Computer simulation of preflight blood volume reduction as a countermeasure to fluid shifts in space flight

Fluid shifts in weightlessness may cause a central volume expansion, activating reflexes to reduce the blood volume. Computer simulation was used to test the hypothesis that preadaptation of the blood volume prior to exposure to weightlessness could counteract the central volume expansion due to fluid shifts and thereby attenuate the circulatory and renal responses resulting in large losses of fluid from body water compartments. The Guyton Model of Fluid, Electrolyte, and Circulatory Regulation was modified to simulate the six degree head down tilt that is frequently use as an experimental analog of weightlessness in bedrest studies. Simulation results show that preadaptation of the blood volume by a procedure resembling a blood donation immediately before head down bedrest is beneficial in damping the physiologic responses to fluid shifts and reducing body fluid losses. After ten hours of head down tilt, blood volume after preadaptation is higher than control for 20 to 30 days of bedrest. Preadaptation also produces potentially beneficial higher extracellular volume and total body water for 20 to 30 days of bedrest

On long-wavelength magnetic anomalies over Indian region

A data set composed of vector magnetic measurements obtained by MAGSAT and very accurate altitude determinations made using Sun sensors and star cameras was used to obtain data for very quiet days over the Indian region at 10 S to 40 N and 60 E to 110 E in an effort to determine the validity of quantitative estimates made from aeromagnetic data obtained by removing the core field. To further account for the external effects, the ring current contributions estimated using both X and Z variations were subtracted from the observed values. Before this, the core contribution was eliminated through a spherical harmonic expansion with terms up to N=13. Analysis of the residual measurements using Fast Fourier techniques indicates that the anomalies contain substantial power for wavelengths of about 1500 kms. Because the ring current effect has a spatial structure of this dimension over India, efforts are being made to exactly eliminate these two interfering effects from the data

An Architecture for On board Frequency Domain Analysis of Launch Vehicle Vibration Signals

The dynamic properties of the airborne structures plays a crucial role in the stability of the vehicle during flight. Modal and spectral behaviour of the structures are simulated and analysed. Ground tests are carried out with environmental conditions close to the flight conditions, with some assumptions. Subsequently, based on the flight telemetered data, the on-board mission algorithm and the auto-pilot filter coefficients are fine tuned. An attempt is made in this paper to design a novel architecture for analysing the modal and spectral random vibration signals on-board the flight vehicle and to identify the dominant frequencies. Based on the analysed results, the mission mode algorithm and the filter coefficients can be fine tuned on-board for better effectiveness in control and providing more stability. Three types of windows viz. Hann, Hamming and Blackman-Harris are configured with a generalised equation using FIR filter structure. The overlapping of the input signal data for better inclusiveness of the real-time data is implemented with BRAM. The domain conversion of the data from time domain to frequency domain is carried out with FFT using Radix-2 BF architecture. The FFT output data are processed for calculating the power spectral density. The dominant frequency is identified using the array search method and Goldschmidt algorithm is utilised for the averaging of the PSDs for better precision. The proposed architecture is synthesised, implemented and tested with both Synthetic and doppler signal of 300 Hz spot frequency padded with Gaussian white noise. The results are highly satisfactory in identifying the spot frequency and generating the PSD array