Study of blade aspect ratio on a compressor front stage aerodynamic and mechanical design report

A single stage compressor was designed with the intent of demonstrating that, for a tip speed and hub-tip ratio typical of an advanced core compressor front stage, the use of low aspect ratio can permit high levels of blade loading to be achieved at an acceptable level of efficiency. The design pressure ratio is 1.8 at an adiabatic efficiency of 88.5 percent. Both rotor and stator have multiple-circular-arc airfoil sections. Variable IGV and stator vanes permit low speed matching adjustments. The design incorporates an inlet duct representative of an engine transition duct between fan and high pressure compressor

Two-stage fan. 3: Data and performance with rotor tip casing treatment, uniform and distorted inlet flows

A two stage fan with a 1st-stage rotor design tip speed of 1450 ft/sec, a design pressure ratio of 2.8, and corrected flow of 184.2 lbm/sec was tested with axial skewed slots in the casings over the tips of both rotors. The variable stagger stators were set in the nominal positions. Casing treatment improved stall margin by nine percentage points at 70 percent speed but decreased stall margin, efficiency, and flow by small amounts at design speed. Treatment improved first stage performance at low speed only and decreased second stage performance at all operating conditions. Casing treatment did not affect the stall line with tip radially distorted flow but improved stall margin with circumferentially distorted flow. Casing treatment increased the attenuation for both types of inlet flow distortion

Antireflective nanotextures for monolithic perovskite silicon tandem solar cells

Recently, we studied the effect of hexagonal sinusoidal textures on the reflective properties of perovskite silicon tandem solar cells using the finite element method FEM . We saw that such nanotextures, applied to the perovskite top cell, can strongly increase the current density utilization from 91 for the optimized planar reference to 98 for the best nanotextured device period 500 nm and peak to valley height 500 nm , where 100 refers to the Tiedje Yablonovitch limit. [D. Chen et al., J. Photonics Energy 8, 022601, 2018 , doi 10.1117 1.JPE.8.022601] In this manuscript we elaborate on some numerical details of that work we validate an assumption based on the Tiedje Yablonovitch limit, we present a convergence study for simulations with the finite element method, and we compare different configurations for sinusoidal nanotexture

Two-stage fan. 4: Performance data for stator setting angle optimization

Stator setting angle optimization tests were conducted on a two-stage fan to improve efficiency at overspeed, stall margin at design speed, and both efficiency and stall margin at partspeed. The fan has a design pressure ratio of 2.8, a flow rate of 184.2 lb/sec (83.55 kg/sec) and a 1st-stage rotor tip speed of 1450 ft/sec (441.96 in/sec). Performance was obtained at 70,100, and 105 percent of design speed with different combinations of 1st-stage and 2nd-stage stator settings. One combination of settings, other than design, was common to all three speeds. At design speed, a 2.0 percentage point increase in stall margin was obtained at the expense of a 1.3 percentage point efficiency decrease. At 105 percent speed, efficiency was improved by 1.8 percentage points but stall margin decreased 4.7 percentage points. At 70 percent speed, no change in stall margin or operating line efficiency was obtained with stator resets although considerable speed-flow requlation occurred

Combining Contrast Invariant L1 Data Fidelities with Nonlinear Spectral Image Decomposition

This paper focuses on multi-scale approaches for variational methods and corresponding gradient flows. Recently, for convex regularization functionals such as total variation, new theory and algorithms for nonlinear eigenvalue problems via nonlinear spectral decompositions have been developed. Those methods open new directions for advanced image filtering. However, for an effective use in image segmentation and shape decomposition, a clear interpretation of the spectral response regarding size and intensity scales is needed but lacking in current approaches. In this context, $L^1$ data fidelities are particularly helpful due to their interesting multi-scale properties such as contrast invariance. Hence, the novelty of this work is the combination of $L^1$-based multi-scale methods with nonlinear spectral decompositions. We compare $L^1$ with $L^2$ scale-space methods in view of spectral image representation and decomposition. We show that the contrast invariant multi-scale behavior of $L^1-TV$ promotes sparsity in the spectral response providing more informative decompositions. We provide a numerical method and analyze synthetic and biomedical images at which decomposition leads to improved segmentation.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, conference SSVM 201

Time-Resolved Data Acquisition for In Situ Subsurface Planetary Geochemistry

The current gamma-ray/neutron instrumentation development effort at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center aims to extend the use of active pulsed neutron interrogation techniques to probe the subsurface geochemistry of planetary bodies in situ. All previous NASA planetary science missions, that used neutron and/or gamma-ray spectroscopy instruments, have relied on a constant neutron source produced from galactic cosmic rays. One of the distinguishing features of this effort is the inclusion of a high intensity 14.1 MeV pulsed neutron generator synchronized with a custom data acquisition system to time each event relative to the pulse. With usually only one opportunity to collect data, it is difficult to set a priori time-gating windows to obtain the best possible results. Acquiring time-tagged, event-by-event data from nuclear induced reactions provides raw data sets containing channel/energy, and event time for each gamma ray or neutron detected. The resulting data set can be plotted as a function of time or energy using optimized analysis windows after the data are acquired. Time windows can now be chosen to produce energy spectra that yield the most statistically significant and accurate elemental composition results that can be derived from the complete data set. The advantages of post-processing gamma-ray time-tagged event-by-event data in experimental tests using our prototype instrument will be demonstrated

Optical simulations of advanced light management for liquid phase crystallized silicon thin film solar cells

Light management is a key issue for highly efficient liquid phase crystallized silicon LPC Si thin film solar cells and can be achieved with periodic nanotextures. They are fabricated with nanoimprint lithography and situated between the glass superstrate and the silicon absorber. To combine excellent optical performance and LPC Si material quality leading to open circuit voltages exceeding 640 mV, the nanotextures must be smooth. Optical simulations of these solar cells can be performed with the finite element method FEM . Accurately simulating the optics of such layer stacks requires not only to consider the nanotextured glass silicon interface, but also to adequately account for the air glass interface on top of this stack. When using rigorous Maxwell solvers like the finite element method FEM , the air glass interface has to be taken into account a posteriori, because the solar cells are prepared on thick glass superstrates, in which light is to be treated incoherently. In this contribution we discuss two different incoherent a posteriori corrections, which we test for nanotextures between glass and silicon. A comparison with experimental data reveals that a first order correction can predict the measured reflectivity of the samples much better than an often applied zeroth order correctio

Time-resolved Neutron-gamma-ray Data Acquisition for in Situ Subsurface Planetary Geochemistry

The current gamma-ray/neutron instrumentation development effort at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center aims to extend the use of active pulsed neutron interrogation techniques to probe the subsurface elemental composition of planetary bodies in situ. Previous NASA planetary science missions, that used neutron and/or gamma-ray spectroscopy instruments, have relied on neutrons produced from galactic cosmic rays. One of the distinguishing features of this effort is the inclusion of a high intensity 14.1 MeV pulsed neutron generator synchronized with a custom data acquisition system to time each event relative to the pulse. With usually only one opportunity to collect data, it is difficult to set a priori time-gating windows to obtain the best possible results. Acquiring time-tagged, event-by-event data from nuclear induced reactions provides raw data sets containing channel/energy, and event time for each gamma ray or neutron detected. The resulting data set can be plotted as a function of time or energy using optimized analysis windows after the data are acquired. Time windows can now be chosen to produce energy spectra that yield the most statistically significant and accurate elemental composition results that can be derived from the complete data set. The advantages of post-processing gamma-ray time-tagged event-by-event data in experimental tests using our prototype instrument will be demonstrated

Magnetic properties of single-crystalline CeCuGa3

The magnetic behavior of single-crystalline CeCuGa3 has been investigated. The compound forms in a tetragonal BaAl4-type structure consisting of rare-earth planes separated by Cu-Ga layers. If the Cu-Ga site disorder is reduced, CeCuGa3 adopts the related, likewise tetragonal BaNiSn3-type structure, in which the Ce ion are surrounded by different Cu and Ga layers and the inversion symmetry is lost. In the literature conflicting reports about the magnetic order of CeCuGa3 have been published. Single crystals with the centrosymmetric structure variant exhibit ferromagnetic order below approx. 4 K with a strong planar anisotropy. The magnetic behavior above the transition temperature can be well understood by the crystal-field splitting of the 4f Hund's rule ground-state multiplet of the Ce ions