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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 OSTI2022

Relative importance of high-latitude local and long-range-transported dust for Arctic ice-nucleating particles and impacts on Arctic mixed-phase clouds

Dust particles, serving as ice-nucleating particles (INPs), may impact the Arctic surface energy budget and regional climate by modulating the mixed-phase cloud properties and lifetime. In addition to long-range transport from low-latitude deserts, dust particles in the Arctic can originate from local sources. However, the importance of high-latitude dust (HLD) as a source of Arctic INPs (compared to low-latitude dust, LLD) and its effects on Arctic mixed-phase clouds are overlooked. In this study, we evaluate the contribution to Arctic dust loading and INP population from HLD and six LLD source regions by implementing a source-tagging technique for dust aerosols in version 1 of the US Department of Energy's Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SMv1). Our results show that HLD is responsible for 30.7 % of the total dust burden in the Arctic, whereas LLD from Asia and North Africa contributes 44.2 % and 24.2 %, respectively. Due to its limited vertical transport as a result of stable boundary layers, HLD contributes more in the lower troposphere, especially in boreal summer and autumn when the HLD emissions are stronger. LLD from North Africa and East Asia dominates the dust loading in the upper troposphere with peak contributions in boreal spring and winter. The modeled INP concentrations show better agreement with both ground and aircraft INP measurements in the Arctic when including HLD INPs. The HLD INPs are found to induce a net cooling effect (-0.24 W m -2 above 60 °N) on the Arctic surface downwelling radiative flux by changing the cloud phase of the Arctic mixed-phase clouds. The magnitude of this cooling is larger than that induced by North African and East Asian dust (0.08 and -0.06 W m -2 , respectively), mainly due to different seasonalities of HLD and LLD. Uncertainties of this study are discussed, which highlights the importance of further constraining the HLD emissions.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRS2016

NASA's Contributions to Controlled Environment Agriculture

It may come as a surprise, but NASA has been a long-standing sponsor of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) research. This is based on the potential for using plants (crops) for life support systems in space. Through photosynthesis, crops could produce food and oxygen for humans, while removing CO2. In addition, plant transpiration could help purify waste water. NASAs interest in bioregenerative life support dates back to the late 1950s. At that time, much of the testing focused on algae, but over the years moved toward higher plants as CEA techniques improved. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, extensive testing was carried out at different universities to gather horticultural data for a range of crops, including wheat, soybean, lettuce, potato, sweet potato, cowpea, rice and more. These studies examined different electric light sources, mineral nutrition, recirculating hydroponics, effects of CO2, temperature, photosynthetic photon flux (PPF), and photoperiod on the crops, and identified cultivars that would be useful for space. Findings from these studies were then used to conduct large scale (20 sq m), closed atmosphere tests at Kennedy Space Center, and later at NASA Johnson Space Center, where plant growth chambers were linked to human habitats. Results showed that with high light input and careful horticultural management, about 20-25 sq m of crops under continuous cultivation could produce the O2 for one person, and about 40-50 sq m could produce enough dietary calories. The ability to sustain these production levels and accurately assess system costs and failures needs further study. In all likelihood, the use of plants for life support will evolve, where for early missions like the International Space Station, crops will be grown in small chambers to provide supplemental fresh foods. As mission durations and distances increase, the systems could expand to assume more of the life support burden. But the constraints of space travel require that these approaches be efficient in terms of mass, volume, and energy, which are similar to challenges facing terrestrial CEA, such as vertical agriculture systems.

Bioregenerative↗
DOE OSTI2025

Life Cycle Analysis of Natural Gas Extraction and Power Generation: U.S. 2020 Emissions Profile

This analysis expands upon previous life cycle analyses (LCAs) of natural gas systems performed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). It provides a complete inventory of emissions to air and water, water consumption, and land use change. These environmental burdens are detailed for all supply chain steps from natural gas production through natural gas distribution. This package includes the report, the NETL Natural Gas Model, and appendices that include several Excel workbooks and a python script to provide transparent access to the calculations and resulting data. This is revision 1 of the 2024 study (published December 17, 2024 and updated on January 24, 2025) and corrects a modeling error in natural gas composition. See the errata on page 2 for more information.

03 NATURAL GAS↗
NASA NTRS2015

Microlith-Based Catalytic Reactor for Air Quality and Trace Contaminant Control Applications

Traditionally, gaseous compounds such as methane, carbon monoxide, and trace contaminants have posed challenges for maintaining clean air in enclosed spaces such as crewed spacecraft cabins as they are hazardous to humans and are often difficult to remove by conventional adsorption technology. Catalytic oxidizers have provided a reliable and robust means of disposing of even trace levels of these compounds by converting them into carbon dioxide and water. Precision Combustion, Inc. (PCI) and NASA - Marshall (MSFC) have been developing, characterizing, and optimizing high temperature catalytic oxidizers (HTCO) based on PCI's patented Microlith® technology to meet the requirements of future extended human spaceflight explorations. Current efforts have focused on integrating the HTCO unit with a compact, simple recuperative heat exchanger to reduce the overall system size and weight while also reducing its energy requirements. Previous efforts relied on external heat exchangers to recover the waste heat and recycle it to the oxidizer to minimize the system's power requirements; however, these units contribute weight and volume burdens to the overall system. They also result in excess heat loss due to the separation of the HTCO and the heat recuperator, resulting in lower overall efficiency. Improvements in the recuperative efficiency and close coupling of HTCO and heat recuperator lead to reductions in system energy requirements and startup time. Results from testing HTCO units integrated with heat recuperators at a variety of scales for cabin air quality control and heat melt compactor applications are reported and their benefits over previous iterations of the HTCO and heat recuperator assembly are quantified in this paper.

Vilekar, Saurabh↗
DOE OSTI2021

Life‐Cycle Assessment Considerations for Batteries and Battery Materials

Abstract Rechargeable batteries are necessary for the decarbonization of the energy systems, but life‐cycle environmental impact assessments have not achieved consensus on the environmental impacts of producing these batteries. Nonetheless, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful tool to inform the development of better‐performing batteries with reduced environmental burden. This review explores common practices in lithium‐ion battery LCAs and makes recommendations for how future studies can be more interpretable, representative, and impactful. First, LCAs should focus analyses of resource depletion on long‐term trends toward more energy and resource‐intensive material extraction and processing rather than treating known reserves as a fixed quantity being depleted. Second, future studies should account for extraction and processing operations that deviate from industry best‐practices and may be responsible for an outsized share of sector‐wide impacts, such as artisanal cobalt mining. Third, LCAs should explore at least 2–3 battery manufacturing facility scales to capture size‐ and throughput‐dependent impacts such as dry room conditioning and solvent recovery. Finally, future LCAs must transition away from kg of battery mass as a functional unit and instead make use of kWh of storage capacity and kWh of lifetime energy throughput.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2021

Simplified Transactive Distribution Grids for Bulk Power System Mechanism Development

As distributed energy resources and smart devices become omnipresent in the electrical power grid, transactive energy control mechanisms are evolving. From real-time to day-ahead markets, these transactive energy algorithms involve more and more agents, whose behavior is going to affect the transmission and generation network. In order to study the interaction between the wholesale and retail energy markets, extensive co-simulations are performed. To be able to redesign, evaluate, and verify new control algorithms, the simulations need to provide results in a fast and reliable manner. This work has built and tested a transactive distribution grid model, the DSO-Stub, meant to offer a configurable distribution retail market while ensuring the computational burden is not significantly increased.

Transactive Energy, , Distribution System Operator↗
DOE OSTI2025

Development of novel techniques for non-invasive air leakage and moisture detection in building envelopes

Unwanted air leakage and moisture in building envelopes can cause high energy consumption, detrimental indoor air quality, poor occupant comfort, and reduction in building material durability. High moisture can cause rot and mold, leading to costly and time-consuming repairs that add to the carbon burden of the building envelope. Novel detection techniques for locating and measuring air leakage flow and areas of high moisture in building envelopes will be presented. The techniques are easy, fast, and non-destructive which can enable quick building envelope assessment, foster retrofits, and lead to energy savings and carbon emission reduction.

Boudreaux, Philip [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000229564665)↗
DOE OSTI2020

An ODE-Enabled Distributed Transient Stability Analysis for Networked Microgrids

Networked microgrid (NMG) exhibits noteworthy resiliency and flexibility benefits for the mutual support from neighboring microgrids. With high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and the associated controls, the transient stability analysis of NMGs is of critical significance. To address the issues of computation burdens and privacy in the centralized transient analysis, this paper devises an ordinary differential equation (ODE)-enabled distributed transient stability (DTS) methodology for NMGs. First, an ODE-based microgrid model is established to capture the dynamics in the droop control of DERs as well as network and load. Further, a distributed DTS is devised for the ODE representation of an NMG, allowing a privacy-preserving transient analysis of each microgrid while accurately reconstructing the frequency dynamics under droop controls in all DERs. In conclusion, extensive tests are performed to verify the validity of the ODE-based microgrid model through both dynamic response and eigenvalue analysis, and the efficacy of the DTS algorithm in simulating the large signal responses and the frequent fluctuations in NMG.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

High-resolution hourly surrogate modeling framework for physics-based large-scale building stock modeling

Surrogate modeling can play a key role in reducing high computational burdens for large-scale physics-based modeling and uncertainty quantification. With the rapid development of large-scale building stock energy modeling, surrogate modeling has also begun to be widely applied in this field; however, most existing surrogate models lack hourly time resolution for regional-scale modeling, which is essential for understanding building demand profiles and grid impacts. Further, there is generally a lack of necessary data and feature engineering frameworks specific to building modeling for efficiently managing large datasets and complex computations. Furthermore, this paper proposes a modeling framework for large-scale (city-/region-scale), high-resolution, high-fidelity surrogate building stock energy models. Our developed framework consists of six modules: (1) building stock energy modeling (ComStock TM and ResStock TM ), (2) data engineering for large simulation data, (3) high performance computing workflow, (4) feature engineering, (5) machine learning model development, and (6) model performance evaluation. Two case studies apply the developed framework in both residential and commercial building stock analysis to demonstrate its computational efficiency and surrogate modeling accuracies. Results show that surrogate models, when efficiently trained using the HPC workflow module, reach a high level of modeling accuracy for two case studies.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2023

Commercial, industrial, and institutional discount rate estimation for efficiency standards analysis: Sector-level data 1998–2022

Underlying each of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) federal appliance and equipment energy conservation standards are a set of complex analyses of the projected costs and benefits of regulation. Any new or amended standard must be designed to achieve significant additional energy conservation, provided that it is technologically feasible and economically justified (42 U.S.C. 6295(o)(2)(A)). DOE determines economic justification based on whether the benefits exceed the burdens, considering a variety of factors, including the economic impact of the standard on consumers of the product and the savings in lifetime operating cost compared to any increase in price or maintenance expenses (42 U.S.C. 6295(o)(2)(B)). As part of this determination, DOE conducts a life-cycle cost (LCC) analysis, which models the combined impact of appliance first cost and operating cost changes on a representative commercial building sample to identify the fraction of customers achieving LCC savings or incurring net cost at the considered efficiency levels. Thus, the commercial discount rate value(s) used to calculate the present value of energy cost savings within the LCC model implicitly plays a role in estimating the economic impact of potential standard levels. This report provides an in-depth discussion of the commercial discount rate estimation process. It is an update to previous reports on estimating commercial discount rates from firm-level and sector-level financial data (e.g., Fujita, 2021, 2016). Major topics covered in this report include the following: -Discount rate estimation methods and rationale -Data sources used and data limitations -Discount rate distributions for use in standards analysis -Discount rate estimation methods and distributions specific to the small business subgroup analysis A version of this analysis was most recently released in 2022. Going forward, this report will be updated as data allow and analyses necessitate.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Commercial, industrial, and institutional discount rate estimation for efficiency standards analysis: Sector-level data 1998–2023

Underlying each of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) federal appliance and equipment energy conservation standards are a set of complex analyses of the projected costs and benefits of regulation. Any new or amended standard must be designed to achieve significant additional energy conservation, provided that it is technologically feasible and economically justified (42 U.S.C. 6295(o)(2)(A)). DOE determines economic justification based on whether the benefits exceed the burdens, considering a variety of factors, including the economic impact of the standard on consumers of the product and the savings in lifetime operating cost compared to any increase in price or maintenance expenses (42 U.S.C. 6295(o)(2)(B)). As part of this determination, DOE conducts a life-cycle cost (LCC) analysis, which models the combined impact of appliance first cost and operating cost changes on a representative commercial building sample to identify the fraction of customers achieving LCC savings or incurring net cost at the considered efficiency levels. Thus, the commercial discount rate value(s) used to calculate the present value of energy cost savings within the LCC model implicitly plays a role in estimating the economic impact of potential standard levels. This report provides an in-depth discussion of the commercial discount rate estimation process relying on the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to estimate a business’ cost of equity, and by adding a risk adjustment factor to the risk-free rate associated with long-term U.S. Treasury bonds to estimate their cost of debt. It is an update to previous reports on estimating commercial discount rates from firm-level and sector-level financial data (e.g., Fujita, 2021, 2016). Major topics covered in this report include the following: • Discount rate estimation methods and rationale • Data sources used and data limitations • Discount rate distributions for use in standards analysis • Discount rate estimation methods and distributions specific to the small business subgroup analysis.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Commercial, industrial, and institutional discount rate estimation for efficiency standards analysis: Sector-level data 1998–2021

Underlying each of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) federal appliance and equipment energy conservation standards are a set of complex analyses of the projected costs and benefits of regulation. Any new or amended standard must be designed to achieve significant additional energy conservation, provided that it is technologically feasible and economically justified (42 U.S.C. 6295(o)(2)(A)). DOE determines economic justification based on whether the benefits exceed the burdens, considering a variety of factors, including the economic impact of the standard on consumers of the product and the savings in lifetime operating cost compared to any increase in price or maintenance expenses (42 U.S.C. 6295(o)(2)(B)). As part of this determination, DOE conducts a Life-Cycle Cost (LCC) analysis, which models the combined impact of appliance first cost and operating cost changes on a representative commercial building sample in order to identify the fraction of customers achieving LCC savings or incurring net cost at the considered efficiency levels. Thus, the commercial discount rate value(s) used to calculate the present value of energy cost savings within the LCC model implicitly plays a role in estimating the economic impact of potential standard levels. This report provides an in-depth discussion of the commercial discount rate estimation process. It is an update to previous reports on estimating commercial discount rates from firm-level financial data (Fujita, 2016). Major topics covered in this report include: Discount rate estimation methods and rationale; -Data sources used and data limitations; -Discount rate distributions for use in standards analysis; -Discount rate estimation methods and distributions specific to the small business subgroup analysis. Going forward, this report will be updated as data allow and analyses necessitate.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2023

Potential impact of work from home jobs on residential energy bills: A case study in phoenix, AZ, USA

Nearly one-third of U.S. households face challenges paying energy bills. During the day, many residents have routine access to cooled environments provided by others—employers, shopping centers, and other public buildings. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has significantly shifted the cost burden of air conditioning in hot cities. Specifically, during the pandemic, many companies either laid off employees or put them in work-from-home (WFH) assignments. Large tech companies are already promoting WFH as a long-term option for their employees, even after the pandemic. This change in the nature of the workforce might reduce daily travel expenses for workers, but could also significantly increase residential energy bills, particularly during summer in very hot climates. Here, this study uses building energy simulations to quantify the potential residential energy bill penalties resulting from WFH for typical residences in Phoenix. Four building archetypes are used in this study to represent variations in building vintage, occupancy, and characteristics. The results show that, for some single-family residences in Phoenix, WFH can increase annual energy bills by more than $1100 (up to a 70% increase). The study also demonstrates that building performance enhancement retrofit measures have the potential to reduce this WFH energy bill penalty for the existing buildings substantially.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Improved Particle Swarm Algorithm Using Rubik’s Cube Topology for Bilevel Building Energy Transaction

Following the rapid growth of distributed energy resources (e.g., renewables, battery), localized peer-to-peer energy transactions are receiving more attention for multiple benefits, such as reducing power loss and stabilizing the main power grid. To promote distributed renewables locally, the local trading price is usually set to be within the external energy purchasing and selling price range. Consequently, building prosumers are motivated to trade energy through a local transaction center. This local energy transaction is modeled in bilevel optimization game. A selfish upper level agent is assumed with the privilege to set the internal energy transaction price with an objective of maximizing its arbitrage profit. Meanwhile, the building prosumers at the lower level will response to this transaction price and make decisions on electricity transaction amount. Therefore, this non-cooperative leader-follower trading game is seeking for equilibrium solutions on the energy transaction amount and prices. Additionally, a uniform local transaction price structure (purchase price equals selling price) is considered here. Aiming at reducing the computational burden from classical Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) transformation and protecting the private information of each stakeholder (e.g., building), swarm intelligence-based solution approach is employed for upper level agent to generate trading price and coordinate the transactive operations. On one hand, to decrease the chance of premature convergence in global-best topology, Rubik’s Cube topology is proposed in this study based on further improvement of a two-dimensional square lattice model (i.e., one local-best topology-Von Neumann topology). Rotating operation of the cube is introduced to dynamically changing the neighborhood and enhancing information flow at the later searching state. Several groups of experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of proposed Rubik’s Cube topology-based particle swarm algorithm. The results have validated the effectiveness of proposed topology and operators comparing with global-best version PSO and Von Neumann topology-based PSO and its scalability on larger scale applications.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2023

Environmental life cycle assessment of treatment and management strategies for food waste and sewage sludge

A consequential life cycle assessment (LCA) was utilized to compare the environmental impacts of food waste and sewage sludge management strategies. The strategies included a novel two-phase anaerobic digestion (AD) system and alternatives including landfill, waste-to-energy, composting, anaerobic membrane bioreactor, and conventional AD (wet continuous stirred-tank reactor [CSTR]). The co-management of food waste with sewage sludge was also considered for the two-phase AD system and for a conventional AD reactor. Further, a multidimensional LCA approach was taken, considering the five-midpoint impact categories of global warming, smog, human health particulate, acidification, and eutrophication estimated using the U.S. EPA Tool for the Reduction and Assessment of Chemical and Other Environmental Impacts. Co-management of food waste and sewage sludge using the novel two-phase AD system was shown to maximize energy recovery and had a net global warming benefit while reducing other environmental impacts compared with the alternative management strategies. It had similar relative environmental advantages across all categories as conventional AD, with the advantage of a smaller physical footprint. However, both approaches featured net environmental burdens when the background electric grid intensity fell below 0.25 kg CO 2 -eq kWh -1 , as could be expected in a decarbonized electric future. Upgrading the biogas produced from AD to renewable natural gas can displace the use of fossil natural gas for other non-electricity energy requirements that are difficult to decarbonize and may extend the time period of significant environmental benefits of utilizing AD for organic waste management. Treatment of the nutrient-rich supernatant generated by the novel two-phase AD system could be an obstacle for utilities with stringent nutrient discharge limits. Future research and full-scale implementation are needed to demonstrate the benefits of the two-phase AD system predicted through this analysis.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Black hole explosions as probes of new physics

The final stage of black hole evaporation is a potent probe of physics beyond the Standard Model: Hawking-Bekenstein radiation may be affected by quantum gravity “memory burden effects,” or by the presence of “dark,” beyond-the-Standard-Model degrees of freedom in ways that are testable with high-energy gamma-ray observations. We argue that information on either scenario can best be inferred from measurements of the evaporation’s light curve and by correlating observations at complementary energies. We offer several new analytical insights in how such observations map on the fundamental properties of the evaporating black holes and of the possible exotic particles they can evaporate into. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Federico, Kevin (ORCID:0009000708441977)↗
DOE OSTI2026

Netload Range Cost Curves for Coordinated Transmission-Distribution Planning Under DER Growth Uncertainty

The increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) requires better coordination between transmission and distribution (T&D) planning to ensure system security and cost efficiency. However, misaligned planning horizons, computational burdens, and privacy concerns hinder effective coordination, leading to either underutilized resources caused by overinvestments or reliability risks due to underinvestment. To address this challenge, we introduce netload range cost curves (NRCCs), a novel approach for managing long-term DER growth uncertainty through T&D coordination, while preserving existing data-sharing and regulatory structures. NRCCs provide pairs of (i) peak substation netload guarantees and (ii) corresponding distribution upgrade options and costs, enabling their seamless integration into transmission planning workflows. To compute NRCCs efficiently, we develop a transmission-aware distribution network planning (TADNP), which is subsequently integrated to an iterative computation procedure. These NRCCs are then embedded into an NRCC-informed transmission planning model to enable resource-efficient coordination. We illustrate our proposed approach with a case study based on realistic distribution and transmission systems in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Our results indicate the possibility of dramatic savings in transmission investments by incorporating the proposed NRCC-integrated T&D coordination framework.

Li, Yujia↗
DOE OSTI2021

Advancing Equity in Utility Regulation

Increasingly, states are recognizing equity as a goal of utility regulation, going beyond traditionally stated objectives to ensure that electricity systems are reliable, safe, and fairly priced. State initiatives are critical not only to address historical inequities, but to ensure equitable benefits and burdens in the transition to net-zero emissions by 2050. This report provides four perspectives on advancing equity in electric utility regulation, from representatives of energy justice and consumer organizations and a leading utility in this area. The authors provide recommendations related to regulatory issues such as stakeholder engagement, defining "public interest," intervenor funding, electricity infrastructure siting, access to distributed energy technologies, consumer protections, bill affordability programs, rate design, program design, and metrics to track and evaluate results of policies, regulations, and programs intended to deliver equitable outcomes.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗