2018 NIA Key Activities

Week Ending Jan. 12, 2018

NIA Educators Present NASA OPSPARC Webinar With ITEEA

On Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018, educators from the National Institute of Aerospace’s Center for Integrated STEM Education (NIA-CISE), Dr. Sharon Bowers, Joan Harper-Neely, and Betsy McCallister, presented a webinar with the International Technology Engineering Education Association (ITEEA) to teach the 37 K-16 educators in attendance how to run the NASA OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge (NASA OPSPARC) in their classroom. The NIA educators also promoted other NASA and NIA activities.

The NASA OPSPARC Challenge asks students to reinvent NASA technology to create a spinoff to help people on Earth.

NIA Research Engineer Presents Paper at 2018 SciTech Special Session

Dr. Nelson V. De Carvalho, Research Engineer at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), presented a paper on “Combining Progressive Nodal Release with the Virtual Crack Closure Technique to Model Fatigue Delamination Growth Without Re-meshing” at the 2018 AIAA SciTech conference. The paper was presented in a special session in honor of Dr. Raju from NASA Langley Research Center.

NIA-HIPAC Researchers Present at AIAA SciTech 2018

Several researchers from the National Institute of Aerospace’s (NIA) Center for High-Performance Aerospace Computing (HiPAC) took an active part in the AIAA SciTech-2018 meeting. NIA Senior Research Scientist, Ali Uzun, presented an invited presentation “Wall-Resolved Large Eddy Simulations of Transonic Shock-Induced Flow Separation” at NASA’s Revolutionary Computational Aerosciences Special Session on Numerical Methods and Turbulence Modeling/Simulations. NIA Research Scholar, David C. Del Rey Fernández, contributed to another presentation at the same session. NIA Senior Research Engineer, Balaji Venkatachari, presented a paper “Tetrahedral-Mesh Simulations of Shock-Turbulence Interaction”. NIA Research Fellow, Boris Diskin, was an organizer and chair of the special sessions “RANS Solutions for Benchmark Configurations” at SciTech-2018. Boris Diskin, Hiroaki Nishikawa, and NIA Senior Research Engineer, Yi Liu, collaborated with NASA researchers on two papers presented at these sessions. This collaboration presented customized grid generation and coarsening codes and reference solutions for 3D benchmark aerodynamic flows. The codes and reference solutions are posted on NASA’s Turbulence Modeling Resource website for the benefits of a broader computational aerodynamics community. Other contributors used these resources to demonstrate the benefits of advanced solver technologies such as finite-element discretizations, high-order discretizations, and mesh adaptation methods.

Below is the list of papers and an oral presentation presented at these special sessions:

1. 1. 1. NIA: Hiroaki Nishikawa and Boris Diskin,“Customized Grid Generation Codes for Benchmark Three-Dimensional Flows,” AIAA-2018-1101
    2. NIA, NASA: Boris Diskin, William K. Anderson, Mohagna J. Pandya, Christopher L. Rumsey, James Thomas, Yi Liu, and Hiroaki Nishikawa, “Grid Convergence for Three- Dimensional Benchmark Turbulent Flows,”AIAA-2018-1102
    3. NASA, Imperial College, Sandia, Boeing, INRIA: Michael A. Park, Nicolas Barral, Daniel Ibanez, Dmitry S. Kamenetskiy, Joshua A. Krakos, Todd R. Michal, and Adrien Loseille, “Unstructured Grid Adaptation and Solver Technology for Turbulent Flows,”AIAA-2018-1103
    4. University of Michigan: Krzysztof Fidkowski, “Three-Dimensional Benchmark RANS Computations Using Discontinuous Finite Elements on Solution-Adapted Meshes,”AIAA-2018-1104
    5. ONERA: Matthieu Soismier, Antoine Dumont, Clement Caillaux, Julien Mayeur, Bertrand Michel, and Bruno Maugars, “RANS simulations on OM6 with the ONERA elsAflow solver,” AIAA-2018-1566
    6. University of Toronto: Thomas Reist and David W. Zingg, “Application of Diablo to Three-Dimensional Benchmark Problems for Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Solvers,”AIAA-2018-1567
    7. CREATE-AV Kestrel: Jon T. Erwin, Ryan S. Glasby, and Douglas L. Stefanski, “Evaluation of RANS Solutions for 3D Benchmark Configurations with HPCMP CREATE™-AV Kestrel,”AIAA-2018-1568
    8. University of Wyoming: Behzad Reza Ahrabi, Michael J. Brazell, and Dimitri J. Mavriplis,”An Investigation of Continuous and Discontinuous Finite-Element Discretizations on Benchmark 3D Turbulent Flows, “AIAA-2018-1569
    9. NASA: William K. Anderson, “Stabilized Finite-Element Solutions for the Special Session on Solver Technology for Turbulent Flows,”Oral Presentation
    10. MIT: Marshall C. Galbraith, Steven R. Allmaras, and David L. Darmofal, “SANS RANS solutions for 3D benchmark configurations,”AIAA-2018-1570

NIA Associate Research Fellow Awarded AIAA Best CFD Paper

Hiro Nishikawa was awarded the AIAA Best Computational Fluids Dynamics (CFD) Conference Paper at SciTech 2018. His paper titled “Uses of Zero and Negative Volume Elements for Node-Centered Edge-Based Discretization” from AIAA Aviation 2017 in Denver, CO has been selected as the 2017 AIAA Best Computational Fluids Dynamics Conference Paper. This paper demonstrates not only that a node-centered finite-volume solver works with zero/negative-volume elements, but also that computational grids with zero/negative volumes can be useful for bringing advantages over conventional grids. This year is the first year that AIAA has offered a best-paper award for the CFD conference, and Nishikawa is the first winner.

NIA Senior Research Engineer Completes Implementation of Inviscid Scheme into NASA’s FUN3D Code

Yi Liu, Senior Research Engineer at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), has completed the implementation of a low-dissipation Roe flux and a third-order inviscid scheme into NASA’s FUN3D code. This work has been funded by the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program Transformative Tools and Technologies project under Contract No. NNL09AA00A with Hiro Nishikawa as co-PI. These new capabilities will be available for use by general users with the next software release. The third-order low-dissipation inviscid scheme enables time-dependent vortical flow simulations with much higher resolution than the default method. These improvements have been achieved at a surprisingly small additional cost. The low-dissipation flux is a very simple modification to the existing flux and requires almost no additional computing time. The third-order scheme is a very economical edge-based scheme and requires only 15% additional computing time to achieve higher-order for inviscid dominated flows.

NIA Research Fellow and Research Scientist Presents Research at Fall AGU

Dr. Hongyu Liu, Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), and Dr. Bo Zhang, Research Scientist at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), presented their research on the sources and variability of aerosols and aerosol-cloud interactions in the Arctic at the 2017 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, which was held in New Orleans, LA, during Dec. 11-15, 2017. Funded by the 2017 NIA Internal Research and Development (IRAD) program, the study is part of their effort to support and contribute to the development of a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital-3 (EVS-3) proposal lead by the NASA LaRC Science Directorate. Dr. Liu and his LaRC colleagues organized two seminars on the proposal topical areas given by external collaborators in the Science Directorate during Oct. – Nov. 2017. Dr. Bo Zhang also gave a talk, entitled “Assessing cloud radiative effects on tropospheric photolysis rates and key oxidants during aircraft campaigns using satellite cloud observations and a global chemical transport model” at the AGU meeting.

Week Ending Jan. 5, 2018

Final Five Teams Selected for 2018 BIG Idea Competition

On Friday, Dec. 15, 2017, 5 collegiate teams were selected as finalists in the 2018 Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Competition, a university-level design competition managed by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) for NASA’s Game-Changing Development Program Office. During the down-select meeting, a panel of NASA judges discussed 16 proposals for innovations in the design, installation, and sustainable operation of a large solar power system on the surface of Mars.

The following five teams were selected as finalists:

- - Norwich University
    - Title: Norwich Inflatable Mars Solar Array (NIMSA)
  - Princeton University
    - Title: Horus
  - Texas A&M University
    - Title: Utilization of Solar Cell Umbrellas to Provide Long-Term Photovoltaic Solar Power on Mars
  - The University of Colorado, Boulder
    - Title: MAFSA: Mars Autonomous and Foldable Solar Array
  - The University of Virginia
    - Title: Photovoltaic Balloon for Autonomous Energy Generation on Mars

The five finalists will continue developing their concepts over the next few months, presenting their final concepts to the panel of NASA judges during the 2018 BIG Idea Forum, scheduled for March 6-7, 2018 at NASA GRC.

For more information on the BIG Idea Competition, visit: http://bigidea.nianet.org

NIA Research Scientist Presents Paper at VMCAI 2018

Laura Titolo, Research Scientist at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), presented “An Abstract Interpretation Framework for the Round-Off Error Analysis of Floating-Point Programs” at the 19th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2018). The authors of the paper include Marco A. Feliu (NIA), Mariano Moscato (NIA) and Cesar Muñoz (NASA LaRC). The paper was also published in the proceedings of the conference in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. VMCAI was held in Los Angeles, California, Jan. 7-9, 2018.

NIA Associate Research Fellow Presents Talk at 2017 Fall AGU Meeting

Dr. Carolyn Jordan, Associate Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), presented the talk entitled, “New in situ Aerosol Spectral Optical Measurements over 300-700 nm, Extinction and Total Absorption, Paired with Absorption from Water- and Methanol-coluble Aerosol Extracts” at the 2017 American Geophysical Union. This year’s AGU meeting was held in New Orleans, Lousiana, Dec. 11-15, 2017.