1,909 research outputs found
Integrated control and health management. Orbit transfer rocket engine technology program
To insure controllability of the baseline design for a 7500 pound thrust, 10:1 throttleable, dual expanded cycle, Hydrogen-Oxygen, orbit transfer rocket engine, an Integrated Controls and Health Monitoring concept was developed. This included: (1) Dynamic engine simulations using a TUTSIM derived computer code; (2) analysis of various control methods; (3) Failure Modes Analysis to identify critical sensors; (4) Survey of applicable sensors technology; and, (5) Study of Health Monitoring philosophies. The engine design was found to be controllable over the full throttling range by using 13 valves, including an oxygen turbine bypass valve to control mixture ratio, and a hydrogen turbine bypass valve, used in conjunction with the oxygen bypass to control thrust. Classic feedback control methods are proposed along with specific requirements for valves, sensors, and the controller. Expanding on the control system, a Health Monitoring system is proposed including suggested computing methods and the following recommended sensors: (1) Fiber optic and silicon bearing deflectometers; (2) Capacitive shaft displacement sensors; and (3) Hot spot thermocouple arrays. Further work is needed to refine and verify the dynamic simulations and control algorithms, to advance sensor capabilities, and to develop the Health Monitoring computational methods
The Finite Size Error in Many-body Simulations with long-Ranged Interactions
We discuss the origin of the finite size error of the energy in many-body
simulation of systems of charged particles and we propose a correction based on
the random phase approximation at long wave lengths. The correction comes from
contributions mainly determined by the organized collective oscillations of the
interacting system. Finite size corrections, both on kinetic and potential
energy, can be calculated within a single simulation. Results are presented for
the electron gas and silicon.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PRL; corrected typo
PHENIX and the Reaction Plane: Recent Results
During the past several years, experiments at RHIC have established that a
dense partonic medium is produced in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s)=200 GeV.
Subsequently, a primary goal of analysis has been to understand and
characterize the dynamics underlying this new form of matter. Among the many
probes available, the measurements with respect to the reaction plane has
proven to be crucial to our understanding of a wide range of topics, from the
hydrodynamics of the initial expansion of the collision region to high-pt jet
quenching phenomena. Few tools have the ability to shed light on such a wide
variety of observables as the reacion plane. In this article, we discuss recent
PHENIX measurements with respect to the reaction plane, and the implications
for understanding the underlying physics of RHIC collisions.Comment: 9 pages, 13 figures, Submitted for proceedings to the Winter Workshop
on Nuclear Dynamics 2010, Ocho Rios, Jamaic
Verification and Optimization of a PLC Control Schedule
We report on the use of the SPIN model checker for both the verification of a process control program and the derivation of optimal control schedules. This work was carried out as part of a case study for the EC VHS project (Verification of Hybrid Systems), in which the program for a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) of an experimental chemical plant had to be designed and verified. The intention of our approach was to see how much could be achieved here using the standard model checking environment of SPIN/Promela. As the symbolic calculations of real-time model checkers can be quite expensive it is interesting to try and exploit the efficiency of established non-real-time model checkers like SPIN in those cases where promising work-arounds seem to exist. In our case we handled the relevant real-time properties of the PLC controller using a time-abstraction technique; for the scheduling we implemented in Promela a so-called variable time advance procedure. For this case study these techniques proved sufficient to verify the design of the controller and derive (time-)optimal schedules with reasonable time and space requirements
Performance Evaluation of Vision-Based Algorithms for MAVs
An important focus of current research in the field of Micro Aerial Vehicles
(MAVs) is to increase the safety of their operation in general unstructured
environments. Especially indoors, where GPS cannot be used for localization,
reliable algorithms for localization and mapping of the environment are
necessary in order to keep an MAV airborne safely. In this paper, we compare
vision-based real-time capable methods for localization and mapping and point
out their strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, we describe algorithms for
state estimation, control and navigation, which use the localization and
mapping results of our vision-based algorithms as input.Comment: Presented at OAGM Workshop, 2015 (arXiv:1505.01065
Transition temperature of a dilute homogeneous imperfect Bose gas
The leading-order effect of interactions on a homogeneous Bose gas is
theoretically predicted to shift the critical temperature by an amount
\Delta\Tc = # a_{scatt} n^{1/3} T_0 from the ideal gas result T_0, where
a_{scatt} is the scattering length and n is the density. There have been
several different theoretical estimates for the numerical coefficient #. We
claim to settle the issue by measuring the numerical coefficient in a lattice
simulation of O(2) phi^4 field theory in three dimensions---an effective theory
which, as observed previously in the literature, can be systematically matched
to the dilute Bose gas problem to reproduce non-universal quantities such as
the critical temperature. We find # = 1.32 +- 0.02.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett; minor changes due to
improvement of analysis in the longer companion pape
The transition temperature of the dilute interacting Bose gas for internal degrees of freedom
We calculate explicitly the variation of the Bose-Einstein
condensation temperature induced by weak repulsive two-body interactions
to leading order in the interaction strength. As shown earlier by general
arguments, is linear in the dimensionless product
to leading order, where is the density and the scattering length. This
result is non-perturbative, and a direct perturbative calculation of the
amplitude is impossible due to infrared divergences familiar from the study of
the superfluid helium lambda transition. Therefore we introduce here another
standard expansion scheme, generalizing the initial model which depends on one
complex field to one depending on real fields, and calculating the
temperature shift at leading order for large . The result is explicit and
finite. The reliability of the result depends on the relevance of the large
expansion to the situation N=2, which can in principle be checked by systematic
higher order calculations. The large result agrees remarkably well with
recent numerical simulations.Comment: 10 pages, Revtex, submitted to Europhysics Letter
Exploiting Behavioral Hierarchy for Efficient Model Checking
Inspired by the success of model checking in hardware and protocol verification, model checking techniques for software have been the focus of a lot of research in the last few years [5,3,2,6]. Model checking can be applied only to relatively small models due to its inherently high computational requirements, and there are two complementary trends to address scalability. The model extraction approach, exemplified by projects such as Bandera [6] and SLAM [3], involves constructing inputs to model checkers by abstracting programs written in languages such as C and Java. The model-based design approach, exemplified by modeling notations such as Statecharts [7], promotes design using high-level models that are compiled into code. Our research agenda is to develop model checking techniques for model-based design of software.
Modern software design languages promote hierarchy as one of the key constructs for structuring complex specifications. The input language to our model checker is based on hierarchic reactive modules [1]. This choice was motivated by the fact that, unlike STATECHARTS and other languages, in hierarchic reactive modules, the notion of hierarchy is semantic with an observational trace-based semantics and a notion of refinement with assume-guarantee rules. The first contribution of this paper is the Hermes toolkit that implements hierarchic reactive modules. Our implementation has a visual front-end and XML-based back-end, consistent with modern software design tools, and is in Java.
There are two basic techniques for reachability analysis. Enumerative model checkers such as SPIN [8] perform an on-the-fly exploration of the state-space using a depth-first search, while symbolic model checkers such as SMV [9] perform a breadth-first search by manipulating sets of states, rather than individual states, encoded typically by ordered binary (or multi-valued) decision diagrams. Since the two approaches are incomparable, and have been shown to be successful, Hermes supports both enumerative and symbolic reachability analysis. In this paper, we report progress on exploiting the structuring information in the behavioral hierarchy of the input model to speed up the exploration of reachable state-space of the model for both the approaches. More information about the tool is available at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/sdrl/hermes
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