Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “package design”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 199 records · Page 11
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Expanding thermite reactions for downhole applications

Methods and apparatus for forming platforms and flow control features in underground wells is described, using modified thermite reactions to form a ceramic plug in place. The reactive package is engineered to expand laterally, filling the well, and may be used to form a ceramic bridge plug, porous ceramic screen sections, or mitigate lost circulation of drilling fluids. These objectives are achieved through the design of the reactive package and through use of carefully chosen reaction additives that control the molten product rheology, solidification temperature, and pore generations and sustainment.

Lowry, William Edward↗
DOE OSTI2026

High-Temperature SiC Cladding End Plug Irradiation Design and HFIR Readiness

This report documents the design of a High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) irradiation experiment intended to evaluate irradiation effects on the hermeticity of silicon carbide (SiC) end plug specimens under a radial fast neutron flux gradient at representative light-water reactor (LWR) temperatures of approximately 300 °C. The overarching goal of this work is to statistically evaluate SiC end plug hermeticity and mechanical properties following irradiation using the high-throughput irradiation capability discussed here. Each specimen consists of a short section of SiC fiber–reinforced SiC (SiC/SiC) tube with a single monolithic SiC end plug joined to one end. The experiment allows up to 66 specimens to be irradiated in six different stacks within a dry, sealed irradiation capsule derived from the previously developed high-temperature SiC/SiC cladding bowing experiment. The neutronics basis, thermal analysis, and HFIR readiness of the experiment are discussed in this report for two possible design cases. The first design case is based on existing approval documentation and components that are on hand and approved for use, so the experiment insertion would require only specimen receipt, specimen pre-irradiation characterization, experiment assembly, and final fabrication package approval. The second design case provides improved thermal robustness and the preferred end plug geometry but requires fabrication of a modified holder and revisions to the HFIR approval documentation, in addition to the other activities required for the first design case, before insertion.

Hott, Daniel [Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)↗
DOE OSTI2025

ORNL Package Testing Program Overview

When transporting radioactive or hazardous materials, safety and security are top priorities. Packaging and transportation regulations require reliable evidence that containers have passed rigorous performance tests to ensure that the public and the environment are protected from the hazardous nature of the cargo. Because of its long history in energy and security research, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has needed to ship hazardous packages for the past 65 years. Since the 1940s, ORNL has made significant contributions to transportation regulations and has been at the forefront of regulatory testing development. Today, ORNL is a leader in standards development and testing of designs of radioactive material packages. ORNL plays a critical role in ensuring the safe transportation of radioactive materials across the United States by executing rigorous testing campaigns of packages that contain radioactive materials. Early testing activities focused on supporting the development of transportation regulations established by both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United States. Currently, all package testing activities are performed under the Package Testing Program (PTP) at the Package Evaluation Facility (PEF) located at the National Transportation Research Center (NTRC), which is about 10 miles from the main ORNL campus. The PTP develops and evaluates testing solutions, ensuring that they are safe efficient, and in compliance with regulatory requirements. The vision for the PTP is to be a world-class leader in the evaluation and testing of radioactive and hazardous material packages. The key elements necessary to fulfill this mission are an experienced and professional staff; state-of-the-art facilities, equipment, and instrumentation; and completion of challenging programs and projects important to package transportation. Collaborations with other internal and external organizations play a significant role in building stronger teams and achieving this vision. By adhering to and advancing regulatory standards, ORNL’s PTP supports development of safe and compliant packaging, safeguarding the transportation process from potential risks associated with radioactive material logistics.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2020

The Relationship Between Dose Rate and Decay Heat for Spent Nuclear Fuel Casks

Decay heat and dose rate are two important limits used for determining the allowable contents of spent fuel (SNF) in dry storage systems and transportation packages. While the decay heat limit is used to maintain fuel cladding integrity and ensure retrievability, dose rates are used to demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements on radiation protection. Because both dose rate and decay heat result from decay of radioisotopes in SNF, this study is an attempt to examine the relationship between dose rate and decay heat for a given cask design. Dose rates were evaluated for 198 cask configurations, that include various SNF system designs (e.g., storage, transfer, transport), SNF characteristics (e.g., fuel types, burnup, cooling time), and loading maps (e.g., uniform loading, zone loading), while a constant decay heat was maintained. The decay heat was calculated using US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Regulatory Guide (RG) 3.54, Revision 2, and verified using ORIGEN sequence within SCALE code system. The ORIGEN outputs were used as source terms in the dose analysis using 198 different configurations. A computer script was developed to calculate the cooling time necessary to achieve a given decay heat for a given enrichment, assembly average burnup, assembly mass, and in-core history using a rootfinder algorithm. Initially the computer script was developed to provide cooling time and burnup calculations directly to the analysis of dose rates and decay heats, so a comparison between Used Nuclear Fuel-Storage Transportation and Disposal Analysis Resource Data System (UNF-ST&DARDS) results and RG3.54 data was made; results are included in the appendix to this document. However, an iterative approach was used to compute cooling time, and its accuracy did not depend on the results of the RG3.54r2 algorithm, although the algorithm was still used. The results of the evaluation presented herein clearly demonstrate that a given decay heat does not correspond to a unique dose rate for a variety of cask and package designs. There is no clear pattern to develop a correlation between decay heat and the source terms. Depending on burnup, enrichment, cask type, and loading pattern, dose rates varied for the exact same decay heat—in some cases by 400% for a given cask. For cases in which decay heat was held constant through selection of the appropriate cooling time, dose rates would decrease with increasing burnup, and in other cases, dose rates would increase. The large variation in dose rates for a constant decay heat indicates that casks loaded based on decay heat—that is allowing any burnup, cooling time, and enrichment combinations that yield the qualified decay heat limit(s) —cannot ensure that an Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation or a spent fuel transportation package will meet the regulatory limits set forth by the respective regulations, i.e., 10 CFR 72 or 10 CFR 71.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2022

Code of Record: DOE Standard Canister (DOESC)

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) Packaging Demonstration seeks to develop and demonstrate the designs, technology, processes, and regulatory framework for packaging DOE SNF for road-ready dry storage (RRDS); and establish the processes that will be used in a future production facility. The Packaging Demonstration will utilize the DOE Standard Canister (DOESC) for packaging select DOE-managed SNF types for interim storage, transportation and disposal as part of RRDS. Placing DOE-managed SNF into RRDS is part of the strategic framework for SNF on the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) site. To comply with DOE, INL and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requirements, this Code of Record establishes the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (BPVC), Section III, Division 3 as the Code that will govern DOESC and internal support structure constructioni, with certain clarifications. This Code of Record establishes a rationale for proceeding without construction certification of the DOESC (i.e., “N-stamping) and the extent to which a Registered Professional Engineer is required for the DOE Spent Fuel Packaging Demonstration. Given the (i) standard industry practice to pursue independent licensure of commercial storage casks and transportation packages by the NRC in lieu of ASME certification and (ii) guidance provided by 10 CFR 830, DOESC construction activities need not be certified (i.e., “stamped”) to the ASME BPVC. However, additional quality assurance requirements will apply as outlined in this Code of Record.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2021

TX$^2$: Transformer eXplainability and eXploration

The Transformer eXplainability and eXploration (Martindale & Stewart, 2021), or TX 2 software package, is a library designed for artificial intelligence researchers to better understand the performance of transformer models (Vaswani et al., 2017) used for sequence classification. The tool is capable of integrating with a trained transformer model and a dataset split into training and testing populations to produce an ipywidget (Project Jupyter Contributors, 2021) dashboard with a number of visualizations to understand model performance with an emphasis on explainability and interpretability. The TX 2 package is primarily intended to integrate into a workflow centered around Jupyter Notebooks (Kluyver et al., 2016), and currently assumes the use of PyTorch (Paszke et al., 2019) and Hugging Face transformers library (Wolf et al., 2020). The dashboard includes visualization and data exploration features to aid researchers, including an interactive UMAP embedding graph (McInnes et al., 2018) to understand classification clusters, a word salience map that can be updated as researchers alter textual entries in near real time, a set of tools to understand word frequency and importance based on the clusters in the UMAP embedding graph, and a set of traditional confusion matrix analysis tools.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

From lab to lamp: Understanding downconverter degradation in LED packages

Downconverters, primarily inorganic phosphors, are critical components in white solid-state LED-based lighting and liquid crystal display backlights. Research efforts have led to a fundamental understanding of a downconverter's absorption, photoluminescence, and efficiency as a function of composition, structure, and processing conditions. However, considerably less work has focused on the reliability of phosphors once they are incorporated into LED packages. Solving these issues is often the final step before the commercialization of new materials, but the significant resources and time required to evaluate and mitigate materials failure are rarely discussed in the literature. In this Perspective, we discuss the need for conducting downconverter reliability testing and the potential of accelerating, screening, and understanding downconverter failure modes. Our focus highlights the mechanisms of failure and discusses how this influences materials selection and the design of different LED packages. We also stress the potential for accelerated reliability testing protocols and note the potential role first-principles calculations and data-driven models could play in establishing the compositional-processing trends for different aspects of downconverter reliability. In conclusion, we close with possible research directions that could improve downconverter reliability and emphasize the importance of assessing a material's (chemical) stability where multiple manufacturing and processing steps can dictate system performance.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2023

Block2 : A comprehensive open source framework to develop and apply state-of-the-art DMRG algorithms in electronic structure and beyond

block2 is an open source framework to implement and perform density matrix renormalization group and matrix product state algorithms. Out-of-the-box it supports the eigenstate, time-dependent, response, and finite-temperature algorithms. In addition, it carries special optimizations for ab initio electronic structure Hamiltonians and implements many quantum chemistry extensions to the density matrix renormalization group, such as dynamical correlation theories. The code is designed with an emphasis on flexibility, extensibility, and efficiency and to support integration with external numerical packages. Here, we explain the design principles and currently supported features and present numerical examples in a range of applications.

Chemistry↗
DOE OSTI2024

GENTANGLE: integrated computational design of gene entanglements

The design of two overlapping genes in a microbial genome is an emerging technique for adding more reliable control mechanisms in engineered organisms for increased stability. The design of functional overlapping gene pairs is a challenging procedure, and computational design tools are used to improve the efficiency to deploy successful designs in genetically engineered systems. GENTANGLE (Gene Tuples ArraNGed in overLapping Elements) is a high-performance containerized pipeline for the computational design of two overlapping genes translated in different reading frames of the genome. This new software package can be used to design and test gene entanglements for microbial engineering projects using arbitrary sets of user-specified gene pairs.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

SAVY-4000 Corrosion Evaluation Plan

Nuclear material packages, with few exceptions, outside of an approved engineered contamination barrier must meet packaging, surveillance, and testing requirements designed to protect workers from airborne contamination per Department of Energy (DOE) Manual 441.1-1, Nuclear Material Packaging. The SAVY-4000 containers were developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in conjunction with Nuclear Filter Technology Inc. (NFT Inc.) as a general purpose vented manually-compliant container system for staging and storage of plutonium for LANL and the DOE complex. The SAVY-4000 containers have a 316L stainless steel containment barrier, which was selected based on its corrosion resistant properties. These containers were approved for use in 2014 with a five-year design life; LANL requested and DOE has approved lifetime extension from 5 to 15 years. The 10-year lifetime extension was proposed as a conservative recommendation based on the corrosion observations for the metal components in surveillance and results from laboratory studies. Extensive accelerated aging studies have been done on the SAVY-4000 O-ring with very little evidence of significant degradation when subjected to aggressive elevated temperature and radiation conditions. Therefore, our current conservative lifetime estimate for the O-ring and the filter is 40 years at 80°C. Additional work is ongoing in a phased approach to further extend the design life of the Manual compliant SAVY-4000 storage container; the limiting component for further life extension is still the 316L containment barrier.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2020

Transporting Non-Compliant TRU Wastes in the OPTIMUS{sup TM} Packages - 20493

The OPTIMUS{sup TM} product line of packages was developed with the purpose of providing a versatile and modular packaging option for shipping problematic wastes and fissile material contents. The product line includes a high-activity design in the OPTIMUS-H and a low activity design in the OPTIMUS-L. The two variants utilize a singular containment vessel design, that is enclosed in different protective components that offer different levels of shielding along with thermal and impact protection. The thick shielding provided by the OPTIMUS-H packaging allows for higher activity contents than the OPTIMUS-L to be transported. But the lightweight design of the OPTIMUS-L packaging allows for more packages to be transported in a single shipment. The containment vessel design shared between the two packages provides leak-tight containment of all radioactive contents along with the capabilities to easily leak test and the option to inert and backfill the contents, as necessary, prior to each shipment of the package. Together the OPTIMUS package designs offer significant flexibility and are capable of handling a wide variety of waste materials and other radioactive contents. One of the primary contents covered in the initial design effort for these packages is TRU waste contents beyond the standard waste materials that are compliant with the WIPP Waste Acceptance Criteria. More specifically, the initial content of interest is TRU Waste drums containing sealed containers with potentially flammable gases. While there are multiple other packaging options available for transporting standard WIPP compliant TRU wastes, the goal of the OPTIMUS packages is to offer a superior option for transporting both standard TRU wastes as well as the more problematic non-compliant wastes, among other contents. The non-compliant TRU waste contents explicitly included for the OPTIMUS packages are standard aerosol cans and DOT 3E lecture bottles. However, the methods applied for the package containment can be easily adjusted to cover other sealed container types with potentially flammable gases. The primary challenges with including these items are both the obvious issue of potential for flammable gases (e.g. aerosol propellants) in the package, but also the uncertainty in the exact state of the contents. Because these desired contents are waste materials, the characterization of the materials present in the waste may include some uncertainties. For example, though it may be known that there are one or more aerosol cans in a TRU waste drum, it may not be known if this can is full, spent, or anywhere in between. Also there may be equal uncertainty in the contents of the aerosol can, specifically in the potentially flammable propellant remaining in the can. To include these types of non-compliant items as acceptable contents for the package, the methods utilized in the safety analyses of the OPTIMUS packages must consider all of the uncertainties in the characterization of the waste. The methods utilized cover a range of concerns with transporting contents of this nature including pressure buildup, gas generation, and gaseous combustion for demonstrating the containment of the package. The ability to transport these problematic contents in the OPTIMUS packages gives TRU waste generating sites the option to relocate these drums to an offsite location where the non-compliant items can be properly managed through removal or destruction. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗
DOE OSTI2020

A space-time parallel algorithm with adaptive mesh refinement for computational fluid dynamics

This work describes a space-time parallel algorithm with space-time adaptive mesh refinement (AMR). AMR with subcycling is added to multigrid reduction-in-time (MGRIT) in order to provide solution efficient adaptive grids with a reduction in work performed on coarser grids. This algorithm is achieved by integrating two software libraries: XBraid (Parallel time integration with multigrid. https://computation.llnl.gov/projects/parallel-timeintegration-multigrid) and Chombo (Chombo software package for AMR applications—design document, 2014). The former is a parallel time integration library using multigrid and the latter is a massively parallel structured AMR library. Employing this adaptive space-time parallel algorithm is Chord (Comput Fluids 123:202–217, 2015), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) application code for solving compressible fluid dynamics problems. For the same solution accuracy, speedups are demonstrated from the use of space-time parallelization over the time-sequential integration on Couette flow and Stokes’ second problem. On a transient Couette flow case, at least a 1.5× speedup is achieved, and with a time periodic problem, a speedup of up to 13.7× over the time-sequential case is obtained. In both cases, the speedup is achieved by adding processors and exploring additional parallelization in time. The numerical experiments show the algorithm is promising for CFD applications that can take advantage of the time parallelism. Future work will focus on improving the parallel performance and providing more tests with complex fluid dynamics to demonstrate the full potential of the algorithm.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Development and evaluation of a multi-functional heat pump with embedded thermal storage

We developed and tested a novel multi-functional packaged vertical heat pump designed for multi-family buildings, capable of providing space cooling, space heating, water heating, and energy storage integration. The system employs a 3-speed scroll compressor and supports energy-efficient cooling and heating across different ambient conditions, while utilizing both indoor and outdoor air sources for water heating. Key performance metrics include an integrated energy efficiency ratio of 18.0 for cooling, a heating seasonal performance factor of 10.0, and a coefficient of performance (COP) of 2.1 for heating in cold climates down to −15 ˚C. Additionally, the system delivers an annual water heating COP greater than 4.0, with outstanding performance in combined space cooling and water heating modes, achieving a total COP of 8.8 by recovering condenser waste heat. The heat pump also demonstrated thermal energy storage capabilities, integrating with phase change material systems to store heating and cooling energy. Furthermore, this versatile system offers a promising solution for improving energy efficiency and sustainability in multi-family buildings, providing high-performance heating, cooling, and water heating across a range of climates.

COP↗
DOE OSTI2020

Radiation-hard miniature optical engine with high bandwidth

Future silicon trackers will be operated in an intense radiation environment and require large volumes of data to be transmitted off detector. In addition, the optical modules must be of low mass in order to limit multiple scattering and nuclear interactions that would degrade the overall performance of the detector. Here, we present a miniature optical engine that satisfies these constraints. The optical engine consists of an ASIC driving a VCSEL (Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser) array in an optical package. Two ASICs are designed to operate a 12-channel VCSEL array at 1.28 or 5.12 Gb/s per channel, which yields a total data rate of up to 60 Gb/s. The core transistors are fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process which enhance the radiation-hardness. Each channel contains equalizer (CTLE) and clock-data recovery circuits (CDR) so that the ASIC can restore the highly distorted electrical signal after propagating through several meters of cables of small diameter. The equalizer, CDR, and VCSEL driver are configured via a digital I 2 C chip interface with triple redundant memory to mitigate single event upset (SEU) effects. The bias and modulation currents are controlled by a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). We present the design of the circuit together with the results of the simulations and preliminary measurements.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Forte: A suite of advanced multireference quantum chemistry methods

Software development plays a critical role in advancing quantum chemistry, enabling the exploration of new fundamental theoretical ideas and modeling systems of ever-increasing complexity. In the past decade, the availability of quantum chemistry packages that use modular designs and provide application programming interfaces (APIs) has enabled the creation of specialized software plugins, enhancing the capabilities of the original codes. Here, the availability of well-documented APIs is particularly beneficial in the context of academic scientific software development because it reduces the entry barrier for new developers and shields them from the complexities of large software projects.

74 ATOMIC AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS↗