Design significance of component tests

The component test program has been designed to permit a realistic evaluation of critical components and, where necessary, to point the way to design or operational changes which will provide a high level of assurance of a successful power test

Review of NASA progress in thermal barrier coatings for stationary gas turbines

Ceramic thermal barrier coatings for industrial/utility gas turbines were investigated. In burner rig tests of a zirconia yttria/nickel chromium aluminum yttrium ZrO2-12w/0Y2O3/NiCrAlY coating system on air cooled superalloy specimens, ceramic coating life (spallation) was sensitive to Na and V concentration in the fuel. The locations of coating spallation correspond to areas where combustion products were predicted to condense. Three new thermal barrier coating systems were identified. These are based on calcium silicate, ZrO2-8w/0Y2O3, and a MgO-NiCrAlY cermet. The spall resistance can be increased by reducing the ceramic layer thickness from 0.038 to 0.013 cm and by the use of more oxidation/corrosion resistant bond coats

An investigation of the performance portability of OpenCL

This paper reports on the development of an MPI/OpenCL implementation of LU, an application-level benchmark from the NAS Parallel Benchmark Suite. An account of the design decisions addressed during the development of this code is presented, demonstrating the importance of memory arrangement and work-item/work-group distribution strategies when applications are deployed on different device types. The resulting platform-agnostic, single source application is benchmarked on a number of different architectures, and is shown to be 1.3–1.5× slower than native FORTRAN 77 or CUDA implementations on a single node and 1.3–3.1× slower on multiple nodes. We also explore the potential performance gains of OpenCL’s device fissioning capability, demonstrating up to a 3× speed-up over our original OpenCL implementation

Experimental studies of perceptual processes, section three Progress report, Jan. 1 - Sep. 30, 1965

Interrelations of signal detection and operant researc

Four-wave mixing wavelength conversion efficiency in semiconductor traveling-wave amplifiers measured to 65 nm of wavelength shift

The efficiency of broadband optical wavelength conversion by four-wave mixing in semiconductor traveling-wave amplifiers is measured for wavelength shifts up to 65 nm using a tandem amplifier geometry. A quantity we call the relative conversion efficiency function, which determines the strength of the four-wave mixing nonlinearity, was extracted from the data. Using this quantity, gain requirements for lossless four-wave mixing wavelength conversion are calculated and discussed. Signal to background noise ratio is also measured and discussed in this study

Four-Wave Mixing in Semiconductor Traveling-wave Amplifiers for Efficient, Broadband, Wavelength Conversion up to 65 nm

Wavelength conversion is recognized as an important function in future fiber networks employing wavelength division multiplexing. The authors have recently demonstrated broad-band wavelength conversion over spans as large as 27 nm. Their approach uses ultra-fast four-wave mixing dynamics associated with intraband relaxation mechanisms in semiconductor traveling-wave amplifiers (TWA's). In the paper the authors present new results showing conversion over wavelength spans as large as 65 nm. This surpasses the previous record by over a factor of two. Of equal importance, they also verify experimentally their previous theoretical prediction that wavelength conversion efficiency varies as the cube of TWA single pass gain. In the course of our previous work, we have shown that the theoretical efficiency, η, of this process can be expressed by the simple relation: η = 3G + 2P + R(Δ⋋) where η is the ratio in dB of the converted signal output power to the signal input power and G is the single pass TWA optical gain. A crucial point is the presence of 3G in this expression - essentially, the wavelength converter uses the available TWA optimal gain three times. We verified this expression using an experimental setup similar to that described in. Tunable, single-frequency, erbium fiber ring lasers were used as pump and signal sources and TWA devices used contained tensile-strained mutli-quantum well active layers described in. Figure 1 shows conversion efficiency data plotted versus single-pass saturated optical gain. The pump power was -5.2 dBm and the signal power was -11.3 dBm. The measured slope of 3.18 confirms the cubic dependence of efficiency on single pass gain

Study of interwell carrier transport by terahertz four-wave mixing in an optical amplifier with tensile and compressively strained quantum wells

Interwell carrier transport in a semiconductor optical amplifier having a structure of alternating tensile and compressively strained quantum wells was studied by four-wave mixing at detuning frequencies up to 1 THz. A calculation of transbarrier transport efficiency is also presented to qualitatively explain the measured signal spectra