NASA SBIR abstracts of 1990 phase 1 projects

The research objectives of the 280 projects placed under contract in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 1990 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 program are described. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses in response to NASA's 1990 SBIR Phase 1 Program Solicitation. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 280, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. The document also includes Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference in the 1990 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA field center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number

Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications

Proceedings of a conference held in Huntsville, Alabama, on November 15-16, 1988. The Fourth Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications brings together diverse technical and scientific work in order to help those who employ AI methods in space applications to identify common goals and to address issues of general interest in the AI community. Topics include the following: space applications of expert systems in fault diagnostics, in telemetry monitoring and data collection, in design and systems integration; and in planning and scheduling; knowledge representation, capture, verification, and management; robotics and vision; adaptive learning; and automatic programming

Report of the proceedings of the Colloquium and Workshop on Multiscale Coupled Modeling

The Colloquium and Workshop on Multiscale Coupled Modeling was held for the purpose of addressing modeling issues of importance to planning for the Cooperative Multiscale Experiment (CME). The colloquium presentations attempted to assess the current ability of numerical models to accurately simulate the development and evolution of mesoscale cloud and precipitation systems and their cycling of water substance, energy, and trace species. The primary purpose of the workshop was to make specific recommendations for the improvement of mesoscale models prior to the CME, their coupling with cloud, cumulus ensemble, hydrology, air chemistry models, and the observational requirements to initialize and verify these models

IST Austria Thesis

This thesis describes a brittle fracture simulation method for visual effects applications. Building upon a symmetric Galerkin boundary element method, we first compute stress intensity factors following the theory of linear elastic fracture mechanics. We then use these stress intensities to simulate the motion of a propagating crack front at a significantly higher resolution than the overall deformation of the breaking object. Allowing for spatial variations of the material's toughness during crack propagation produces visually realistic, highly-detailed fracture surfaces. Furthermore, we introduce approximations for stress intensities and crack opening displacements, resulting in both practical speed-up and theoretically superior runtime complexity compared to previous methods. While we choose a quasi-static approach to fracture mechanics, ignoring dynamic deformations, we also couple our fracture simulation framework to a standard rigid-body dynamics solver, enabling visual effects artists to simulate both large scale motion, as well as fracturing due to collision forces in a combined system. As fractures inside of an object grow, their geometry must be represented both in the coarse boundary element mesh, as well as at the desired fine output resolution. Using a boundary element method, we avoid complicated volumetric meshing operations. Instead we describe a simple set of surface meshing operations that allow us to progressively add cracks to the mesh of an object and still re-use all previously computed entries of the linear boundary element system matrix. On the high resolution level, we opt for an implicit surface representation. We then describe how to capture fracture surfaces during crack propagation, as well as separate the individual fragments resulting from the fracture process, based on this implicit representation. We show results obtained with our method, either solving the full boundary element system in every time step, or alternatively using our fast approximations. These results demonstrate that both of these methods perform well in basic test cases and produce realistic fracture surfaces. Furthermore we show that our fast approximations substantially out-perform the standard approach in more demanding scenarios. Finally, these two methods naturally combine, using the full solution while the problem size is manageably small and switching to the fast approximations later on. The resulting hybrid method gives the user a direct way to choose between speed and accuracy of the simulation

ReSCon '12, Research Student Conference: Book of Abstracts

The fifth SED Research Student Conference (ReSCon2012) was hosted over three days, 18-20 June 2012, in the Hamilton Centre at Brunel University. The conference consisted of 130 oral and 70 poster presentations, based on the high quality and diverse research being conducted within the School of Engineering and Design by postgraduate research students. The conference is held annually, and ReSCon plays a key role in contributing to research and innovations within the School

Stochastic Simulation of Mudcrack Damage Formation in an Environmental Barrier Coating

The FEAMAC/CARES program, which integrates finite element analysis (FEA) with the MAC/GMC (Micromechanics Analysis Code with Generalized Method of Cells) and the CARES/Life (Ceramics Analysis and Reliability Evaluation of Structures / Life Prediction) programs, was used to simulate the formation of mudcracks during the cooling of a multilayered environmental barrier coating (EBC) deposited on a silicon carbide substrate. FEAMAC/CARES combines the MAC/GMC multiscale micromechanics analysis capability (primarily developed for composite materials) with the CARES/Life probabilistic multiaxial failure criteria (developed for brittle ceramic materials) and Abaqus (Dassault Systmes) FEA. In this report, elastic modulus reduction of randomly damaged finite elements was used to represent discrete cracking events. The use of many small-sized low-aspect-ratio elements enabled the formation of crack boundaries, leading to development of mudcrack-patterned damage. Finite element models of a disk-shaped three-dimensional specimen and a twodimensional model of a through-the-thickness cross section subjected to progressive cooling from 1,300 C to an ambient temperature of 23 C were made. Mudcrack damage in the coating resulted from the buildup of residual tensile stresses between the individual material constituents because of thermal expansion mismatches between coating layers and the substrate. A two-parameter Weibull distribution characterized the coating layer stochastic strength response and allowed the effect of the Weibull modulus on the formation of damage and crack segmentation lengths to be studied. The spontaneous initiation of cracking and crack coalescence resulted in progressively smaller mudcrack cells as cooling progressed, consistent with a fractal-behaved fracture pattern. Other failure modes such as delamination, and possibly spallation, could also be reproduced. The physical basis assumed and the heuristic approach employed, which involves a simple stochastic cellular automaton methodology to approximate the crack growth process, are described. The results ultimately show that a selforganizing mudcrack formation can derive from a Weibull distribution that is used to describe the stochastic strength response of the bulk brittle ceramic material layers of an EBC

e-Sanctuary: open multi-physics framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuation

The number of evacuees worldwide during wildfire keep rising, year after year. Fire evacuations at the wildland-urban interfaces (WUI) pose a serious challenge to fire and emergency services and are a global issue affecting thousands of communities around the world. But to date, there is a lack of comprehensive tools able to inform, train or aid the evacuation response and the decision making in case of wildfire. The present work describes a novel framework for modelling wildfire urban evacuations. The framework is based on multi-physics simulations that can quantify the evacuation performance. The work argues that an integrated approached requires considering and integrating all three important components of WUI evacuation, namely: fire spread, pedestrian movement, and traffic movement. The report includes a systematic review of each model component, and the key features needed for the integration into a comprehensive toolkit

Research and technology highlights, 1993

This report contains highlights of the major accomplishments and applications that have been made by Langley researchers and by our university and industry colleagues during the past year. The highlights illustrate both the broad range of the research and technology activities supported by NASA Langley Research Center and the contributions of this work toward maintaining United States leadership in aeronautics and space research. This report also describes some of the Center's most important research and testing facilities

Massiv parallele Simulation von Mehrphasen- und Mehrkomponentenströmungen unter Anwendung des Lattice Boltzmann Verfahrens

This thesis reflects the work mainly performed within the research project FIMOTUM focusing on the determination of transport properties and mechanisms in unsaturated media. The efficient simulation of single- and multiphase flows at the pore scale in highly resolved natural porous media is one of the major topics in this work. For this purpose a simulation kernel which is based on the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) has been developed and extensively validated. The LBM presented utilizes the Multiple Relaxation Time (MRT) model and fluid/wall boundary conditions of second order accuracy. The model has also been extended to solve multiphase, advection/diffusion and thermal flow problems. Due to the application of an optimized collision model and corresponding boundary conditions, the covered parameter space and the stability of the method could be greatly enhanced. Hence, it was possible to perform simulations in complex geometries at a large scale (2E11+ DoF) which have been obtained with an unprecedented accuracy. A second target of this thesis was the design and implementation of a simulation kernel to perform massively parallel computations with high efficiency. In order to obtain accurate simulation results at reasonable computational effort, a novel grid generation procedure has been developed. The robust and flexible method is based on the decoupling of input geometry and the actual computational grid. It is therefore excellently suited for the grid generation based on natural porous media data sets obtained by CT- or X-ray methods. Aspects concerning the increasing difficulties in pre- and post-processing of large data sets are discussed. Furthermore, special issues in high performance computing environments are highlighted and a tool chain to visualize scientific data in photo-realistic representation is described.Die vorliegende Dissertation gibt im Wesentlichen die Arbeiten wieder, die im Rahmen des FIMOTUM Projektes durchgeführt worden sind, welches sich vornehmlich auf die Untersuchung von Transporteigenschaften in ungesättigten porösen Medien fokussierte. Hierfür wurde ein Software-Prototyp auf Basis der Gitter Boltzmann Methode (LBM) entwickelt und ausführlich validiert. Die vorgestellte LB-Methode basiert auf dem Multiple-Relaxation-Time (MRT) Modell und verwendet Fluid/Wand Randbedingungen mit einer Genauigkeit 2. Ordnung. Das beschriebene Modell wurde zudem für die Simulation von Mehrphasen-, Advektion/Diffusions- und Thermalen Problemen erweitert. Durch die Optimierung des Kollisionsmodells und der entsprechenden Randbedingungen konnte der nutzbare Parameterraum deutlich vergrößert werden, so dass Simulationen in komplexen Geometrien mit mehr als 2.0E+11 Freiheitsgraden möglich wurden. Ein zweites Ziel dieser Arbeit war die Implementierung eines effizienten und hochparallelen Software-Prototypen zur Simulation von fluiddynamischen Problemen. Um möglichst genaue Ergebnisse bei mäßigem Ressourceneinsatz zu erzielen, wurde ein neuartiger Gittergenerierungsprozess entwickelt. Dieses robuste und flexible Verfahren basiert auf der Entkopplung von Eingangsgeometrie und dem eigentlichen Rechengitter. Daher eignet sich dieser Gittergenerator hervorragend für die Erzeugung eines numerischen Gitters aus digitalen Datensätzen natürlicher poröser Medien, wie bspw. Tomographie-Scans. Desweiteren werden, neben allgemeinen Problemen des Hochleistungsrechnens, die zunehmenden Schwierigkeiten bei der Verarbeitung der ständig steigenden Datenmengen im Pre- und Postprocessing diskutiert. Weiterhin wird, unterstützend zur Ergebnisanalyse, eine Prozesskette für die Erzeugung von fotorealistischen Visualisierungen aus Simulationsdaten beschrieben