Recent advances in the development of a European Mars climate model in Oxford

Since the early 1990s, efforts have been under way in Oxford to develop a range of numerical weather and climate prediction models for various studies of the Martian atmosphere and near-surface environment. Early versions of the Oxford model were more in the way of 'process models', aimed at relatively idealised studies e.g. of baroclinic instability[1] and low-level western boundary currents in the cross-equatorial solsticial Hadley circulation[2]. Since the mid-1990s, however, the group in Oxford have worked closely with the modelling group at LMD in Paris to develop a joint suite of more sophisticated and comprehensive numerical models of Mars' atmosphere. This collaboration, partly sponsored in recent years by the European Space Agency in connection with the associated development of a climate database for Mars[3], culminated in a suite of global circulation models[4], in which both groups share a library of parametrisation schemes, but in which the Oxford team use a spectral representation of horizontal fields (in the form of spherical harmonics) and the LMD group use a grid-point finite difference representation. These models were described in some detail by Forget et al.[4], and their preliminary validation and use in the construction of first versions of the European Mars Climate Database by Lewis et al.[3]. In the present report, we will review further developments which have taken place since the latter papers were published. Aspects of these developments which are common to both the LMD and Oxford groups will also be covered in the companion contribution by Forget et al. in this meeting, and so will only be touched on briefly here. Instead, we will concentrate on those advances which are more specific to the Oxford version of the model. In the following sections, we outline the main new developments to the model formulation since 1999. Subsequent sections then describe some recent examples where the new model is being utilised to advance a diverse range of studies of Mars atmospheric science

High resolution performance analysis of micro-trigeneration in an energy-efficient residential building

Trigeneration has long been proposed as a means to improve energy-efficiency for large and medium sized buildings. To curb increasing energy demand in the residential sector, researchers are now focusing their attention on adapting trigeneration to residential buildings. Literature is full of examples pertaining to the performance of trigeneration in large and medium sized commercial buildings, however little is known on the performance of micro-trigeneration inside residential buildings, particularly under a range of operating conditions. To understand the influence that parameters such as changes in thermal and electrical loading or different plant configurations have on the performance of micro-trigeneration, this research makes use of a detailed model of a Maltese apartment building, and associated micro-trigeneration system. The performance of the model is simulated using a whole building simulation tool run at high-resolution minute time frequency over a number of different operating conditions and scenarios. Each scenario was then assessed on the basis of the system's energetic, environmental and economic performance. The results show that, compared to separate generation the use of a residential micro-trigeneration system reduces primary energy consumption by about 40%, but also that the system's financial performance is highly susceptible to the operating conditions

State space modelling and data analysis exercises in LISA Pathfinder

LISA Pathfinder is a mission planned by the European Space Agency to test the key technologies that will allow the detection of gravitational waves in space. The instrument on-board, the LISA Technology package, will undergo an exhaustive campaign of calibrations and noise characterisation campaigns in order to fully describe the noise model. Data analysis plays an important role in the mission and for that reason the data analysis team has been developing a toolbox which contains all the functionalities required during operations. In this contribution we give an overview of recent activities, focusing on the improvements in the modelling of the instrument and in the data analysis campaigns performed both with real and simulated data.Comment: Plenary talk presented at the 9th International LISA Symposium, 21-25 May 2012, Pari

Automatic Test Generation for Space

The European Space Agency (ESA) uses an engine to perform tests in the Ground Segment infrastructure, specially the Operational Simulator. This engine uses many different tools to ensure the development of regression testing infrastructure and these tests perform black-box testing to the C++ simulator implementation. VST (VisionSpace Technologies) is one of the companies that provides these services to ESA and they need a tool to infer automatically tests from the existing C++ code, instead of writing manually scripts to perform tests. With this motivation in mind, this paper explores automatic testing approaches and tools in order to propose a system that satisfies VST needs

Improving early design stage timing modeling in multicore based real-time systems

This paper presents a modelling approach for the timing behavior of real-time embedded systems (RTES) in early design phases. The model focuses on multicore processors - accepted as the next computing platform for RTES - and in particular it predicts the contention tasks suffer in the access to multicore on-chip shared resources. The model presents the key properties of not requiring the application's source code or binary and having high-accuracy and low overhead. The former is of paramount importance in those common scenarios in which several software suppliers work in parallel implementing different applications for a system integrator, subject to different intellectual property (IP) constraints. Our model helps reducing the risk of exceeding the assigned budgets for each application in late design stages and its associated costs.This work has received funding from the European Space Agency under Project Reference AO=17722=13=NL=LvH, and has also been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant TIN2015-65316-P. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the MINECO under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft