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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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At least 235 records · Page 13
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

User-Centered Evaluation of Visual Analytics

Visual analytics systems are becoming very popular. More domains now use interactive visualizations to analyze the ever-increasing amount and heterogeneity of data. More novel visualizations are being developed for more tasks and users. We need to ensure that these systems can be evaluated to determine that they are both useful and usable. A user-centered evaluation for visual analytics needs to be developed for these systems. While many of the typical human-computer interaction (HCI) evaluation methodologies can be applied as is, others will need modification. Additionally, new functionality in visual analytics systems needs new evaluation methodologies. There is a difference between usability evaluations and user-centered evaluations. Usability looks at the efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction of users carrying out tasks with software applications. User-centered evaluation looks more specifically at the utility provided to the users by the software. This is reflected in the evaluations done and in the metrics used. In the visual analytics domain this is very challenging as users are most likely experts in a particular domain, the tasks they do are often not well defined, the software they use needs to support large amounts of different kinds of data, and often the tasks last for months. These difficulties are discussed more in the section on User-centered Evaluation. Our goal is to provide a discussion of user-centered evaluation practices for visual analytics, including existing practices that can be carried out and new methodologies and metrics that need to be developed and agreed upon by the visual analytics community. The material provided here should be of use for both researchers and practitioners in the field of visual analytics. Researchers and practitioners in HCI and interested in visual analytics will find this information useful as well as a discussion on changes that need to be made to current HCI practices to make them more suitable to visual analytics. A history of analysis and analysis techniques and problems is provided as well as an introduction to user-centered evaluation and various evaluation techniques for readers from different disciplines. The understanding of these techniques is imperative if we wish to support analysis in the visual analytics software we develop. Currently the evaluations that are conducted and published for visual analytics software are very informal and consist mainly of comments from users or potential users. Our goal is to help researchers in visual analytics to conduct more formal user-centered evaluations. While these are time-consuming and expensive to carryout, the outcomes of these studies will have a defining impact on the field of visual analytics and help point the direction for future features and visualizations to incorporate. While many researchers view work in user-centered evaluation as a less-than-exciting area to work, the opposite is true. First of all, the goal is user-centered evaluation is to help visual analytics software developers, researchers, and designers improve their solutions and discover creative ways to better accommodate their users. Working with the users is extremely rewarding as well. While we use the term “users” in almost all situations there are a wide variety of users that all need to be accommodated. Moreover, the domains that use visual analytics are varied and expanding. Just understanding the complexities of a number of these domains is exciting. Researchers are trying out different visualizations and interactions as well. And of course, the size and variety of data are expanding rapidly. User-centered evaluation in this context is rapidly changing. There are no standard processes and metrics and thus those of us working on user-centered evaluation must be creative in our work with both the users and with the researchers and developers.

intelligence analysis↗
DOE OSTI2018

In-situ visualizing atomic structural evolution during crystallization in ternary Zr Cu Al bulk metallic glasses

A well-designed experimental method has been presented to in-situ visualize the amorphous-to-crystalline phase transformation of two glass formers at the atomic length scale in the supercooled liquid region using a high voltage electron microscopy (HVEM). Analysis of the HVEM high-resolution images, supported by the in situ synchrotron diffraction, further confirms previous observations of distinctively different crystallization pathways in the two Zr-Cu-Al alloys. Moreover, the HVEM results illustrate that isolated distributed nanocrystals with mutual orientation easily grew up from the Zr 56 Cu 36 Al 8 , an average glass former, which follows a classical crystallization pathway; while density population poorly ordered atomic clusters with large misorientation suspended the growth in the Zr 46 Cu 46 Al 8 , a good glass former, which might follow an unusual crystallization pathway. In addition, in-situ synchrotron diffraction measurements confirm that the Zr 56 Cu 36 Al 8 alloy finally crystallized into an extended structure, in contrast, the final crystalline product of Zr 46 Cu 46 Al 8 alloy possesses a damped structure. Our study provides a detailed microscopic understanding of the crystallization behaviors in the supercooled liquids, showing that the density population nucleation site with large misorientation and the confined final crystalline structure contribute to the stability of Zr-Cu-Al supercooled liquids.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2016

Technical Note: Development of a 3D printed subresolution sandwich phantom for validation of brain SPECT analysis

Purpose: To make an adaptable, head shaped radionuclide phantom to simulate molecular imaging of the brain using clinical acquisition and reconstruction protocols. This will allow the characterization and correction of scanner characteristics, and improve the accuracy of clinical image analysis, including the application of databases of normal subjects. Methods: A fused deposition modeling 3D printer was used to create a head shaped phantom made up of transaxial slabs, derived from a simulated MRI dataset. The attenuation of the printed polylactide (PLA), measured by means of the Hounsfield unit on CT scanning, was set to match that of the brain by adjusting the proportion of plastic filament and air (fill ratio). Transmission measurements were made to verify the attenuation of the printed slabs. The radionuclide distribution within the phantom was created by adding {sup 99m}Tc pertechnetate to the ink cartridge of a paper printer and printing images of gray and white matter anatomy, segmented from the same MRI data. The complete subresolution sandwich phantom was assembled from alternate 3D printed slabs and radioactive paper sheets, and then imaged on a dual headed gamma camera to simulate an HMPAO SPECT scan. Results: Reconstructions of phantom scans successfully used automated ellipse fitting to apply attenuation correction. This removed the variability inherent in manual application of attenuation correction and registration inherent in existing cylindrical phantom designs. The resulting images were assessed visually and by count profiles and found to be similar to those from an existing elliptical PMMA phantom. Conclusions: The authors have demonstrated the ability to create physically realistic HMPAO SPECT simulations using a novel head-shaped 3D printed subresolution sandwich method phantom. The phantom can be used to validate all neurological SPECT imaging applications. A simple modification of the phantom design to use thinner slabs would make it suitable for use in PET.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2019

Metallography Box Improvements

The information included in this poster is designed to provide information on a visualization system needed in a hot-cell with a high radiation dose level. The system is necessary to enable real-time remote monitoring of microscope function. The current configuration for viewing function of in-cell equipment is through a single window. This makes for difficult viewing of the microscope workstations which are located away from the window. A properly designed camera system enhances troubleshooting capability in-cell. The poster will aid in the exposition of the design process and implementation of the system described above.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2023

FunMC^2: A Filter for Uncertainty Visualization of Marching Cubes on Multi-Core Devices

Visualization is an important tool for scientists to extract understanding from complex scientific data. Scientists need to understand the uncertainty inherent in all scientific data in order to interpret the data correctly. Uncertainty visualization has been an active and growing area of research to address this challenge. Algorithms for uncertainty visualization can be expensive, and research efforts have been focused mainly on structured grid types. Further, support for uncertainty visualization in production tools is limited. In this paper, we adapt an algorithm for computing key metrics for visualizing uncertainty in Marching Cubes (MC) to multi-core devices and present the design, implementation, and evaluation for a Filter for uncertainty visualization of Marching Cubes on Multi-Core devices (FunMC2). FunMC2 accelerates the uncertainty visualization of MC significantly, and it is portable across multi-core CPUs and GPUs. Evaluation results show that FunMC2 based on OpenMP runs around 11× to 41× faster on multi-core CPUs than the corresponding serial version using one CPU core. FunMC2 based on a single GPU is around 5× to 9× faster than FunMC2 running by OpenMP. Moreover, FunMC2 is flexible enough to process ensemble data with both structured and unstructured mesh types. Furthermore, we demonstrate that FunMC2 can be seamlessly integrated as a plugin into ParaView, a production visualization tool for post-processing.

Wang, Jay↗
DOE OSTI2023

Mobile Hot Cell Digital Twin: End-of-life Management of Disused High Activity Radioactive Sources – 23598

Sealed radioactive sources are utilized for a wide range of applications across nuclear facilities, universities, hospitals, and industry. When these sources reach the end of serviceable life, they become waste. As waste, this radioactive material then goes through a process of recapture and then transfer to long term storage. With the advancement of technology in conjunction with better accessibility of technology, industries are exploring the use of digital automation to enhance productivity, efficiency, and safety while minimizing operation and maintenance costs, health and environmental risks, and uncertainty in the project life cycles. One area for exploration is the use of a digital twin to help design a robust, versatile, and safe solution for recapturing spent sources. We believe this avenue can also provide further advantages in the operations aspect of end-of-life management of spent radioactive sources by reducing the deployment time, increasing operator safety, and reducing operation & maintenance cost. We present a novel digital twin framework for end-of-life management of disused high activity radioactive sources. We have designed and developed a framework that houses a digital twin for visualizing and monitoring the recapture process to inform the engineering and design of a new Mobile Hot Cell. Furthermore, we demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework by providing a prototypical implementation, supporting the Mobile Hot Cell and human-machine interface's virtual replication.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Portable interactive visualization of large-scale simulations in geotechnical engineering using Unity3D

Development in large-scale geotechnical engineering simulation places tremendous demand for efficient visualization of such simulation data. This study presents a lightweight software tool, i.e. Geotechnical Interactive Visualization (GIV), as a solution to this challenge, which achieves efficient interactive visualization of large-scale simulations data in geotechnical engineering. Visualization data flow and algorithms specifically optimized for common geotechnical engineering applications are implemented in GIV. GIV can visualize geotechnical structure models with time-varying attributes attached to mesh with fixed topology, and also models with time-varying mesh topologies but no attributes attached, the two most common visualization tasks in geotechnical engineering. Furthermore, challenges for large-scale simulation data visualization, including parallel simulation data redundancy, massive data size, dynamic user interaction, and portability are overcome via specifically designed algorithms for simulation data preprocessing and optimized visualization modules using the powerful 3D rendering and interactive game engine Unity3D. Comparison of GIV with several widely used visualization tools for the visualization of large-scale idealized datasets and realistic geotechnical simulations highlights the visualization efficiency, smooth interactivity, and lightweight features of GIV.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2017

Coupling Visualization, Simulation, and Deep Learning for Ensemble Steering of Complex Energy Models: Preprint

We have developed a framework for the exploration, design, and planning of energy systems that combines interactive visualization with machine-learning based approximations of simulations through a general purpose dataflow API. Our system provides a visual inter- face allowing users to explore an ensemble of energy simulations representing a subset of the complex input parameter space, and spawn new simulations to 'fill in' input regions corresponding to new enegery system scenarios. Unfortunately, many energy simula- tions are far too slow to provide interactive responses. To support interactive feedback, we are developing reduced-form models via machine learning techniques, which provide statistically sound esti- mates of the full simulations at a fraction of the computational cost and which are used as proxies for the full-form models. Fast com- putation and an agile dataflow enhance the engagement with energy simulations, and allow researchers to better allocate computational resources to capture informative relationships within the system and provide a low-cost method for validating and quality-checking large-scale modeling efforts.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2025

A methodology for decay heat characterization in molten salt reactors

Accurate decay heat prediction in molten salt reactors (MSRs) faces dual challenges: complex operational uncertainties and the need for interpretable models compatible with engineering workflows. This work presents a hybrid machine learning and segmented polynomial methodology that addresses both requirements through three key innovations. First, a modular data architecture encodes MSR-specific operational parameters (power density: 1-100 W cm -3 , humidity: 0-0.1 wt %, air ingress: 0-0.1 mol %) with uncertainty-aware temporal discretization spanning 15 orders of magnitude. Second, region-optimized machine learning models achieve 92.3 % root mean square error (RMSE) reduction over conventional polynomials while maintaining physical interpretability through automated piecewise equation generation. Third, dual front-end interfaces accelerate safety analyses — a Jupyter environment enables researchers to explore 10,000+ parameter combinations via interactive widgets, while a Streamlit web application reduces design iteration cycles through production-grade visualization tools. Operational deployment demonstrates prediction times of only a couple hundred milliseconds for 10 4 years decay profiles, enabling real-time optimization of spent fuel container designs.

42 - ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2014

Optical layout and mechanical structure of polarimeter-interferometer system for Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak

A Far-InfaRed (FIR) three-wave POlarimeter-INTerferometer (POINT) system for measurement current density profile and electron density profile is under development for the EAST tokamak. The FIR beams are transmitted from the laser room to the optical tower adjacent to EAST via ∼20 m overmoded dielectric waveguide and then divided into 5 horizontal chords. The optical arrangement was designed using ZEMAX, which provides information on the beam spot size and energy distribution throughout the optical system. ZEMAX calculations used to optimize the optical layout design are combined with the mechanical design from CATIA, providing a 3D visualization of the entire POINT system.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2021

pnnl/Deep-Learning-Control-with-Embedded-Physical-Structure

Framework that can produce visually compelling articles for project research. The design of our framework is centered around simplifying content creation so that researchers unfamiliar with the underlying technology stack can still produce informative, beautiful research documents with interactive and visual features.

Tuor, Aaron↗
DOE OSTI2021

Human-Centric Lighting: Foundational Considerations and a Five-Step Design Process

At its best, human-centric lighting considers the visual and non-visual effects of light in support of positive human outcomes. At its worst, it is a marketing phrase used to healthwash lighting products or lighting design solutions. There is no doubt that environmental lighting contributes to human health, but how might one practice human-centric lighting given both the credible potential and the implausible hype? Marketing literature is filled with promises. Technical lighting societies have summarized the science but have not yet offered design guidance. Meanwhile, designers are in the middle, attempting to distinguish credible knowledge from that which is dubious to make design decisions that affect people directly. This article is intended to: (1) empower the reader with fundamental understandings of ways in which light affects health; (2) provide a process for human-centric lighting design that can dovetail with the decision-making process that is already a part of a designer's workflow.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2017

Migration to a fully-integrated control room - 349

The nuclear industry is faced with a pressing need to reduce operating costs in order to remain competitive with other forms of electric generation. While current industry initiatives are focused on incremental gains by streamlining work processes and reducing worker burdens, very few, if any, involve significant reductions in the base workload of a nuclear plant. Migration to a fully-integrated control room affords just such an opportunity. This report describes an NPP digital instrumentation and control (I and C) system design, along with its corresponding human systems interface (HSI) design, which achieves high plant availability, while selectively applying digital equipment redundancy and integrating traditional I and C system partitions, to minimize the digital equipment needed, and thereby minimize initial installation costs and ongoing operations and maintenance (O and M) costs. An additional key component of digital equipment minimization is optimization of the digital interface to conventional plant sensors and controlled plant devices (e.g., pumps, valves), which requires no disturbance to plant cables and results in eliminating thousands of electro-mechanical relay control components. The design is rooted in the highly integrated digital technology applied to the most recent advanced light water reactors under United States (U.S.) Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) design certification review and approval. While this design employs technology from new plants, that technology has been adapted to the modernization of current operating NPPs. Hence, the highly integrated digital I and C and HSI design is referred to as the compact control room digital modernization (CDM). Along with minimal digital equipment, the corresponding HSI design employs compact operator workstations with visual display units (VDU) and soft controls for both the main control room (MCR) and remote shutdown room (RSR), to immediately improve human performance and ultimately facilitate operating staff reduction. Some advanced light water reactors have demonstrated this staff reduction through full scope simulator testing of normal and abnormal plant conditions, with U.S. licensed operating crews from currently-operating U.S. plants. Digital equipment minimization, compact operator workstations, and optimized plant component interfaces that require no disturbance to field cables, also facilitate implementation of the CDM over multiple phases, most of which can be conducted during normal refueling shutdown windows. This phased implementation method includes a novel transition of the I and C, MCR and RSR with an operations centered focus. This paper presents the CDM design, along with qualitative cost/benefit comparisons to currently operating plants with conventional analog I and C and HSI technology; this generation of I and C/HSI is referred to as a conventional control room (CCR). A CCR also includes NPPs that have been upgraded with digital systems, but retain the current partitions between plant I and C systems (i.e., no I and C integration) and retain the current plant system to control board configuration of current NPP control rooms. Even though these comparisons are qualitative, a compelling case is presented for the CDM. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2019

Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Comparative Visual Cues for Transparent Diagnostics of Competing Models

Experts in data and physical sciences have to regularly grapple with the problem of competing models. Be it analytical or physics-based models, a cross-cutting challenge for experts is to reliably diagnose which model outcomes appropriately predict or simulate real-world phenomena. Expert judgment involves reconciling information across many, and often, conflicting criteria that describe the quality of model outcomes. In this paper, through a design study with climate scientists, we develop a deeper understanding of the problem and solution space of model diagnostics, resulting in the following contributions: i) a problem and task characterization using which we map experts’ model diagnostics goals to multi-way visual comparison tasks, ii) a design space of comparative visual cues for letting experts quickly understand the degree of disagreement among competing models and gauge the degree of stability of model outputs with respect to alternative criteria, and iii) design and evaluation of MyriadCues, an interactive visualization interface for exploring alternative hypotheses and insights about good and bad models by leveraging comparative visual cues. Here, we present case studies and subjective feedback by experts, which validate how MyriadCues enables more transparent model diagnostic mechanisms, as compared to the state of the art.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Bridging cognitive gaps between user and model in interactive dimension reduction

Interactive machine learning (ML) systems are difficult to design because of the "Two Black Boxes" problem that exists at the interface between human and machine. Many algorithms that are used in interactive ML systems are black boxes that are presented to users, while the human cognition represents a second black box that can be difficult for the algorithm to interpret. These two black boxes create cognitive gaps between the user and the interactive ML model when a user interacts with the system. In this paper, we identify several cognitive gaps that exist in a previously-developed interactive visual analytics (VA) system, Andromeda. These cognitive gaps that we are addressing in Andromeda are representative of common problems in other VA systems. Our goal with this work is to open both black boxes and bridge these cognitive gaps by making improvements to the original Andromeda system, including designing new visual features to help people better understand how Andromeda processes and interacts with data and improving the underlying algorithm so that the Andromeda system can better understand the intent of the user during the data exploration process. We evaluate our designs through both qualitative and quantitative analysis (i.e., user study and simulation analysis), and the results confirm that the improved Andromeda system outperforms the original version significantly in a series of high-dimensional data understanding tasks.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2019

LSE-319: LSST Science Platform Vision Document

This document defines and describes the "LSST Science Platform," a set of integrated web applications and services deployed at the LSST Data Access Centers (DACs) through which the scientific community will access, visualize, subset, and perform next-to-the-data analysis of the data collected by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). These services can be broken down to three different "Aspects": a web Portal, designed to provide essential data access and visualization services through a simple-to-use website, a Notebook environment, that will provide a Jupyter Notebook-like interface, based on JupyterLab, enabling next-to-the-data analysis, and an extensive set of Web APIs that the users will be able to use to remotely examine the LSST data set using tools they're already familiar with. This document lays out the high-level vision for the aforementioned Aspects and some associated backend services. It is intentionally brief, and meant to generally guide the flow-down of requirements and development of product specifications, prioritization, and plans for the Agile development of the relevant elements of the DM system.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Surface Triangulation for CSG in Mercury

Visualization routines for rendering complicated geometries are very useful for engineers and scientists who are trying to build 3D prototypes of their designs. A common way to rapidly add interesting features to a 3D model is through the use of a concept called Constructive Solid Geometry. CSG uses compositions of the boolean set operations to manipulate basic geometric primitives to form more complicated objects. The most common boolean operations employed are union, intersection, and subtraction. Most computer-aided design software packages contain some sort of ability visualize CSG. The typical workflow for the user is as follows: The user specifies the individual primitive components, the user arbitrarily combines each of these primitives with boolean operations, the software generates a CSG tree structure which normally stores these solids implicitly with their defining equation, the tree is traversed and a general algorithm is applied to render the appropriate geometry onto the screen. Algorithms for visualizing CSG have been extensively developed for over a decade. Points sampled from the implicit solids are typically used as input by variations of algorithms like marching cubes and point-cloud surface reconstruction. Here, we explain a surface triangulation method from the graphics community that is being used for surface visualization in the framework of a Monte-Carlo neutron transport code called Mercury.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

THERMAL/STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF THE AXION QUANTUM METROLOGY CAVITY AND ITS COMPONENTS

This research was centered around maximizing the capability to cool dielectric material within a containment unit, or Photonic Band Gap (PBG) cavity, designed for detecting axion dark matter and identifying the unit’s thermal properties. There are multiple types of PBG cavities, but the latest version that axion researchers wish to use has been theorized to contain possible issues related to its thermal properties. Thermal conductivity is an issue with the dielectric material because it is made from alumina which is highly insulative. This is important since the research is being done in a cryogenic environment and the thermal noise affects the quantum bit used for detecting the axion to photon conversion process. Therefore, any improvements to this unit should be justified and implemented but are not entirely limited to thermal contact related aspects of PBG cavities. A prospect of using sapphire in place of alumina also exists, but this is a more expensive, less tested, and more elusive material to justify the creation of a full dielectric structure out of sapphire. Thermal aspects of the cavity were analyzed using finite element method (FEM) and an experiment designed to test different thermal joint materials. FEM was used to check the contraction of the cavity during cooling, the contact quality between the dielectric material and cavity wall, theheat flow rate through the assembly, and helps visualize the cavity’s reaction to different design changes. A simple comparison between thermal conductivity curves justified the usage of sapphire over alumina from a thermal property point of view. Thus, the method of experimentation had an additional dielectric material, sapphire, to test with and compare to alumina. The thermal test identified which material is best to use for a thermal joint but also simultaneously found the conductance of the joint and dielectric material as well as an estimate for what the temperature is inside the larger scale cavity since a thermometer cannot be placed inside the PBG when it cools. Initially, the cavity simulation was tested for structural deformation properties and stress distribution since it is made of copper which contracts heavily in comparison to most other materials. The reduction in volume of the cavity was less than anticipated which gave more room for a possible usage of a modified thermal joint for additional contact area and higher conductivity.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗