Maintaining a Quality Management System in a Hybrid Work Environment
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A series of computations on tunnel boundary-interference effects for hybrid-slotted working sections was performed using the WALINT code. The slots were modeled as lines of porosity with linear crossflow characteristics. The basic shape evaluated was for a rectangular section with height-to-width ratio = 0.835 and its companion in the duplex mode (half model testing) with height-to-width ratio = 0.6. A best overall basic configuration was determined with seven slots on each wall with open area ratio on each wall of 17.5%. For both full-span and half-model testing, the optimum solution required closing all but two slots on each of the half-walls parallel to the plane of the wing (equivalent to four slots on the full floor and ceiling). The results are presented here for the best configurations and are shown to be within the figure-of-merit range of + or - 0.04 in upwash, and + or - 0.1 in curvature for the Mach number range 0.6 to 0.85. Blockage effects are shown to be small.
Currently there is renewed interest in the evaluation and reduction of steady wind tunnel wall interference, especially for large models. Evaluation of previous predictions for perforated and slotted tunnels suggests that a hybrid slotted tunnel (i.e., a slotted tunnel with closed slats and perforated slots) should offer minimum corrections for upwash, flow curvature and solid blockage. This suggestion is confirmed by the present computer studies of a range of rectangular hybrid slotted tunnels. The computer studies are for tunnel working section height to breadth ratios of 0.835 and 0.600 over the Mach number range from 0 to 0.85. Wings swept at 28 deg and 50 deg, with ratios of model span to tunnel breadth varying from 0 to 0.7, are considered. An idealized fuselage shape is used to predict solid and wake blockage corrections for the wall configurations selected on the basis of minimum upwash and curvature interference.
The reduction or elimination of the hazard which results from accidental release of graphite fibers from composite materials was studied at a workshop. At the workshop, groups were organized to consider six topics: epoxy modifications, epoxy replacement, fiber modifications, fiber coatings and new fibers, hybrids, and fiber release testing. Because of the time required to develop a new material and acquire a design data base, most of the workers concluded that a modified composite material would require about four to five years of development and testing before it could be applied to aircraft structures. The hybrid working group considered that some hybrid composites which reduce the risk of accidental fiber release might be put into service over the near term. The fiber release testing working group recommended a coordinated effort to define a suitable laboratory test.
This paper describes a 256 x 256 HgCdTe hybrid focal plane with a 0.9- to 2.6-micron spectral range. The silicon FET switch multiplexer (mux) is based on previous hybrid work with a 128 x 128 Reticon mux. The high-density device described has a 40-micron pixel pitch vs 60-micron pixel pitch for the 128 x 128 devices. A read noise of about 1,000 e(-) has been obtained on developmental hybrid structures, along with full well capacities of about 1 x 10 to the 6th e(-). Preliminary device characterization for the 256 x 256 device, along with the first low-background astronomy test results for the 128 x 128 devices, will be presented.
Although the first idea of coaxial rotors appeared more than 150 years ago, most helicopters have used single main-rotor/tail-rotor combination. Since reactive moments of coaxial rotors are canceled by contra-rotation, no tail rotor is required to counter the torque generated by the main rotor. Unlike the single main rotor design that distributes power to both main and tail rotors, all of the power for coaxial rotors is used for vertical thrust. Thus, no power is wasted for anti-torque or directional control. The saved power helps coaxial rotors reach a higher hover ceiling than single rotor helicopters. Another advantage of coaxial rotors is that the overall rotor diameter can be reduced for a given vehicle gross weight because each rotor provides a maximum contribution to vertical thrust to overcome vehicle weight. However, increased mechanical complexity of the hub has been one of the challenges for manufacturing coaxial rotorcraft. Only the Kamov Design Bureau of Russia had been notably successful in production of coaxial helicopters until Sikorsky built X2, an experimental compound helicopter. Recent developments in unmanned aircraft systems and high-speed rotorcraft have renewed interest in the coaxial configuration. Multi-rotors are frequently used for small electric unmanned rotorcraft partly due to mechanical simplicity. The use of multiple motors provides redundancy as well as cost-efficiency. The multi-rotor concept has rarely been used until recently because of its inherent stability and control problems. However, advances in inexpensive electronic flight control systems have opened the floodgates for small drones using multirotors. Coaxial rotors have started to appear in some multi-rotor configurations. Small coaxial rotors have often been designed using a hundred year old approach that is "sketch, build, fly, and iterate." In that approach, there is no systematic way to explore trade-offs or determine logical next steps. It is neither possible to account for multiple real-world constraints up front in design nor possible to know what performance is possible with a given design. Since unmanned vehicles are sized and optimized for the particular mission, a modern low-fidelity conceptual design and sizing tool that has been used for the design of large helicopters can be used for design of small coaxial rotorcraft. However, unlike most helicopters with single main rotor, the interactions between the upper and lower rotors emerge as an important factor to consider in design because an increase in performance of a multi-rotor system is not proportional to the number of rotors. Interference losses and differences in thrusts between the upper and lower rotors were investigated by theoretical methods as well as a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations. In this work, hybrid turbulence models are used to investigate the physics of interactions between coaxial rotors and a fuselage that are not well understood. Present study covers not only small-scale drones but also large-scale coaxial rotors for heavy-lifting missions. Considering the recently proposed FAA drone rules that require the flight only in visual line-of-sight, a large multirotor might be used as an airborne carrier for launch and recovery of unmanned aircraft systems with a human operator onboard. For applications to civil operations, their aerodynamic performance and noise levels need to be assessed. Noise is one of the largest limiting factors to rotorcraft operations in urban area. Since the high-frequency noise of multi-rotors may increase the annoyance, noise may turn out to be a key issue that must be addressed for market acceptability. One of the objectives of the present work is to study the effects of inter-rotor spacing and collectives on the performance, efficiency, and acoustics of coaxial rotor systems.
The Hybrid Automated Reliability Predictor (HARP) integrated reliability (HiREL) workstation tool system marks another step toward the goal of producing a totally integrated computer aided design (CAD) workstation design capability. Since a reliability engineer must generally graphically represent a reliability model before he can solve it, the use of a graphical input description language increases productivity and decreases the incidence of error. The captured image displayed on a cathode ray tube (CRT) screen serves as a documented copy of the model and provides the data for automatic input to the HARP reliability model solver. The introduction of dependency gates to a fault tree notation allows the modeling of very large fault tolerant system models using a concise and visually recognizable and familiar graphical language. In addition to aiding in the validation of the reliability model, the concise graphical representation presents company management, regulatory agencies, and company customers a means of expressing a complex model that is readily understandable. The graphical postprocessor computer program HARPO (HARP Output) makes it possible for reliability engineers to quickly analyze huge amounts of reliability/availability data to observe trends due to exploratory design changes.
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Aerospace concurrent engineering teams (CETs) have been around since 1995 and have evolved into various shapes and forms. Historically, CETs have been designed to function with all team members physically collocated. In order to continue operating during the coronavirus pandemic, these teams have had to become fully distributed in 2020. Previously, distributed CETs were predicted to be considerably less efficient than traditional CETs. However, at JPL studies are being successfully run at peak rate in a distributed mode. As nominal working conditions resume after the pandemic, a major question is whether these teams must go back to being fully collocated or if they can become successful hybrid teams, with half or more of the engineers working remotely. In order to address this question, it is important to understand the key characteristics that make a CET more likely to be successful in a remote mode. This paper revisits a framework for characterizing concurrent engineering teams, providing a means to describe and compare the behavior of concurrent engineering teams in various settings [1], and uses the framework to make recommendations for future hybrid teams.
The Compass Team at NASA’s Glenn Research Center (GRC) is a concurrent engineering team which specializes in conceptual spacecraft mission designs. Detailed descriptions of the team, its history, and its operating model can be found in [1] and [2]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the team was required to move to remote (virtual) operation from their in-person model for approximately 22 months. As the restrictions began to lift and team members were able to return in-person to the Compass Lab, the team moved into a hybrid mode of operation, with some participants still tying in remotely some or all of the time. This paper discusses many of the lessons learned from these experiences, highlighting improvements, outstanding challenges and the tools and methodologies used to address both. Throughout this discussion the terms “in-person”, “hybrid”, “virtual” and “remote” will be used. For the purposes of this paper, “in-person” will be understood to mean when team members are interacting simultaneously, physically within the Compass Lab. “Remote” or “virtual” will refer to when interactions are happening between people who are not co-located using only technology to interface. “Hybrid” will refer to when two or more participants are physically located in the Compass Lab and one or more participant(s) is participating remotely. Media richness is described as “a medium’s ability to communicate effectively based of four factors. They are the capacity for immediate feedback, the number of cues and channels it utilizes, the degree of personalization it affords, and its ability to communicate using natural language” [3]. This theory will be referenced and discussed in multiple of the following sections due to its relevance when choosing how to operate in remote and hybrid modes, as well as in making tool selections. The key to selecting the best mode of communication lays in how complicated the discussion is and the level of ambiguity involved. Not all conversations or interactions require media rich mediums. For example, providing information about which there is little to no ambiguity can easily be done in less rich methods - such as email. A conversation including high levels of ambiguity and/or complex information is better suited to a richer medium, such as in-person or a video call with shared screens.
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ven with great advances in computational techniques and computing power during recent decades, the modeling of unsteady separated flows, such as those encountered in the wake of a re-entry vehicle, continues to be one of the most challenging problems in CFD. Of most interest to the aerothermodynamics community is accurately predicting transient heating loads on the base of a blunt body, which would result in reduced uncertainties and safety margins when designing a re-entry vehicle. However, the prediction of heat transfer can vary widely depending on the turbulence model employed. Therefore, selecting a turbulence model which realistically captures as much of the flow physics as possible will result in improved results. Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) models have become increasingly popular due to their good performance with attached flows, and the relatively quick turnaround time to obtain results. However, RANS methods cannot accurately simulate unsteady separated wake flows, and running direct numerical simulation (DNS) on such complex flows is currently too computationally expensive. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) techniques allow for the computation of the large eddies, which contain most of the Reynolds stress, while modeling the smaller (subgrid) eddies. This results in models which are more computationally expensive than RANS methods, but not as prohibitive as DNS. By complimenting an LES approach with a RANS model, a hybrid LES/RANS method resolves the larger turbulent scales away from surfaces with LES, and switches to a RANS model inside boundary layers. As pointed out by Bertin et al., this type of hybrid approach has shown a lot of promise for predicting turbulent flows, but work is needed to verify that these models work well in hypersonic flows. The very limited amounts of flight and experimental data available presents an additional challenge for researchers. Recently, a joint study by NASA and CUBRC has focused on collecting heat transfer data on the backshell of a scaled model of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). Heat augmentation effects due to the presence of cavities and RCS jet firings were also investigated. The high quality data produced by this effort presents a new set of data which can be used to assess the performance of CFD methods. In this work, a hybrid LES/RANS model developed at North Carolina State University (NCSU) is used to simulate several runs from these experiments, and evaluate the performance of high fidelity methods as compared to more typical RANS models. .
Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are engineered systems that rely on the smooth integration of computational algorithms and physical elements. This integration presents new challenges for verifying that systems will behave as expected. The goal of this presentation is to present current challenges and potential solutions for the formal verification of cyber-physical systems. For cyber systems, formal methods refer to systematically rigorous mathematical techniques employed in the specification, development, analysis, and verification of both software and hardware systems. Recent advancements in computer science have yielded sophisticated tools specifically designed to address challenges associated with formal methods in complex systems. These tools leverage various foundational concepts such as logic, formal languages, program semantics, type systems, type theory, and automata theory. A notable achievement in the application of formal methods is the seL4 microkernel, claimed to be the first general-purpose operating-system kernel to be verified. Its proof implies the absence of bugs and guarantees that the kernel meets specifications. For physical systems, dynamic and control theory has a history of using rigorous analytic techniques to prove functional correctness. Lyapunov, optimal, classical, modern, and robust control theories all provide rigorous mathematical methods both to analyze system performance and to design controller that can be guaranteed to meet certain objectives. Recent computational techniques like level set theory and reachability analysis provide assertions that a system's state will avoid unsafe regions. Even though success has been independently achieved for cyber systems and physical systems, the integration of such systems creates new challenges. In particular, there is an obvious discrepancy between finite-state machines and infinite-state systems, resulting in different approaches for modeling and analyzing these system. While it is possible to simulate hybrid systems, this provides only a demonstration of a performance and not proof. For hybrid systems, current formal methods and system analysis approaches typically require a workarounds to work on hybrid systems like CPS. This paper will outline the state of the art and limits of current practice for formally verifying CPS and will identify possible research directions that require attention.
The basic configuration of geared traction drives, geometric and structural factors to be considered in their construction, and current work on hybrid helicopter transmissions rated at 500 and 3000 hp are discussed.