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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 271 records · Page 15
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2019

Topology Reconfiguration and distributed Volt Var Control (TR-dVVC) v1

Topology Reconfiguation is a simple algorithm to choose a network configuration with the least losses in a system with high penetration of renewable energy. It uses a linearized optimal power flow algorithm to identify the optimal setpoints of PV in a system, then performs an exhaustive search of switch configurations to find the loss minimizing solution, it repeats this process until convergence. At the end, the operator has a switch schedule for a 24 hour period that should minimize losses. VVC is a distributed algorithm in which PV units drive voltage at points within the network to 1 per unit through reactive power control. The VVC algorithm relies on extremum seeking control to provide the control. The software package is a simulation of VVC on a standard IEEE 34 bus three phase network.

MacDonald, Jason↗
DOE OSTI2023

TACPLUS-DO-AUTH

SF-23-084 This software provides enhanced authorization and access control support to be used in tandem with the open source Terminal Access Controller Access Control System (TACACS+) software tac_plus; providing Authentication, Authorization and Auditing (AAA) capabilities for networking devices.

WEST, GABRIALA↗
DOE OSTI2022

Ten simple rules for getting and giving credit for data

This article attempts to summarize current best practices that support the movement towards enabling researchers to cite and receive credit for their data. The authors are a small representation of the people and organizations trying to make this happen, and we acknowledge that it is not possible to capture all efforts behind this endeavor in 10 Simple Rules. We encourage interested readers to dive deeper by providing related resources along the way.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2014

Status Report on the Development of Micro-Scheduling Software for the Advanced Outage Control Center Project

The long-term viability of existing nuclear power plants (NPPs) in the United States (U.S.) is dependent upon a number of factors, including maintaining high capacity factors, maintaining nuclear safety, and reducing operating costs, particularly those associated with refueling outages. Refueling outages typically take 20-30 days, and for existing light water NPPs in the U.S., the reactor cannot be in operation during the outage. Furthermore, given that many NPPs generate between $1-1.5 million/day in revenue when in operation, there is considerable interest in shortening the length of refueling outages. Yet, refueling outages are highly complex operations, involving multiple concurrent and dependent activities that are difficult to coordinate. Finding ways to improve refueling outage performance while maintaining nuclear safety has proven to be difficult. The Advanced Outage Control Center project is a research and development (R&D) demonstration activity under the Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program. LWRS is a R&D program which works with industry R&D programs to establish technical foundations for the licensing and managing of long-term, safe, and economical operation of current NPPs. The Advanced Outage Control Center project has the goal of improving the management of commercial NPP refueling outages. To accomplish this goal, this INL R&D project is developing an advanced outage control center (OCC) that is specifically designed to maximize the usefulness of communication and collaboration technologies for outage coordination and problem resolution activities. This report describes specific recent efforts to develop a capability called outage Micro-Scheduling. Micro-Scheduling is the ability to allocate and schedule outage support task resources on a sub-hour basis. Micro-Scheduling is the real-time fine-tuning of the outage schedule to react to the actual progress of the primary outage activities to ensure that support task resources are optimally deployed with the least amount of delay and unproductive use of resources. The remaining sections of this report describe in more detail the scheduling challenges that occur during outages, how a Micro-Scheduling capability helps address those challenges, and provides a status update on work accomplished to date and the path forward.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2014

Using the Beopt Automated Residential Simulation Test Suite to Enable Comparative Analysis Between Energy Simulation Engines (Preprint)

Verification and validation are crucial software quality control procedures to follow when developing and implementing models. This is particularly important because a variety of stakeholders rely on accurate predictions from building simulation programs. This study uses the BEopt Automated Residential Simulation Test Suite (BARTS) to facilitate comparison of two energy simulation engines across various building components and includes building models that isolate the impacts of specific components on annual energy consumption. As a case study, BARTS has been used to identify important discrepancies between the engines for several components of the building models. These discrepancies are caused by differences in the algorithms used by the engines or coding errors.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2013

Automatic Energy Schemes for High Performance Applications

Although high-performance computing traditionally focuses on the efficient execution of large-scale applications, both energy and power have become critical concerns when approaching exascale. Drastic increases in the power consumption of supercomputers affect significantly their operating costs and failure rates. In modern microprocessor architectures, equipped with dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and CPU clock modulation (throttling), the power consumption may be controlled in software. Additionally, network interconnect, such as Infiniband, may be exploited to maximize energy savings while the application performance loss and frequency switching overheads must be carefully balanced. This work first studies two important collective communication operations, all-to-all and allgather and proposes energy saving strategies on the per-call basis. Next, it targets point-to-point communications to group them into phases and apply frequency scaling to them to save energy by exploiting the architectural and communication stalls. Finally, it proposes an automatic runtime system which combines both collective and point-to-point communications into phases, and applies throttling to them apart from DVFS to maximize energy savings. The experimental results are presented for NAS parallel benchmark problems as well as for the realistic parallel electronic structure calculations performed by the widely used quantum chemistry package GAMESS. Close to the maximum energy savings were obtained with a substantially low performance loss on the given platform.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2015

Recovery Act--Class 8 Truck Freight Efficiency Improvement Project

Daimler Trucks North America completed a five year, $79.6M project to develop and demonstrate a concept vehicle with at least 50% freight efficiency improvement over a weighted average of several drive cycles relative to a 2009 best-in-class baseline vehicle. DTNA chose a very fuel efficient baseline vehicle, the 2009 Freightliner Cascadia with a DD15 engine, yet successfully demonstrated a 115% freight efficiency improvement. DTNA learned a great deal about the various technologies that were incorporated into Super Truck and those that, through down-selection, were discarded. Some of the technologies competed with each other for efficiency, and notably some of the technologies complemented each other. For example, we found that Super Truck’s improved aerodynamic drag resulted in improved fuel savings from eCoast, relative to a similar vehicle with worse aerodynamic drag. However, some technologies were in direct competition with each other, namely the predictive technologies which use GPS and 3D digital maps to efficiently manage the vehicles kinetic energy through controls and software, versus hybrid which is a much costlier technology that essentially targets the same inefficiency. Furthermore, the benefits of a comprehensive, integrated powertrain/vehicle approach was proven, in which vast improvements in vehicle efficiency (e.g. lower aero drag and driveline losses) enabled engine strategies such as downrating and downspeeding. The joint engine and vehicle developments proved to be a multiplier-effect which resulted in large freight efficiency improvements. Although a large number of technologies made the selection process and were used on the Super Truck demonstrator vehicle, some of the technologies proved not feasible for series production.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2016

Final Report: Non-Visible, Automated Target Acquisition and Tracking

The Roadside Tracker (RST) represents a new approach to radiation portal monitors. It uses a combination of gamma-ray and visible-light imaging to localize gamma-ray radiation sources to individual vehicles in free-flowing, multi-lane traffic. Deployed as two trailers that are parked on either side of the roadway (Fig. 1); the RST scans passing traffic with two large gamma-ray imagers, one mounted in each trailer. The system compensates for vehicle motion through the imager’s fields of view by using automated target acquisition and tracking (TAT) software applied to a stream of video images. Once a vehicle has left the field of view, the radiation image of that vehicle is analyzed for the presence of a source, and if one is found, an alarm is sounded. The gamma-ray image is presented to the operator together with the video image of the traffic stream when the vehicle was approximately closest to the system (Fig. 2). The offending vehicle is identified with a bounding box to distinguish it from other vehicles that might be present at the same time. The system was developed under a previous grant from the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO). This report documents work performed with follow-on funding from DNDO to further advance the development of the RST. Specifically, the primary thrust was to extend the performance envelope of the system by replacing the visible-light video cameras used by the TAT software with sensors that would allow operation at night and during inclement weather. In particular, it was desired to allow operation after dark without requiring external lighting. As part of this work, the system software was also upgraded to allow the use of 64-bit computers, the current generation operating system (OS), software development environment (Windows 7 vs. Windows XP, and current Visual Studio.Net), and improved software version controls (GIT vs. Source Safe.) With the upgraded performance allowed by new computers, and the additional memory available in a 64-bit OS, the system was able to handle greater traffic densities, and this also allowed addition of the ability to handle stop-and-go traffic.

98 NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL P↗
DOE OSTI2017

Enter TCM and Associated Equipment into Stage One Mockup

The scope of the FY17 milestone involved entering the TCM into stage one mockup at the Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) and completing initial testing. While the TCM head was designed and partially fabricated in FY16, the ancillary equipment and software for standalone operation at the IMCL still required development. The tasks required to prepare the TCM for stage one mockup included: 1 – develop cell feedthroughs for both optical and electrical signals, 2 – design and construction of a film thickness monitor, 3 – drafting an equipment qualification plan, 4 – develop an integrated equipment rack to house lasers and instrumentation, and 5 – develop coding instrumentation software for controlling the TCM.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2015

Procedure for Performing Security Camera Optical Performance Analysis Tests

Digital security camera technologies proliferate the security marketplace with manufacturers extoling the functions, features, specifications and virtues of their cameras. A process to comparatively analyze security camera technologies using international camera analysis standards and methods provides a defensible means to assess camera image quality on a technically comparable basis. The procedures in this document use ISO standard camera test charts and camera image analysis software to perform test chart image analysis for comparative camera assessment. Step-by-step procedures for acquiring test chart images in the laboratory and producing analysis data using analysis software GUI controls and interfaces for comparative analysis of security camera image quality are detailed in this document. The procedures have been validated through the test and analysis of fixed box and 180 degree field of view multi-imager cameras as well as, fixed and varifocal lenses and analog-to-digital video encoder image quality performance attributes.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Optimized Microwave Digestion and Quantification Procedure for Boron Carbide samples

A microwave-assisted HNO3-H2SO4-HF digestion system was explored/optimized for the total dissolution of Boron Carbide samples followed by multi-elemental determination using ICP-MS and ICP OES, in order to improve the methods used in a previous try using a microwave-assisted H2O2-HNO3-HF digestion system. The samples were microwave digested to accomplish complete dissolution needed to perform quantitative analysis of their metal content. Two Boron Carbide samples were provided to us: JM10 and JM11. The Boron Carbide samples were completely dissolved at the end of the optimized microwave digestion procedure that was developed. The digested samples were analyzed for metals mostly by ICP MS; few elements were analyzed by ICP-OES. Microwave digestion reactions were performed in a Titan MPS instrument (Perkin Elmer, USA). Titan MPS instrument is equipped with Temperature and Pressure regulations and controlled by software. Each microwave digestion batch contained the samples of interest along with a reagent blank and one certified standard (1632e) in order to (i) compensate for the contaminations present in the reagents, (ii) ensure that the digestion was complete and (iii) that there was a good recovery of all the constituents. The certified standard used (1632e) was provided with USGS certificates of analysis.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2021

Nanosecond Gated CMOS Camera (NSGCC) ICD (Rev. 2.1)

The Ultra-Fast X-ray Imager (UXI) program is an ongoing effort at Sandia National Laboratories to create high speed, multi-frame, time-gated Read Out Integrated Circuits (ROICs), and a corresponding suite of photodetectors to image a wide variety of High Energy Density (HED) physics experiments on both Sandia’s Z-Machine and LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF). Several cameras have been designed over the length of the program; one of the most recent is the Icarus, which is an improvement on past imagers (Furi and Hippogriff). A second sensor that can be connected is the Daedalus sensor. The Icarus is a 1024 × 512-pixel array with either 25 μm or 8 µm spatial resolution containing four frames of storage per pixel and has improved timing generation and distribution components while achieved 2 ns time gating. The Daedalus sensor is also a 1024 x 512-pixel array with 25 µm special resolution containing three frames of storage per pixel and has an increased set of features for a wider variety of applications from interlacing of rows in each frame to configurability of all shutters. See Section 14 for details regarding the Icarus implementation of the firmware and Section 15 for details regarding the Daedalus implementation. Due to the unique test environments UXI sensors are targeted for, full custom hardware was required to physically mount an Icarus or Daedalus sensor, manage its various functions, and read out pixel data for transfer to a host computer. Beyond experimental functionality, the hardware also needed to accommodate sensor characterization requirements. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s ‘Version 4.0 Board’ was the result of these efforts. It mounts all the components required to fully utilize the Icarus and Daedalus sensors including analog to digital converters to convert pixel data and various system voltages to digital form for readout and analysis, DAC channels for remote configuration of critical bias voltages, static random-access memories to buffer pixel data, RS422 and Gigabit Ethernet communications for remote access, and an FPGA to tie these components together. This document describes the FPGA electrical interfaces in detail to allow the reader a greater understanding of the device, and to facilitate implementation of custom software to control and manage it. The Version 4.0 Board is a continuation of the Nano-second Gated CMOS hardware design that retains much of the functionality of the Version 1.0 Board while adding features including a DAC instead of digital potentiometers, as well as sensors for pressure and radiation. The Version 4.0 board is intended for applications requiring tight form-factor enclosures. It is composed of two stacking boards; one holds the FPGA and regulators to power the various components of the board while the other contains the mating connector to the sensor, image-readoff ADCs, the DAC, and other components.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2023

Flow Sensor Test Article (F-STAr) - Assembly and Water Testing Report

The Flow Sensor Test Article (F-STAr) is a new test article under development for the Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop (METL) facility at Argonne National Laboratory. F-STAr’s purpose is to provide sodium submersible, high flowrate testing capabilities for the development of sensors, components, fluid studies and more. This report will provide a status update on the assembly and initial qualification testing of F-STAr. All components have been manufactured and received. Some modifications to these components were made to support minor changes in the test article design. Additionally, the power distribution, and data acquisition and control enclosures were designed, completed, and tested along with the control system software. Furthermore, initial qualification testing was completed in water. Finally, the F-STAr submersible Electromagnetic Flowmeter (EMFM) was completed and calibrated in flowing sodium.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2025

A formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide toxics monitor for environmental justice

DOE’s Integrated Field Laboratories (IFLs) require a vast array of measurements to measure urban air quality. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and formaldehyde (HCHO) are ubiquitous pollutants with numerous sources, most notably vehicle exhaust. High-spatial density measurements are critical to understanding how certain neighborhoods are more adversely impacted by pollutants. This report describes the results of a Phase I SBIR project to develop and demonstrate a rapid, affordable, low-power monitor to provide high spatial resolution mobile measurements of formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide at street-level, where people live and walk. The spatial density will be achieved via rapid measurements on a mobile platform. This sensor will quantify spatial disparities in cities of the toxics, HCHO and NO2, as well as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide for better source identification. These species are detected in the mid infrared by laser absorption spectroscopy, and fiberoptics are used. Tasks accomplished include identification and testing of the appropriate spectroscopic regions; coupling of laser light into a fiberoptic system; development of software to control miniature electronics to scan and control two lasers simultaneously; coupling of the mid infrared fiber into a multipass cell for enhanced pathlength and sensitivity; characterization of sources of instrument noise; and design work for a Phase II prototype.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2026

ARCH Technology Snapshot Autonomous Robot Control Hierarchy (ARCH): A universal software system that removes the need to rebuild robotic software for every new platform or task

Robots are increasingly used to perform repetitive, hazardous, and time-sensitive tasks, improving safety and operational efficiency. However, most robotic systems remain difficult to adapt because they are tightly tied to specific hardware and require extensive reprogramming for each new configuration.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2014

Using the BEopt Automated Residential Simulation Test Suite to Enable Comparative Analysis Between Energy Simulation Engines: Preprint

Verification and validation are crucial software quality control procedures when developing and implementing models. This is particularly important as a variety of stakeholders rely on accurate predictions from building simulation programs. This study uses the BEopt Automated Residential Simulation Test Suite (BARTS) to facilitate comparison of two energy simulation engines across various building components and includes models that isolate the impacts of specific building components on annual energy consumption. As a case study, BARTS has been used to identify important discrepancies between the engines for several components of the building models; these discrepancies are caused by differences in the models used by the engines or coding errors.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗