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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

DOE OSTI2012

Swelling of U(Mo)–Al(Si) dispersion fuel under irradiation – Non-destructive analyses of the LEONIDAS E-FUTURE plates

In the framework of the elimination of High-Enriched Uranium (HEU) from the civil circuit, the search for an appropriate fuel to replace the high-enriched research reactor fuel in those reactors that currently still require it for their operation has led to the development of a U–7 wt.%Mo alloy based dispersion fuel with an Al–Si matrix. The European LEONIDAS program, joining SCK-CEN, ILL, CEA and AREVA-CERCA, is aimed at the qualification of such a fuel for the use in high power conditions. The first experiment of the program, designated E-FUTURE, was performed to select the appropriate matrix Si concentration and fuel plate post-production heat treatment parameters for further qualification. It consisted of the irradiation of four distinct (4% and 6% Si, 3 different heat treatments) full size, flat fuel plates in the BR2 reactor. The irradiation conditions were relatively severe: 470 W/cm2 peak BOL power, with an approximate 70% 235U peak burnup.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2026

Generating multiple benefits from forests by producing value-added products: Lessons from the Pacific Northwestern US

This paper asks what conditions are needed to counteract a declining forest industry. The mobilization of supply chains for new value-added forest products and services can be supported by programs designed to simultaneously achieve multiple goals related to health, climate, and rural economic development. But several challenges are identified that underscore the need to stack benefits and incentives to achieve muti-sectoral goals. Based on a case study in Washington state, we find opportunities and constraints for sourcing forest products are determined by the local and regional conditions such as availability of working forests and their residues, socioeconomic conditions, workforce availability, transportation options, and perceptions about social license of the new industry. Key recommendations are the need for (1) a consistent demand and resilient supply chain for the new product; (2) a stable, supportive policy and assessment framework; (3) timely, transparent, and trusted monitoring and reporting of benefits and costs; (4) fostering engagement and buy-in from stakeholders; (5) a context-specific evaluation of opportunities and constraints; and (6) agreement on the goals of sustainable forestry. A diversity of products and markets builds a more resilient forest-based economy by mitigating impacts of disruptions in any individual market, adding value to biomass, increasing employment, and reducing forest risks to fire, insects, and disease.

Bioenergy↗

DOE OSTI2017

Integrating tools for non-targeted analysis research and chemical safety evaluations at the US EPA

Tens-of-thousands of chemicals are registered in the U.S. for use in countless processes and products. Recent evidence suggests that many of these chemicals are measureable in environmental and/or biological systems, indicating the potential for widespread exposures. Traditional public health research tools, including in vivo studies and targeted analytical chemistry methods, have been unable to meet the needs of screening programs designed to evaluate chemical safety. As such, new tools have been developed to enable rapid assessment of potentially harmful chemical exposures and their attendant biological responses. One group of tools, known as “nontargeted analysis” (NTA) methods, allows the rapid characterization of thousands of never-before-studied compounds in a wide variety of environmental, residential, and biological media. This article discusses current applications of NTA methods, challenges to their effective use in chemical screening studies, and ways in which shared resources (e.g., chemical standards, databases, model predictions, and media measurements) can advance their use in risk-based chemical prioritization. A brief review is provided of resources and projects within EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) that provide benefit to, and receive benefits from, NTA research endeavors. A summary of EPA’s Non-Targeted Analysis Collaborative Trial (ENTACT) is also given, which makes direct use of ORD resources to benefit the global NTA research community. Finally, a research framework is described that shows how NTA methods will bridge chemical prioritization efforts within ORD. This framework exists as a guide for institutions seeking to understand the complexity of chemical exposures, and the impact of these exposures on living systems.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2016

Development of an FPGA-based multipoint laser pyroshock measurement system for explosive bolts

Pyroshock can cause failure to the objective of an aerospace structure by damaging its sensitive electronic equipment, which is responsible for performing decisive operations. A pyroshock is the high intensity shock wave that is generated when a pyrotechnic device is explosively triggered to separate, release, or activate structural subsystems of an aerospace architecture. Pyroshock measurement plays an important role in experimental simulations to understand the characteristics of pyroshock on the host structure. This paper presents a technology to measure a pyroshock wave at multiple points using laser Doppler vibrometers (LDVs). These LDVs detect the pyroshock wave generated due to an explosive-based pyrotechnical event. Field programmable gate array (FPGA) based data acquisition is used in the study to acquire pyroshock signals simultaneously from multiple channels. This paper describes the complete system design for multipoint pyroshock measurement. The firmware architecture for the implementation of multichannel data acquisition on an FPGA-based development board is also discussed. An experiment using explosive bolts was configured to test the reliability of the system. Pyroshock was generated using explosive excitation on a 22-mm-thick steel plate. Three LDVs were deployed to capture the pyroshock wave at different points. The pyroshocks captured were displayed as acceleration plots. The results showed that our system effectively captured the pyroshock wave with a peak-to-peak magnitude of 303 741 g. The contribution of this paper is a specialized architecture of firmware design programmed in FPGA for data acquisition of large amount of multichannel pyroshock data. The advantages of the developed system are the near-field, multipoint, non-contact, and remote measurement of a pyroshock wave, which is dangerous and expensive to produce in aerospace pyrotechnic tests.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

DOE OSTI2020

Scalable molecular dynamics on CPU and GPU architectures with NAMD

NAMD is a molecular dynamics program designed for high-performance simulations of very large biological objects on CPU- and GPU-based architectures. NAMD offers scalable performance on petascale parallel supercomputers consisting of hundreds of thousands of cores, as well as on inexpensive commodity clusters commonly found in academic environments. It is written in C++ and leans on Charm++ parallel objects for optimal performance on low-latency architectures. NAMD is a versatile, multipurpose code that gathers state-of-the-art algorithms to carry out simulations in apt thermodynamic ensembles, using the widely popular CHARMM, AMBER, OPLS, and GROMOS biomolecular force fields. Here, we review the main features of NAMD that allow both equilibrium and enhanced-sampling molecular dynamics simulations with numerical efficiency. We describe the underlying concepts utilized by NAMD and their implementation, most notably for handling long-range electrostatics; controlling the temperature, pressure, and pH; applying external potentials on tailored grids; leveraging massively parallel resources in multiple-copy simulations; and hybrid quantum-mechanical/molecular-mechanical descriptions. We detail the variety of options offered by NAMD for enhanced-sampling simulations aimed at determining free-energy differences of either alchemical or geometrical transformations and outline their applicability to specific problems. Last, we discuss the roadmap for the development of NAMD and our current efforts toward achieving optimal performance on GPU-based architectures, for pushing back the limitations that have prevented biologically realistic billion-atom objects to be fruitfully simulated, and for making large-scale simulations less expensive and easier to set up, run, and analyze. NAMD is distributed free of charge with its source code at www.ks.uiuc.edu.

high-performance computing↗

DOE OSTI2014

Improving the space surveillance telescope's performance using multi-hypothesis testing

The Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program designed to detect objects in space like near Earth asteroids and space debris in the geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) belt. Binary hypothesis test (BHT) methods have historically been used to facilitate the detection of new objects in space. In this paper a multi-hypothesis detection strategy is introduced to improve the detection performance of SST. In this context, the multi-hypothesis testing (MHT) determines if an unresolvable point source is in either the center, a corner, or a side of a pixel in contrast to BHT, which only tests whether an object is in the pixel or not. The images recorded by SST are undersampled such as to cause aliasing, which degrades the performance of traditional detection schemes. The equations for the MHT are derived in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), which is computed by subtracting the background light level around the pixel being tested and dividing by the standard deviation of the noise. A new method for determining the local noise statistics that rejects outliers is introduced in combination with the MHT. An experiment using observations of a known GEO satellite are used to demonstrate the improved detection performance of the new algorithm over algorithms previously reported in the literature. The results show a significant improvement in the probability of detection by as much as 50% over existing algorithms. In addition to detection, the S/N results prove to be linearly related to the least-squares estimates of point source irradiance, thus improving photometric accuracy.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2013

IDENTIFYING THE LOCATION IN THE HOST GALAXY OF THE SHORT GRB 111117A WITH THE CHANDRA SUBARCSECOND POSITION

We present our successful Chandra program designed to identify, with subarcsecond accuracy, the X-ray afterglow of the short GRB 111117A, which was discovered by Swift and Fermi. Thanks to our rapid target of opportunity request, Chandra clearly detected the X-ray afterglow, though no optical afterglow was found in deep optical observations. The host galaxy was clearly detected in the optical and near-infrared band, with the best photometric redshift of z=1.31{sub -0.23}{sup +0.46} (90% confidence), making it one of the highest known short gamma-ray burst (GRB) redshifts. Furthermore, we see an offset of 1.0 {+-} 0.2 arcsec, which corresponds to 8.4 {+-} 1.7 kpc, between the host and the afterglow position. We discuss the importance of using Chandra for obtaining subarcsecond X-ray localizations of short GRB afterglows to study GRB environments.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2011

Simulation tool for optical design of PET detector modules including scintillator material and sensor array

The appearance of single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) in the field of PET detector modules made it necessary to apply more complex optical design methods to refine the performance of such assemblies. We developed a combined simulation tool that is capable to model complex detector structures including scintillation material, light guide, light collection optics and sensor, correctly taking into account the statistical behavior of emission of scintillation light and its absorbance in SPADs. As a validation we compared simulation results obtained by our software and another optical design program. Calculations were performed for a simple PET detector arrangement used for testing purposes. According to the results, deviation of center of gravity coordinates between the two simulations is 0.0195 mm, the average ratio of total counts 1.0052. We investigated the error resulting from finite sampling in wavelength space and we found that 20 nm pitch is sufficient for the simulation in case of the given spectral dependencies. (authors)

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

DOE OSTI2022

Biomass yield improvement in switchgrass through genomic prediction of flowering time

The seasonal timing of the transition from vegetative to reproductive growth has a major impact on biomass accumulation in switchgrass. Late-flowering switchgrass cultivars produce greater biomass, a critical trait for sustainable bioenergy production. Genomic prediction (GP) may allow rapid selection of late-flowering individuals with reduced time and expense for field evaluations. To evaluate GP, two flowering time traits (heading date and anthesis date) were collected on 1532 genotypes from four breeding populations: Midwest, Gulf, Atlantic, and Hybrid. These were sequenced using genotype-by-sequencing (530,792 single-nucleotide polymorphisms). Predictive ability of single-trait and multi-trait models were evaluated by cross-validation, by prediction of a progeny trial (n = 122), and through prediction of yield performance in a parallel experiment (n = 52). Predictive ability was not improved by sharing information among breeding groups. Overall, multi-trait models provided an advantage during cross-validation, but a smaller advantage during progeny prediction. Within populations, GP resulted in lower per-cycle progress than previously reported field evaluations (3.1 vs. 5.0 day –1 cycle –1 ). However, GP cycles are potentially much faster than field evaluations. When directly predicting biomass yield, the Hybrid training population had a predictive ability of 0.54–0.63. This reinforces the strong linkage between biomass yields in swards and flowering time. Furthermore, these results highlight the value of GP for rapid yield improvement in switchgrass, particularly in a breeding program designed to share information between biomass yield trials and low-cost flowering time evaluations.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

DOE OSTI2022

Demand Response Analysis for Different Residential Personas in a Comfort-Driven Behavioral Context

Low demand response (DR) participation and high program drop-out rates continue to impede DR goals that could save up to $13 billion in annual grid expansion and electricity demand costs. Yet, the literature lacks a thorough understanding of how different residential customer segments enrolled in DR programs respond to utility signals in view of occupant comfort considerations. The objective of this study is to gain a clear understanding of the effects of four different customer personas on residential DR. Given current data limitations, this work developed an array of hypothetical personas with varied priorities, activity levels, and comfort thresholds based on demographic variables that have been found in previous studies to influence energy consumption. A BEopt DR model for a reference residential single-family building located in Colorado was built to isolate the effect of differences in buildings or climate. The results provide useful evidence on how persona-comfort differences lead to significant deviations in DR goals (especially peak demand reduction), ranging from 0.1% to 20%. This work presents a novel framework representing comfort preferences in DR models. The data generated, albeit synthetic, and the results could inform DR program design considerations of how different people respond to different comfort priorities.

BEopt↗

DOE OSTI2026

Integrase-On-Demand-Pipeline Data Set

Files needed to run the Integrase-On-Demand-Pipeline, a program designed to provide users with a list of putative attachment site and integrase pairs for a prokaryotic genome of interest. isles.pkl: Serialized python-object file, containing a dictionary of attachment site sequences and reference genomic island information extracted from the Genomic island database ints.gff: Gene format file containing annotations for all integrases referenced in isles.pkl. The source genome, gene coordinates, integrase name, protein IDs and amino acid sequence included. reps.msh: Binary file containing 1000 128-bit MurmurHash3 hashes for >80,000 genomes

McClain, Hannah Marie [Sandia National Laboratorie↗

DOE OSTI2018

PyDislocDyn

PyDislocDyn is a suite of python programs designed to perform various calculations for basic research in dislocation dynamics in metals with simple crystal symmetries in the continuum limit. In particular, one of its main purposes is to calculate dislocation drag from phonon wind (i.e. the friction coefficient of a moving crystal defect called a “dislocation” due to its interaction with crystal lattice vibrations or phonons). Additional features include the averaging of elastic constants for polycrystals, the calculation of the dislocation field and the calculation of dislocation self-energy and line tension.

Blaschke, Daniel↗

DOE OSTI2012

Particle-in-cell/accelerator code for space-charge dominated beam simulation

Warp is a multidimensional discrete-particle beam simulation program designed to be applicable where the beam space-charge is non-negligible or dominant. It is being developed in a collaboration among LLNL, LBNL and the University of Maryland. It was originally designed and optimized for heave ion fusion accelerator physics studies, but has received use in a broader range of applications, including for example laser wakefield accelerators, e-cloud studies in high enery accelerators, particle traps and other areas. At present it incorporates 3-D, axisymmetric (r,z) planar (x-z) and transverse slice (x,y) descriptions, with both electrostatic and electro-magnetic fields, and a beam envelope model. The code is guilt atop the Python interpreter language.

Grote, D. P.↗

DOE OSTI2011

Mesh2d

Mesh2d is a Fortran90 program designed to generate two-dimensional structured grids of the form [x(i),y(i,j)] where [x,y] are grid coordinates identified by indices (i,j). The x(i) coordinates alone can be used to specify a one-dimensional grid. Because the x-coordinates vary only with the i index, a two-dimensional grid is composed in part of straight vertical lines. However, the nominally horizontal y(i,j0) coordinates along index i are permitted to undulate or otherwise vary. Mesh2d also assigns an integer material type to each grid cell, mtyp(i,j), in a user-specified manner. The complete grid is specified through three separate input files defining the x(i), y(i,j), and mtyp(i,j) variations.

Smith, Frank↗

DOE OSTI2022

LLNL/SAC2000

SAC2000 (Seismic Analysis Code for the third millennium) is a general purpose interactive program designed for the study of sequential signals, especially time-series data.

Barno, Justin↗

DOE OSTI2019

Seismic Analysis Code 2000

The Seismic Analysis Code (SAC2000) is a general purpose interactive program designed for the study of sequential signals, especially time-series data. Emphasis has been placed on analysis tools used by research seismologists in the detailed study of seismic events. Analysis capabilities include general arithmetic operations, Fourier transforms, spectral estimation techniques, IIR and FIR filtering, signal stacking, decimation, interpolation, correlation, and seismic phase picking. SAC2000 also contains an extensive graphics capability. Versions are available for a wide variety of computer systems. SAC2000 was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Barno, Justin↗

DOE OSTI2023

Automaton & Cognition

AutoCog is a framework to design programming models (PM) for language models (LM). It permits researchers to devise Cognitive Architectures where traditional Artificial Intelligence algorithms are executed by Language Models.

Vanderbruggen, TristanL↗

DOE OSTI2018

Fission Induced Electromagnetic Response

The FIER (Fission Induced Electromagnetic Response) code is a C++ program designed to predict delayed gamma-ray spectra following fission. Given a fissioning isotope and irradiation scheme, FIER will determine the decay chains for each fission fragment and their daughters. Each product’s time-dependent population is calculated using an analytical solution to the Bateman equations that guide decay transmutation. These populations are then used to calculate the number of gamma-ray emissions for a given counting scheme. A Monte Carlo method is also available to determine the uncertainty of the fission product populations and delayed gamma-ray intensities based on the uncertainties on the input nuclear data.

Matthews, EricFrancis [University of California - ↗