Simplex turbopump design

Turbomachinery used in liquid rocket engines typically are composed of complex geometries made from high strength-to-weight super alloys and have long design and fabrication cycle times (3 to 5 years). A simple, low-cost turbopump is being designed in-house to demonstrate the ability to reduce the overall cost to $500K and compress life cycle time to 18 months. The simplex turbopump was designed to provide a discharge pressure of 1500 psia of liquid oxygen at 90 lbm/s. The turbine will be powered by gaseous oxygen. This eliminates the need for an inter-propellant seal typically required to separate the fuel-rich turbine gases from the liquid oxygen pump components. Materials used in the turbine flow paths will utilize existing characterized metals at 800 deg R that are compatible with a warm oxygen environment. This turbopump design would be suitable for integration with a 40 K pound thrust hybrid motor that provides warm oxygen from a tapped-off location to power the turbine. The preliminary and detailed analysis was completed in a year by a multiple discipline, concurrent engineering team. Manpower, schedule, and cost data were tracked during the process for a comparison to the initial goal. The Simplex hardware is the procurement cycle with the expectation of the first test to occur approximately 1.5 months behind the original schedule goal

Building Near-Real-Time Processing Pipelines with the Spark-MPI Platform

Advances in detectors and computational technologies provide new opportunities for applied research and the fundamental sciences. Concurrently, dramatic increases in the three Vs (Volume, Velocity, and Variety) of experimental data and the scale of computational tasks produced the demand for new real-time processing systems at experimental facilities. Recently, this demand was addressed by the Spark-MPI approach connecting the Spark data-intensive platform with the MPI high-performance framework. In contrast with existing data management and analytics systems, Spark introduced a new middleware based on resilient distributed datasets (RDDs), which decoupled various data sources from high-level processing algorithms. The RDD middleware significantly advanced the scope of data-intensive applications, spreading from SQL queries to machine learning to graph processing. Spark-MPI further extended the Spark ecosystem with the MPI applications using the Process Management Interface. The paper explores this integrated platform within the context of online ptychographic and tomographic reconstruction pipelines.Comment: New York Scientific Data Summit, August 6-9, 201

Self-unloading, unmanned, reusable lunar lander project

A payload delivery system will be required to support the buildup and operation of a manned lunar base. In response, a self-unloading, unmanned, reusable lunar lander was conceptually designed. The lander will deliver a 7000 kg payload, with the same dimensions as a space station logistics module, from low lunar orbit to any location on the surface of the moon. The technical aspects of the design is introduced as well as the management structure and project cost

Special libraries: ten essential technologies

This report describes ten technologies of use in special libraries

Corals Meet Oysters: The Optimum Geometric and Chemical Design for Restoration

Worldwide coral reefs and oyster bars are under attack by human generated chemical and physical parameters, ranging from ocean acidification and pollution to tourism and overharvesting. In order to bring back these reefs and bars, a technique that can be scaled up is needed. Current techniques for corals such micro-fragmentation have shown some promise to rejuvenate coral populations but the ability to scale up for a large application are not promising at this point. Oyster restoration now often includes recycle oyster shells from restaurants, cleaning them, placing in perforated plastic bags and deploying them. This approach works on a small scale but has little chance of being scaled up to work along the entire Chesapeake Bay or the Southern coast of Louisiana. At VSU we have developed a material called NEC or Nutrient Enriched Concrete as an economical and green approach for coral and oyster restoration. This presentation will outline current designs for the coast of Georgia and north Florida for oysters and the Florida Keys for corals

An Economical Synthesis Route in the Ocean for the Marine Natural Product, Bryostatin

Bryostatin is a marine natural product found in minute amounts in nature. Cost 17 million USD/gram, this molecule targets latent HIV reservoirs, has potential for slowing the progression of Alzheimer's, and demonstrates strong anti-cancer properties. We have developed an economical synthesis of bryostatin through the creation of a bioreactor that cultivates a symbiotic bacterium which lives on the bryosome B. Nerintina. This bioreactor is comprised of inexpensive organic materials providing essential nutrients which promotes the growth of the bacterium. Our bioreactor was deployed off the Gulf Coast for a short period to attract our symbiotic bacterium. This bioreactor was returned to the lab where it was monitored weekly for 2 months with sample extraction every other day. Each sample was labeled and stored in cold storage to prevent the degradation of bryostatin. After our collection period, we ran each sample through a UV Spectrometer to determine the possible presence of Bryostatin. Promising samples were, then, ran through a liquid chromatography mass spectrometer to determine the different types of Bryostatin present

Revision history aware repositories of computational models of biological systems

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Building repositories of computational models of biological systems ensures that published models are available for both education and further research, and can provide a source of smaller, previously verified models to integrate into a larger model.</p> <p>One problem with earlier repositories has been the limitations in facilities to record the revision history of models. Often, these facilities are limited to a linear series of versions which were deposited in the repository. This is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, there are many instances in the history of biological systems modelling where an 'ancestral' model is modified by different groups to create many different models. With a linear series of versions, if the changes made to one model are merged into another model, the merge appears as a single item in the history. This hides useful revision history information, and also makes further merges much more difficult, as there is no record of which changes have or have not already been merged. In addition, a long series of individual changes made outside of the repository are also all merged into a single revision when they are put back into the repository, making it difficult to separate out individual changes. Furthermore, many earlier repositories only retain the revision history of individual files, rather than of a group of files. This is an important limitation to overcome, because some types of models, such as CellML 1.1 models, can be developed as a collection of modules, each in a separate file.</p> <p>The need for revision history is widely recognised for computer software, and a lot of work has gone into developing version control systems and distributed version control systems (DVCSs) for tracking the revision history. However, to date, there has been no published research on how DVCSs can be applied to repositories of computational models of biological systems.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have extended the Physiome Model Repository software to be fully revision history aware, by building it on top of Mercurial, an existing DVCS. We have demonstrated the utility of this approach, when used in conjunction with the model composition facilities in CellML, to build and understand more complex models. We have also demonstrated the ability of the repository software to present version history to casual users over the web, and to highlight specific versions which are likely to be useful to users.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Providing facilities for maintaining and using revision history information is an important part of building a useful repository of computational models, as this information is useful both for understanding the source of and justification for parts of a model, and to facilitate automated processes such as merges. The availability of fully revision history aware repositories, and associated tools, will therefore be of significant benefit to the community.</p

The Science Case for an Extended Spitzer Mission

Although the final observations of the Spitzer Warm Mission are currently scheduled for March 2019, it can continue operations through the end of the decade with no loss of photometric precision. As we will show, there is a strong science case for extending the current Warm Mission to December 2020. Spitzer has already made major impacts in the fields of exoplanets (including microlensing events), characterizing near Earth objects, enhancing our knowledge of nearby stars and brown dwarfs, understanding the properties and structure of our Milky Way galaxy, and deep wide-field extragalactic surveys to study galaxy birth and evolution. By extending Spitzer through 2020, it can continue to make ground-breaking discoveries in those fields, and provide crucial support to the NASA flagship missions JWST and WFIRST, as well as the upcoming TESS mission, and it will complement ground-based observations by LSST and the new large telescopes of the next decade. This scientific program addresses NASA's Science Mission Directive's objectives in astrophysics, which include discovering how the universe works, exploring how it began and evolved, and searching for life on planets around other stars.Comment: 75 pages. See page 3 for Table of Contents and page 4 for Executive Summar