density of nucleation sites. This study experimentally investigated the pool boiling heat transfer and flow characteristics on metal-foam enhanced tube bundles. The enhanced bundle consists of four aluminum tubes with aluminum foam brazed around the outer surface, which are horizontally mounted in a staggered arrangement. The results showed that the metal-foam enhanced tube bundles improved the heat transfer coefficient by 100-160% with a lower wall temperature difference of 1-10°C, compared to the baseline. In addition, the tube pitch played a significant role in determining the pool boiling behavior of the tube bundles.

Yang, Cheng-Min↗
DOE OSTI2021

NO PLIF flow visualization and time-resolved temperature distributions in laser induced breakdown plumes

NO planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) is used to obtain images of laser-induced breakdown plasma plumes in NO-seeded nitrogen and dry air at near atmospheric pressure. Single-shot PLIF-images show that the plume development 5–50 μs after the breakdown pulse is fairly reproducible shot-to-shot, although the plume becomes increasingly stochastic on longer timescales, 100–500 μs. The stochastic behavior of the plume is quantified using probability distributions of the loci of the plume boundary. Analysis of the single-shot images indicates that the mixing of the plume with ambient gas on sub-ms time scale is insignificant. The induced flow velocity in the plume is fairly low, up to 30 m s –1 , suggesting that laser breakdowns are ineffective for mixing enhancement in high speed flows. The ensemble-averaged PLIF images indicate the evolution of the plume from an initially elongated shape to near-spherical to toroidal shape, with a subsequent radial expansion and formation of an axial jet in the center. Temperature distributions in the plume in air are obtained from the NO PLIF images, using two rotational transitions in the NO(X, v' = 0 → A, v'' = 0) band, J'' = 6.5 and 12.5 of the Q R 12 + Q 2 branch. The results indicate that the temperature in the plume remains high, above 1000 K, for approximately 100 μs, after which it decays gradually, to below 500 K at 500 μs. The residual NO fraction in the plume is ~0.1%, indicating that repetitive laser-assisted ignition may result in significant NO-generation. Furthermore, these measured temperature and velocity distributions can be used for detailed validation of kinetic models of laser-induced breakdown and assessment of their predictive capability.

42 ENGINEERING↗