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At least 199 records · Page 11

Simulation-based characterization of the variability of earthquake risk to buildings in the near-field

Recent advancements in high performance computing platforms and computational workflow for regional-scale simulations are enabling unprecedented modeling of fault-to-structure earthquake processes. Regional simulations resolving ground motions at frequencies relevant to engineered systems are becoming computationally viable and provide a new capability to improve understanding of the geographical distribution and intensity of risk to buildings and critical infrastructure. As computational capabilities advance, it is essential to move beyond illustrative single rupture realizations for scenario earthquake events towards the development of a full suite of rupture realizations that appropriately characterize the range of risk to building systems. The work described in this article investigates the application of a suite of fault rupture realizations with the objective of assessing near-fault, site-specific seismic demand variability for building structures. A representative high-performance regional-scale computational model is utilized to execute ground motion and building response simulations based on 18 kinematic rupture realizations of an M7 strike-slip scenario earthquake. The fault rupture models for the scenario earthquake are created by systematically perturbing the hypocenter location and stochastically generating rupture parameters (slip, rise time, rake angle) to represent a breadth of ground motion intensities resulting from the spatial and temporal variabilities of an earthquake rupture process. The resulting seismic demand variability for three-story (short period) and forty-story (long period) steel moment-resisting frame buildings is characterized in terms of the median and distribution of peak inter-story drift ratio for a range of near-fault sites. The full suite of 18 fault rupture realizations and approximately 280,000 nonlinear dynamic building simulations indicate that the three-story building undergoes higher median seismic demand and significantly greater variability of demand at a given site than the forty-story building, which has important implications for the level of certainty in predicting building performance during an earthquake. The simulations performed provide deeper insight into the relationship between fault rupture parameterization and building response, which is essential information for developing a representative suite of rupture realizations for specific earthquake scenarios.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Physics-Informed Gaussian Process Regression for States Estimation and Forecasting in Power Grids

Real-time state estimation and forecasting are critical for the efficient operation of power grids. In this paper, a physics-informed Gaussian process regression (PhI-GPR) method is presented and used for forecasting and estimating the phase angle, angular speed, and wind mechanical power of a three-generator power grid system using sparse measurements. In standard data-driven Gaussian process regression (GPR), parameterized models for the prior statistics are fit by maximizing the marginal likelihood of observed data. In the PhI-GPR method, we propose to compute the prior statistics offline by solving stochastic differential equations (SDEs) governing the power grid dynamics. The short-term forecast of a power grid system dominated by wind generation is complicated by the stochastic nature of the wind and the resulting uncertainty in wind mechanical power. Here, we assume that the power grid dynamics are governed by swing equations, with the wind mechanical power fluctuating randomly in time. We solve these equations for the mean and covariances of the power grid states using the Monte Carlo simulation method. We demonstrate that the proposed PhI-GPR method can accurately forecast and estimate observed and unobserved states. For the considered problem, PhI-GPR has computational advantages over the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) method: In PhI-GPR, ensembles are computed offline and independently of the data acquisition process, whereas for EnFK, ensembles are computed online with data acquisition, rendering real-time forecast more challenging. We also demonstrate that the PhI-GPR forecast is more accurate than the EnKF forecast when the random mechanical wind power is non-Markovian. In contrast, the two methods produce similar forecasts for the Markovian mechanical wind power. For observed states, we show that PhI-GPR provides a forecast comparable to the standard data-driven GPR; both forecasts are significantly more accurate than the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) forecast. We also show that the ARIMA forecast is more sensitive to observation frequency and measurement errors than the PhI-GPR forecast.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

The Space Station Freedom Reliability and Maintainability Assessment Tool

The Reliability and Maintainability Assessment Tool is a stochastic, event-oriented simulation model that has been developed to analyze the functional reliability, availability, and maintainability characteristics of the Space Station Freedom. This tool simulates failures and performs corrective and preventive maintenance tasks, utilizing user-specified maintenance resources, including crewmembers and/or robotics, and accommodates the growth of the station. The model dynamically interfaces with minimal cut sets derived from reliability block diagrams to assess functional status and to determine queuing priorities.

Blumentritt, Will↗

A spatially-resolved model of neutron-irradiated tungsten coupling stochastic cluster dynamics and finite deformation plasticity

Structural materials used in nuclear reactors face severe degradation in mechanical properties, such as hardening and embrittlement. At the microscopic scale, this occurs due to creation and accumulation of irradiation-induced defects and their interaction with system dislocations. Although techniques exist which can model evolution of irradiation defects, for instance kinetic transport theory-based models, their interaction with mechanical deformation of the bulk material has not been investigated extensively. In this work, we demonstrate a novel spatially-resolved multiscale coupling between microscopic irradiation defect evolution, modeled using Stochastic Cluster Dynamics (SCD) and macroscopic mechanical deformation modeled using a finite-deformation plasticity model. SCD is used to determine the statistically averaged defect cluster spacing, dependent on operating conditions such as irradiation dose and temperature. This acts as an initial condition that governs the critical resolved shear stress of dislocation glide in the macroscopic plasticity model. This framework is used to predict mechanical behavior in post-mortem test of irradiated Tungsten samples, which has found its importance as structural material used in nuclear reactors. The results obtained using the coupled approach are in good agreement with experimental data of uniaxial tension tests. The model is able to capture the effect of temperature and irradiation dose on the material hardening. Two methods are proposed to estimate hardness – using Tabor's Law relating uniaxial yield stress to hardness and from flat-punch simulations. The results are in reasonable agreement with hardness data from micro-indentation experiments of irradiated Tungsten samples. Finally, the model is also able to reveal microstructural details such as spatial variation in defect density and local stress.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Radiation-Spray Coupling for Realistic Flow Configurations

Three Large Eddy Simulations (LES) for a lean-direct injection (LDI) combustor are performed and compared. In addition to the cold flow simulation, the effect of radiation coupling with the multi-physics reactive flow is analyzed. The flame let progress variable approach is used as a subgrid combustion model combined with a stochastic subgrid model for spray atomization and an optically thin radiation model. For accurate chemistry modeling, a detailed Jet-A surrogate mechanism is utilized. To achieve realistic inflow, a simple recycling technique is performed at the inflow section upstream of the swirler. Good comparison is shown with the experimental data mean and root mean square profiles. The effect of combustion is found to change the shape and size of the central recirculation zone. Radiation is found to change the spray dynamics and atomization by changing the heat release distribution and the local temperature values impacting the evaporation process. The simulation with radiation modeling shows wider range of droplet size distribution by altering the evaporation rate. The current study proves the importance of radiation modeling for accurate prediction in realistic spray combustion configurations, even for low pressure systems.

El-Asrag, Hossam↗

Kinetic Monte Carlo Framework for Coupled Degradation and Dehydration of Anion Exchange Membranes

Kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) simulations, augmented with temporal-acceleration schemes, can efficiently handle stiff reaction-transport networks when fast processes rapidly relax to quasi-equilibrium on a fixed lattice. However, in glassy anion-exchange membranes (AEM), rare and irreversible chemical degradation events continuously reshape the nanoscale morphology, and the associated hydration and transport degrees of freedom remain far from a well-defined local equilibrium. This combination of evolving state space and nonequilibrated fast dynamics lies outside the scope of existing kMC acceleration frameworks. Here, to address this challenge, we introduce an auxiliary-particle kinetic Monte Carlo (AP-kMC) scheme. In AP-kMC, short-lived mobile particles spawned at degradation sites execute hop, water-elimination, and decay moves, enforcing rapid local relaxation of the hydration structure while preserving the stochastic rules of kMC. Parameterized with molecular-dynamics morphologies and experimental solution degradation kinetics, AP-kMC reproduces the evolution of ion-exchange capacity, water uptake, and conductivity, and reveals a feedback loop in which poorly hydrated sites degrade first and each degradation event induces further local dehydration. The resulting thinning and fragmentation of water channels cause loss of hydrophilic percolation and abrupt conductivity collapse well before complete charge loss. AP-kMC thus reframes AEM durability as a coupled degradation–drying–percolation problem and provides a transferable strategy to simulate reactive, out-of-equilibrium polymer electrolytes where local solvation controls reactivity.

organic↗

Stochastic journeys of cell progenies through compartments and the role of self-renewal, symmetric and asymmetric division

Abstract Division and differentiation events by which cell populations with specific functions are generated often take place as part of a developmental programme, which can be represented by a sequence of compartments. A compartment is the set of cells with common characteristics; sharing, for instance, a spatial location or a phenotype. Differentiation events are transitions from one compartment to the next. Cells may also die or divide. We consider three different types of division events: (i) where both daughter cells inherit the mother’s phenotype (self-renewal), (ii) where only one of the daughters changes phenotype (asymmetric division), and (iii) where both daughters change phenotype (symmetric division). The self-renewal probability in each compartment determines whether the progeny of a single cell, moving through the sequence of compartments, is finite or grows without bound. We analyse the progeny stochastic dynamics with probability generating functions. In the case of self-renewal, by following one of the daughters after any division event, we may construct lifelines containing only one cell at any time. We analyse the number of divisions along such lines, and the compartment where lines terminate with a death event. Analysis and numerical simulations are applied to a five-compartment model of the gradual differentiation of hematopoietic stem cells and to a model of thymocyte development: from pre-double positive to single positive (SP) cells with a bifurcation to either SP4 or SP8 in the last compartment of the sequence.

Science & Technology - Other Topics↗

Fluid Dynamics of Axial Turbomachinery: Blade- and Stage-Level Simulations and Models

The current generation of axial turbomachines is the culmination of decades of experience, and detailed understanding of the underlying flow physics has been a key factor for achieving high efficiency and reliability. Driven by advances in numerical methods and relentless growth in computing power, computational fluid dynamics has increasingly provided insights into the rich fluid dynamics involved and how it relates to loss generation. This article presents some of the complex flow phenomena occurring in bladed components of gas turbines and illustrates how simulations have contributed to their understanding and the challenges they pose for modeling. The interaction of key aerodynamic features with deterministic unsteadiness, caused by multiple blade rows, and stochastic unsteadiness, i.e., turbulence, is discussed. High-fidelity simulations of increasingly realistic configurations and models improved with help of machine learning promise to further grow turbomachinery performance and reliability and, thus, help fluid mechanics research have a greater industrial impact.

Mechanics↗

Time-resolved turbulent dynamo in a laser plasma

Understanding magnetic-field generation and amplification in turbulent plasma is essential to account for observations of magnetic fields in the universe. A theoretical framework attributing the origin and sustainment of these fields to the so-called fluctuation dynamo was recently validated by experiments on laser facilities in low-magnetic-Prandtl-number plasmas (Pm<1). However, the same framework proposes that the fluctuation dynamo should operate differently when Pm≳1, the regime relevant to many astrophysical environments such as the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters. This paper reports an experiment that creates a laboratory Pm≳1 plasma dynamo. We provide a time-resolved characterization of the plasma’s evolution, measuring temperatures, densities, flow velocities, and magnetic fields, which allows us to explore various stages of the fluctuation dynamo’s operation on seed magnetic fields generated by the action of the Biermann-battery mechanism during the initial drive-laser target interaction. The magnetic energy in structures with characteristic scales close to the driving scale of the stochastic motions is found to increase by almost three orders of magnitude and saturate dynamically. It is shown that the initial growth of these fields occurs at a much greater rate than the turnover rate of the driving-scale stochastic motions. Our results point to the possibility that plasma turbulence produced by strong shear can generate fields more efficiently at the driving scale than anticipated by idealized magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of the nonhelical fluctuation dynamo; this finding could help explain the large-scale fields inferred from observations of astrophysical systems.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Time-resolved turbulent dynamo in a laser plasma

Understanding magnetic-field generation and amplification in turbulent plasma is essential to account for observations of magnetic fields in the universe. A theoretical framework attributing the origin and sustainment of these fields to the so-called fluctuation dynamo was recently validated by experiments on laser facilities in low-magnetic-Prandtl-number plasmas (Pm < 1). However, the same framework proposes that the fluctuation dynamo should operate differently when Pm ≳ 1, the regime relevant to many astrophysical environments such as the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters. This paper reports an experiment that creates a laboratory Pm ≳ 1 plasma dynamo. We provide a time-resolved characterization of the plasma’s evolution, measuring temperatures, densities, flow velocities, and magnetic fields, which allows us to explore various stages of the fluctuation dynamo’s operation on seed magnetic fields generated by the action of the Biermann-battery mechanism during the initial drive-laser target interaction. The magnetic energy in structures with characteristic scales close to the driving scale of the stochastic motions is found to increase by almost three orders of magnitude and saturate dynamically. It is shown that the initial growth of these fields occurs at a much greater rate than the turnover rate of the driving-scale stochastic motions. Here, our results point to the possibility that plasma turbulence produced by strong shear can generate fields more efficiently at the driving scale than anticipated by idealized magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of the nonhelical fluctuation dynamo; this finding could help explain the large-scale fields inferred from observations of astrophysical systems.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Optimizers for stabilizing likelihood-free inference

A growing number of applications in particle physics and beyond use neural networks as unbinned likelihood ratio estimators applied to real or simulated data. Precision requirements on the inference tasks demand a high-level of stability from these networks, which are affected by the stochastic nature of training. We show how physics concepts can be used to stabilize network training through a physics-inspired optimizer. In particular, the energy conserving descent (ECD) optimization framework uses classical Hamiltonian dynamics on the space of network parameters to reduce the dependence on the initial conditions while also stabilizing the result near the minimum of the loss function. We develop a version of this optimizer known as , which has few free hyperparameters with limited ranges guided by physical reasoning. We apply to representative likelihood-ratio estimation tasks in particle physics and find on average that it out-performs the widely used Adam optimizer. We expect that ECD will be a useful tool for wide array of data-limited problems, where it is computationally expensive to exhaustively optimize hyperparameters and mitigate fluctuations with ensembling.

Monte Carlo methods↗

Transportation Hub Infrastructure Expansion: Decision Support Under Uncertainty

The Athena project (www.athena-mobility.org) has worked to investigate the relationship between the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport (DFW) and the greater Dallas area in order to better understand and therefore better inform future decision-making regarding the critical infrastructure that influence mobility between the airport and the city. Through this work, infrastructure related to curbside pickup and drop-off, parking, public transit, and the road network congestion were identified as critical to the operation of the DFW transportation hub. The infrastructure analysis and expansion aspect of the Athena project is focused on the restructuring of the CTA curb as a hierarchical curb and the building or repurposing of parking infrastructure as the interplay between these two areas. Many sources of uncertainty exist that may impact future airport and transportation hub operations, such as passenger volume growth, population demographic changes over time, electric vehicle (EV) adoption rates, and autonomous vehicle (AV) adoption rates. Due to these sources of uncertainty, we have selected for our research a modeling framework that can capture various types of uncertainty and hedge against those uncertainties in the optimization process. We analyze road network and curb congestion, the rise of transportation networking companies, trends in parking usage, existing policies around this infrastructure, airport revenue streams, and other contributing factors to enable infrastructure decision making with less uncertainty. To accomplish this wholistic analysis, we have developed a novel multi-stage, multi-period stochastic optimization model which considers the airport's decisions from 2025-2045 under different possible future macro trajectories and day-to-day variations in operational conditions captured as "annual representation of operations" scenarios with respective probabilities. This model has also been designed to leverage the outputs of various efforts under the Athena project to create a combined decision framework for infrastructure decisions. These various efforts include the route optimization model, the ASPIRES simulation, the mode choice model, and the SUMO traffic simulation. Our computational experiments of this system at scale have resulted in a working version of our infrastructure model which enables the explicit representation and consideration of various sources of uncertainty in the decision process to enable robust, flexible decision-making. This model has been effectively run on NREL's HPC system, Eagle, with large numbers of stochastic scenarios and shows promise as a scalable tool for robust consideration of uncertainties in airport planning. We have tested our model using 30,240 operational circumstances in total, resulting in a problem with more 200 million variables. This model was solved in several different configurations, and a workflow to simulate the performance of the infrastructure model results was developed and deployed. In general, our results indicate that a combination of remote parking, remote curb infrastructure, and dynamic pricing can generate revenue, reduce emissions, accommodate emerging technologies such as AVs and EVs, and manage airport passenger growth over time. We note the success of the proposed strategy depends on the data collection and forecasting abilities of DFW. We have also seen that the AV adoption by TNCs might necessitate larger amounts of remote curb. The results of this work inform strategies for airport infrastructure decision making, as well as demonstrate the value of an adaptable model, but also indicate that there are avenues remaining where further research would be of value.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Incorporation of market signals for the optimal design of post combustion carbon capture systems

Recent studies have shown that fossil generators equipped with post-combustion carbon capture (PCC) systems are needed to reduce the cost of deep decarbonization. Such generators need to be flexible and responsive to grid conditions, particularly in a high variable renewable energy (VRE) environment. In this work, we evaluate the net present value (NPV) of retrofitting an existing natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) unit with a flexible PCC system while incorporating market signals from a high VRE grid. We use our industrial partner’s NGCC configuration as representative of existing NGCC units and Svante’s rapid-temperature swing adsorption (TSA) for PCC. Because of its ability to rapidly startup/shutdown and ramp-up/ramp-down, the chosen capture technology is very attractive for load-following operations. For a given set of market signals, we formulate a two-stage stochastic multi-period optimization problem, under the price-taker assumption, to simultaneously optimize the design of the capture system and operation of the entire plant. Rigorous models for the NGCC unit, PCC system, and compression system are developed using commercial process simulators and validated with either plant or vendor data. For computational tractability, we develop surrogate/reduced-order models for use in the optimization problem. The surrogate model for the NGCC plant is constructed by linearizing the rigorous dynamic model at 75% load, while data-driven nonlinear surrogate models for the capture and compression systems are constructed using simulation data from the rigorous models. The optimization problem, formulated as a mixed integer bilinear program, is implemented in the IDAES® integrated platform and solved to global optimality using Gurobi 9.5. Using this formulation, we determine the profitability of retrofitting an existing NGCC unit with the chosen capture system for multiple regions in the U.S. under two scenarios with different carbon prices. Importantly, the results show that the optimal decision strongly depends on the region and on the carbon price, thereby demonstrating the importance of the inclusion of market signals in the design process.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Mechanical model of an earthquake fault

The dynamic behavior of a simple mechanical model of an earthquake fault is studied. This model, introduced originally by Burridge and Knopoff (1967), consists of an elastically coupled chain of masses in contact with a moving rough surface. The present version of the model retains the full Newtonian dynamics with inertial effects and contains no externally imposed stochasticity or spatial inhomogeneity. The only nonlinear feature is a velocity-weakening stick-slip friction force between the masses and the moving surface. This system is being driven persistently toward a slipping instability and therefore exhibits noisy sequences of earthquakelike events. These events are observed in numerical simulations, and many of their features can be predicted analytically.

Carlson, J. M.↗

Image Distinguishability Analysis Testing Through Principal Components and Its Application to Hot Spot Scale Invariance

Hot spots are spatial regions of intense energy localization that govern initiation of secondary high explosives. Studies that characterize or compare simulated hot spots are frequently either qualitatively descriptive or resort to quantitative distribution functions that neglect stochastic variations and spatial correlations—effects that are also neglected in common comparison tests like the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. To this end, we develop an image distinguishability analysis (IDA) test based on principal component (PC) analysis that makes pixel-by-pixel comparisons between small, for example, O(<10), image data sets. The IDA test makes comparisons through a generalized distance metric in the PC space and a test statistic that is derived to calculate mathematical equation-values. Here, we derive a statistical distribution and criticality criterion to determine whether images are distinguishable from established baselines. We apply the IDA test on images generated from molecular dynamics simulations of hot spots from pore collapse in TATB to assess scale invariance in the complex patterns of hot spots that form in a representative high explosive crystal. The IDA test shows that TATB hot spot spatial temperature fields and their derived temperature histograms exhibit scale-invariant features over specific intervals of shock orientation, strength, and initial pore diameter. However, the IDA test also shows that qualitatively different conclusions regarding invariance can be reached depending on whether the hot spot is treated as a spatially correlated field as opposed to a distribution function that lacks spatial information.

organic↗

UQpy: A general purpose Python package and development environment for uncertainty quantification

In this paper, we present the UQpy software toolbox, an open-source Python package for general uncertainty quantification (UQ) in mathematical and physical systems. The software serves as both a user-ready toolbox that includes many of the latest methods for UQ in computational modeling and a convenient development environment for Python programmers advancing the field of UQ. The paper presents an introduction to the software's architecture and existing capabilities, divided in the code in a set of modules centered around different UQ tasks such as sampling methods, generation of random processes and random fields, probabilistic inverse modeling, reliability analysis, surrogate modeling, and active learning. The paper also highlights the importance of the RunModel module, which is used to drive simulations in the uncertainty analyses performed in UQpy. This module conveniently allows the user to define computational models directly in Python, or to run simulations from a third-party software in serial or in parallel. To illustrate the various capabilities, two examples are tracked throughout the paper and analyzed repeatedly for various UQ tasks. The first is a Python model solving a nonlinear structural dynamics problem, used to illustrate UQpy's capabilities in sampling and forward propagation of high dimensional random vectors (stochastic processes), and probabilistic inference. The second model is a third-party Abaqus finite element model solving the thermomechanical response of a beam structure. This example is used to illustrate UQpy's capabilities in variance reduction sampling techniques, reliability analysis, surrogate modeling and active learning techniques.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Modeling and Control Using Stochastic Distribution Control Theory for Intersection Traffic Flow

In this work, we investigated stochastic distribution control theory-based traffic signal optimization to achieve a smooth and uniform flow of vehicles through signalized intersections. In this context, the static and linear dynamic stochastic distribution models were developed to express the relationship between the signal timing and the traffic queue length together with its probability density function. Two stochastic distribution control algorithms were designed to control the signal timing at intersections such that the probability density function of the traffic queue of each intersection road segment is made as narrow and as small as possible. Also, a recursive input-output traffic queue estimation model was proposed, which is data-driven and dynamic in nature, to calculate real-time traffic queue length using traffic signal timings and loop-detector data. The control algorithms were evaluated for a one-signal corridor, two-signal corridor, and 2 x 2 network of signalized intersections. MATLAB simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the use of the proposed algorithms and comparison to the existing widely-used semi-actuated control has been made. Desired results were obtained.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Adaptive Sampling-Based Bi-Fidelity Stochastic Trust Region Method for Stochastic Derivative-Free Optimization

Bi-fidelity stochastic optimization has gained increasing attention as an efficient approach to reduce computational costs by leveraging a low-fidelity (LF) model to optimize an expensive high-fidelity (HF) objective. In this paper, we propose ASTRO-BFDF, an adaptive sampling trust-region method specifically designed for unconstrained bi-fidelity stochastic derivative-free optimization problems. In ASTRO-BFDF, the LF function serves two purposes: (i) to identify better iterates for the HF function when the optimization process indicates a high correlation between them and (ii) to reduce the variance of the HF function estimates using bi-fidelity Monte Carlo (BFMC). The algorithm dynamically determines sample sizes while adaptively choosing between crude Monte Carlo and BFMC to balance the trade-off between optimization and sampling errors. We prove that the iterates generated by ASTRO-BFDF converge to a first-order stationary point almost surely. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through numerical experiments on synthetic benchmarks and simulation optimization problems involving discrete event systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗