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Results for “spatial wavelet coherence”

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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Wavelet methods for studying the onset of strong plasma turbulence

Recent simulations have demonstrated that coherent current sheets dominate the kinetic-scale energy dissipation in strong turbulence of magnetized plasma. Wavelet basis functions are a natural tool for analyzing turbulent flows containing localized coherent structures of different spatial scales. Here, wavelets are used to study the onset and subsequent transition to fully developed turbulence from a laminar state. Originally applied to neutral fluid turbulence, an iterative wavelet technique decomposes the field into coherent and incoherent contributions. In contrast to Fourier power spectra, finite time Lyapunov exponents, and simple measures of intermittency such as non-Gaussian statistics of field increments, the wavelet technique is found to provide a quantitative measure for the onset of turbulence and to track the transition to fully developed turbulence. The wavelet method makes no assumptions about the structure of the coherent current sheets or the underlying plasma model. Temporal evolution of the coherent and incoherent wavelet fluctuations is found to be highly correlated (a Pearson correlation coefficient of >0.9) with the magnetic field energy and plasma thermal energy, respectively. The onset of turbulence is identified with the rapid growth of a background of incoherent fluctuations spreading across a range of scales and a corresponding drop in the coherent components. This is suggestive of the interpretation of the coherent and incoherent wavelet fluctuations as measures of coherent structures (e.g., current sheets) and dissipation, respectively. The ratio of the incoherent to coherent fluctuations Ric is found to be fairly uniform in the turbulent state across different plasma models and provides an empirical threshold of ~0.1 for turbulence onset. The utility of this technique is illustrated through examples. First, it is applied to the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability from different simulation models including fully kinetic, hybrid (kinetic ion/fluid electron), and Hall MHD simulations. Second, the wavelet diagnostic is applied to the development of turbulence downstream of the bowshock in a global magnetosphere simulation. Finally, the wavelet technique is also shown to be useful as a de-noising method for particle simulations.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Coupling fine-scale root and canopy structure using ground-based remote sensing

Ecosystem physical structure, defined by the quantity and spatial distribution of biomass, influences a range of ecosystem functions. Remote sensing tools permit the non-destructive characterization of canopy and root features, potentially providing opportunities to link above- and belowground structure at fine spatial resolution in functionally meaningful ways. To test this possibility, we employed ground-based portable canopy LiDAR (PCL) and ground penetrating radar (GPR) along co-located transects in forested sites spanning multiple stages of ecosystem development and, consequently, of structural complexity. We examined canopy and root structural data for coherence (i.e., correlation in the frequency of spatial variation) at multiple spatial scales 10 m within each site using wavelet analysis. Forest sites varied substantially in vertical canopy and root structure, with leaf area index and root mass more becoming even vertically as forests aged. In all sites, above- and belowground structure, characterized as mean maximum canopy height and root mass, exhibited significant coherence at a scale of 3.5–4 m, and results suggest that the scale of coherence may increase with stand age. Our findings demonstrate that canopy and root structure are linked at characteristic spatial scales, which provides the basis to optimize scales of observation. Lastly, our study highlights the potential, and limitations, for fusing LiDAR and radar technologies to quantitatively couple above- and belowground ecosystem structure.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Extracting the spectrum of a flow by spatial filtering

We show that the spectrum of a flow field can be extracted within a local region by straightforward filtering in physical space. We find that for a flow with a certain level regularity, the filtering kernel must have a sufficient number of vanishing moments in order for the "filtering spectrum" to be meaningful. Our derivation follows a similar analysis by [1] for the wavelet spectrum, where we show that the filtering kernel has to have at least p vanishing moments in order to correctly extract a spectrum k (-alpha) with (alpha) less/equal to p + 2. For example, any ow with a spectrum shallower than k (-3) can be extracted by a straightforward average on grid-cells of a stencil. We construct two new "simple stencil" kernels, MI and MII, with only two and three fixed stencil weight coefficients, respectively, and that have sufficient vanishing moments to allow for extracting spectra steeper than k(-3). We demonstrate our results using synthetic fields, 2D turbulence from a Direct Numerical Simulation, and 3D turbulence from the JHU Database. Our method guarantees energy conservation and can be useful in both simulations and experiments when a straightforward Fourier analysis is not justified, such as within coherent flow structures covering non-rectangular regions or in geophysical flows on Earth's curved surface.

42 ENGINEERING↗

BCARS Simulated Phantom Dataset for Evaluation of Processing Pipelines

Broadband coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (BCARS) microscopy is a powerful label-free biological imaging technique, but the raw signal requires careful processing. The vibrationally resonant (Raman) fingerprint signal is usually small compared with instrumental noise sources and the nonresonant background (NRB) inherent in the BCARS signal. Fortunately, the NRB exhibits a systematic phase relationship with the coherent Raman response, acting as a heterodyne amplifier for the weak fingerprint signal. Due to this heterodyne effect, the Raman response can be recovered quantitatively and invariantly across different instruments, provided the NRB shape is known. Even with heterodyne amplification, the amplitudes of fingerprint signal components are often comparable to system noise. Singular value decomposition (SVD), which utilizes spatial information, is often employed for additional noise filtering. Consequently, finding optimal processing parameters to properly distinguish the NRB and Raman responses and suppress noise in the complex BCARS signal requires a reference system that realistically represents the spectral and spatial properties of BCARS signals obtained from biological samples. We present a digital tissue phantom that meets these criteria as a tool for testing candidate signal processing pipelines. The digital phantom is generated with simulated hyperspectral Raman images having system-specific noise and background characteristics. Here, we analyze phantom datasets with differing background and signal-to-noise conditions to evaluate their impact on the performance of multiple signal processing pipelines. Specifically, we investigate the application of a Butterworth filter-based routine to directly estimate the NRB from the BCARS signal. Additionally, we evaluate a Lorentzian wavelet transform as an alternative to the Hilbert transform for extracting the Raman spectrum from the BCARS signal. While we demonstrate this phantom for BCARS, it can be used for any spectroscopic Raman imaging approach.

Dixon, Jessica Z. [Georgia Institute of Technology↗