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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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A Control Framework for Autonomous Smart Grids for Space Power Applications

With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) rising interest in lunar surface operations and deep space exploration, there is a growing need to move from traditional ground-based mission operations to more autonomous vehicle level operations. In lunar surface operations, there are periods of time where communications with ground-based mission control could not occur, forcing vehicles and a lunar base to completely operate independent of the ground. For deep space exploration missions, communication latency times increase to greater than 15 minutes making real-time control of critical systems difficult, if not near impossible. These challenges are driving the need for an autonomous power control system that has the capability to manage power and energy. This will ensure that critical loads have the necessary power to support life systems and carry out critical mission objectives. This paper presents a flexible, hierarchical, distributed control methodology that enables autonomous operation of smart grids and can integrate into a higher level autonomous architecture.

Csank, Jeffrey T.↗

A Control Framework for Autonomous Smart Grids for Space Power Applications

With the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) rising interest in lunar surface operations and deep space exploration, there is a growing need to move from traditional ground-based mission operations to more autonomous vehicle level operations. In lunar surface operations, there are periods of time where communications with ground-based mission control could not occur, forcing vehicles and a lunar base to completely operate independent of the ground. For deep space exploration missions, communication latency times increase to greater than 15 minutes making real-time control of critical systems difficult, if not near impossible. These challenges are driving the need for an autonomous power control system that has the capability to manage power and energy. This will ensure that critical loads have the necessary power to support life systems and carry out critical mission objectives. This paper presents a flexible, hierarchical, distributed control methodology that enables autonomous operation of smart grids and can integrate into a higher level autonomous architecture.

Carbone, Marc A.↗

Role of PHM in Autonomous Decision-Making: Aerospace applications

There is an increased need for onboard decision-making capabilities in cyber-physical systems be it in energy, automotive, aviation, space, or other industries as they aim for increased efficiency, resiliency, and mission assurance capabilities. Emerging next-gen technologies such as multi-rover planetary missions, distributed satellites, unmanned ground and aerial vehicle operations and smart grid systems rely on in-time risk assessment and autonomous decision-making. One critical piece of the autonomy puzzle is reliable prediction of system behavior under time-varying and potentially uncertain environmental conditions. Further, if agent states change during operation such as initiation of faults or degradation, reliable diagnostic tools need to be investigated. In this tutorial, we will revise approaches that integrates existing physics-based and data-driven models of agents interacting with probability models of the environment and component operation state. Role of existing PHM methodologies as they feed into decision-making under uncertainty will be studied. Balancing critical trade-offs between high-fidelity prognostic models, prediction time-horizons and the computational requirements for in-time cost-effective decision-making will be discussed through the implementation of surrogate models. Finally, the audience will be introduced to a real-time application of in-time trajectory planning of an unmanned aerial system (UAS) based on its PHM assessments under uncertain and varying wind conditions.

decision-making↗

Towards Reliable Evaluation of Anomaly-Based Intrusion Detection Performance

This report describes the results of research into the effects of environment-induced noise on the evaluation process for anomaly detectors in the cyber security domain. This research was conducted during a 10-week summer internship program from the 19th of August, 2012 to the 23rd of August, 2012 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The research performed lies within the larger context of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Smart Grid cyber security project, a Department of Energy (DoE) funded effort involving the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and the University of Southern California/ Information Sciences Institute. The results of the present effort constitute an important contribution towards building more rigorous evaluation paradigms for anomaly-based intrusion detectors in complex cyber physical systems such as the Smart Grid. Anomaly detection is a key strategy for cyber intrusion detection and operates by identifying deviations from profiles of nominal behavior and are thus conceptually appealing for detecting "novel" attacks. Evaluating the performance of such a detector requires assessing: (a) how well it captures the model of nominal behavior, and (b) how well it detects attacks (deviations from normality). Current evaluation methods produce results that give insufficient insight into the operation of a detector, inevitably resulting in a significantly poor characterization of a detectors performance. In this work, we first describe a preliminary taxonomy of key evaluation constructs that are necessary for establishing rigor in the evaluation regime of an anomaly detector. We then focus on clarifying the impact of the operational environment on the manifestation of attacks in monitored data. We show how dynamic and evolving environments can introduce high variability into the data stream perturbing detector performance. Prior research has focused on understanding the impact of this variability in training data for anomaly detectors, but has ignored variability in the attack signal that will necessarily affect the evaluation results for such detectors. We posit that current evaluation strategies implicitly assume that attacks always manifest in a stable manner; we show that this assumption is wrong. We describe a simple experiment to demonstrate the effects of environmental noise on the manifestation of attacks in data and introduce the notion of attack manifestation stability. Finally, we argue that conclusions about detector performance will be unreliable and incomplete if the stability of attack manifestation is not accounted for in the evaluation strategy.

cyber defense↗

NASA Capabilities that Could Impact Terrestrial Smart Grids of the Future

Incremental steps to steadily build, test, refine, and qualify capabilities that lead to affordable flight elements and a deep space capability. Potential Deep Space Vehicle Power system characteristics: power 10 kilowatts average; two independent power channels with multi-level cross-strapping; solar array power 24 plus kilowatts; multi-junction arrays; lithium Ion battery storage 200 plus ampere-hours; sized for deep space or low lunar orbit operation; distribution120 volts secondary (SAE AS 5698); 2 kilowatt power transfer between vehicles.

Power systems↗

Experiments in structural dynamics and control using a grid

Future spacecraft are being conceived that are highly flexible and of extreme size. The two features of flexibility and size pose new problems in control system design. Since large scale structures are not testable in ground based facilities, the decision on component placement must be made prior to full-scale tests on the spacecraft. Control law research is directed at solving problems of inadequate modelling knowledge prior to operation required to achieve peak performance. Another crucial problem addressed is accommodating failures in systems with smart components that are physically distributed on highly flexible structures. Parameter adaptive control is a method of promise that provides on-orbit tuning of the control system to improve performance by upgrading the mathematical model of the spacecraft during operation. Two specific questions are answered in this work. They are: What limits does on-line parameter identification with realistic sensors and actuators place on the ultimate achievable performance of a system in the highly flexible environment? Also, how well must the mathematical model used in on-board analytic redundancy be known and what are the reasonable expectations for advanced redundancy management schemes in the highly flexible and distributed component environment?

Montgomery, R. C.↗

Athena

The Athena simulation software supports an analyst from DoD or other federal agency in making stability and reconstruction projections for operational analyses in areas like Iraq or Afghanistan. It encompasses the use of all elements of national power: diplomatic, information, military, and economic (DIME), and anticipates their effects on political, military, economic, social, information, and infrastructure (PMESII) variables in real-world battle space environments. Athena is a stand-alone model that provides analysts with insights into the effectiveness of complex operations by anticipating second-, third-, and higher-order effects. For example, the first-order effect of executing a curfew may be to reduce insurgent activity, but it may also reduce consumer spending and keep workers home as second-order effects. Reduced spending and reduced labor may reduce the gross domestic product (GDP) as a third-order effect. Damage to the economy will have further consequences. The Athena approach has also been considered for application in studies related to climate change and the smart grid. It can be applied to any project where the impacts on the population and their perceptions are important, and where population perception is important to the success of the project.

Chamberlain, Robert G.↗

Surface generation and editing operations applied to structural support of aerospace vehicle fuselages

The Solid Modeling Aerospace Research Tool (SMART) is a computer aided design tool used in aerospace vehicle design. Modeling of structural components using SMART includes the representation of the transverse or cross-wise elements of a vehicle's fuselage, ringframes, and bulkheads. Ringframes are placed along a vehicle's fuselage to provide structural support and maintain the shape of the fuselage. Bulkheads are also used to maintain shape, but are placed at locations where substantial structural support is required. Given a Bezier curve representation of a cross sectional cut through a vehicle's fuselage and/or an internal tank, this project produces a first-guess Bezier patch representation of a ringframe or bulkhead at the cross-sectional position. The grid produced is later used in the structural analysis of the vehicle. The graphical display of the generated patches allows the user to edit patch control points in real time. Constraints considered in the patch generation include maintaining 'square-like' patches and placement of longitudinal, or lengthwise along the fuselage, structural elements called longerons.

Schwartz, Susan K.↗

The System Modeling and Analysis of Resiliency in STEReO (SMARt-STEReO)

Wildfire emergency response has remained rooted in relatively low-tech solutions for coordination between ground and aerial assets. These low-tech solutions are robust for the remote environments in which wildfires are usually fought, but limit strategic cross-organizational support and the ability to deploy and effectively utilize aerial assets. As aircraft become more advanced and new technology, including drones, become available to firefighters, a new, more modern method of asset coordination is needed. NASA is working on a project called ‘Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations’ (STEReO) to integrate unmanned aerial systems (UAS)and UAS traffic management (UTM)into wildfire response. STEReO’s goals include simplifying the coordination of aerial assets, improving the existing UAS framework, and increasing the role of additional autonomous systems to reduce human risk and to increase system resilience. This paper describes the development of the ‘System Modeling and Analysis of Resiliency in STEReO’ (SMARt-STEReO) project, which aims to model wildfire response and to quantify the additional system resilience that STEReO technology provides firefighters. This paper verifies SMARt-STEReO and defines its scope; it includes experimental and statistical analysis of the impact that the addition of UAS has on both performance metrics and also on performance resiliency response to a given fault. SMARt-STEReO is a grid-based model of fire propagation that incorporates varying crew responses. Through the use of a Python package called ‘fmdtools’, the model easily allows for the addition of faults to the system. These faults allow analysts to investigate various response parameters. Factors including terrain, fuel type and wind speed can be modified to affect the fire propagation; additionally, the number of ground crews, engines, fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, and UAS can be changed to affect the crew response. The communication lines between actors mimic those used in real life situations. This paper explains the development of SMARt-STEReO including background research, verification and validation, and preliminary experimental analysis of system resilience to both a minor and major fault in systems with and without UAS.

Resiliency↗

Patch Network for Power Allocation and Distribution in Smart Materials

The power allocation and distribution (PAD) circuitry is capable of allocating and distributing a single or multiple sources of power over multi-elements of a power user grid system. The purpose of this invention is to allocate and distribute power that is collected by individual patch rectennas to a region of specific power-user devices, such as actuators. The patch rectenna converts microwave power into DC power. Then this DC power is used to drive actuator devices. However, the power from patch rectennas is not sufficient to drive actuators unless all the collected power is effectively used to drive another group by allocation and distribution. The power allocation and distribution (PAD) circuitry solves the shortfall of power for devices in a large array. The PAD concept is based on the networked power control in which power collected over the whole array of rectennas is allocated to a sub domain where a group of devices is required to be activated for operation. Then the allocated power is distributed to individual element of power-devices in the sub domain according to a selected run-mode.

Golembiewski, Walter T.↗