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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 325 records · Page 18
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

A geospatial risk analysis graphical user interface for identifying hazardous chemical emission sources

Background: Performing back trajectory and forward trajectory using the Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory Model (HYSPLIT) is a reliable approach for assessing particle transport after release among mid-field atmospheric models. HYSPLIT has an externally facing online interface that allows non-expert users to run the model trajectories without requiring extensive training or programming. However, the existing HYSPLIT interface is limited if simulations have a large amount of meteorological data and timesteps that are not coincident. The objective of this study is to design and develop a more robust tool to rapidly evaluate hazard transport conditions and to perform risk analysis, while still maintaining an intuitive and user-friendly interface. Methods: HYSPLIT calculates forward and backward trajectories of particles based on wind speed, wind direction, and the corresponding location, timestamp, and Pasquill stability classes of the regions of the atmosphere in terms of the wind speed, the amount of solar radiation, and the fractional cloud cover. The computed particle transport trajectories, combined with the online Proton Transfer Reaction-Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS) data (https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/ARL_Data_from_PROS_station_at_Hanford_site/19993964), can be used to identify and quantify the sources and affected area of the hazardous chemicals’ emission using the potential source distribution function (PSDF). PSDF is an improved statistical function based on the well-known potential source contribution function (PSCF) in establishing the air pollutant source and receptor relationship. Performing this analysis requires a range of meteorological and pollutant concentration measurements to be statistically meaningful. The existing HYSPLIT graphical user interface (GUI) does not easily permit computations of trajectories of a dataset of meteorological data in high temporal frequency. To improve the performance of HYSPLIT computations from a large dataset and enhance risk analysis of the accidental release of material at risk, a geospatial risk analysis tool (GRAT-GUI) is created to allow large data sets to be processed instantaneously and to provide ease of visualization. Results: The GRAT-GUI is a native desktop-based application and can be run in any Windows 10 system without any internet access requirements, thus providing a secure way to process large meteorological datasets even on a standalone computer. GRAT-GUI has features to import, integrate, and convert meteorological data with various formats for hazardous chemical emission source identification and risk analysis as a self-explanatory user interface. The tool is available at https://figshare.com/articles/software/GRAT/19426742.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2013

SOWFA Super-Controller: A High-Fidelity Tool for Evaluating Wind Plant Control Approaches

This paper presents a new tool for testing wind plant controllers in the Simulator for Offshore Wind Farm Applications (SOWFA). SOWFA is a high-fidelity simulator for the interaction between wind turbine dynamics and the fluid flow in a wind plant. The new super-controller testing environment in SOWFA allows for the implementation of the majority of the wind plant control strategies proposed in the literature.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2017

Residential Multi-Function Gas Heat Pump

This fact sheet describes a project by Southwest Gas Corporation, in collaboration with IntelliChoice Energy and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to develop hardware and software for engine and system controls for a residential gas heat pump system that provides space cooling, heating, and hot water.

Combined Heat and Power↗
DOE OSTI2022

From PeleC to PeleACC, to PeleC++

PeleC is an Exascale Computing Project application for simulating compressible combustion in complex geometries. It has been built on top of the popular AMReX library. In the beginning of the Exascale Computing Project, PeleC was focused on KNL. It uses a mixture of C++, C, and kernels written in Fortran to obtain performance by focusing on vectorization. Recently we have taken two approaches in deciding PeleC's future for obtaining performance on exascale GPU machines. In the first programming model, we decorated the Fortran kernels with OpenACC directives. This expedited our ability to run at large scales on Summit's GPUs, where we achieved a significant speedup over the CPUs on Summit. The second programming model involved rewriting the Fortran kernels in C++ and using AMReX's Kokkos-like lambda abstractions for running on the GPU. This resulted in similar speedups on Summit's GPUs over merely utilizing the CPUs. Both approaches involved AMReX's management of memory transfers between the device and host. In this work, we compare and contrast the benefits and pitfalls to both programming approaches regarding performance, performance portability, and productivity. We also discuss advantages we have found in taking the time to modernize our code and why have chosen a specific pathway to prepare our code for the future DOE exascale machines.

exascale computing↗
DOE OSTI2024

BIM Interoperability Tool for Improving IFC-based Model Data Exchange Between Architectural Design and Structural Analysis for Linear Piping Components

There is a growing need in the AEC industry for the digitalization of model-based data exchange in BIM workflows. However, users continue to face difficulties exchanging data between BIM-based computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) software, even with the open, non-proprietary data exchange format called Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). Proposed solutions in academic research focus primarily on building systems, with comparatively little attention to piping models. Therefore, this paper introduces an interoperability tool for enabling piping model data exchange between architectural and structural analysis domains. The tool is tested using a piping model created in Autodesk Revit and shows marked improvement for IFC-based CAD-to-CAE interoperability over existing practice.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2016

Parameter Estimator for Engineering Systems

This software model generates vehicle parameter sets for downstream modeling applications using real-world data. Value to users is provided through improvements to modeling activities as a result of decreases in time taken during model development and validation. Currently configured for transportation modeling activities, the software provides initial estimates for multiple fundamental vehicle parameters including mass, coefficient of drag, and tire rolling resistance using real-world drive and duty cycle information as inputs.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2013

Cement Fixation – Control System Upgrade [Slides]

Project description: Develop and deploy a new control system and necessary hardware upgrades for the cement fixation system in order to: Improve reliability of controls related hardware; Ensure drop-in, ‘like-for-like’ replacement parts are available; Create documentation and back-up software compatible with modern computers to eliminate the need to reverse-engineer documentation or software in the event of a failure.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2016

Streaming Analytics and Data Engineering

SADE is a software package for rapidly assembling analytic pipelines to manipulate data. The packages consists of the engine that manages the data and coordinates the movement of data between the tasks performing a function, a set of core libraries consisting of plugins that perform common tasks, and a framework to extend the system supporting the development of new plugins. Currently through configuration files, a pipeline can be defined that maps the routing of data through a series of plugins. Pipelines can be run in a batch mode or can process streaming data; they can be executed from the command line or run through a Windows background service. There currently exists over a hundred plugins, over fifty pipeline configurations, and the software is now being used by about a half-dozen projects.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2020

FLOP for FLAG Output Plotting

The Los Alamos hydrodynamics code, FLAG, is capable of dumping many types of output for many different variables in an array of formats. While some outputs are best viewed in a multidimensional engineering analysis visualization software, others are best viewed as 1-D “this versus that” curves. During development of a FLAG model, it is frequently required to quickly assess a model’s performance by reviewing such curves, and doing so may involve writing scripts repeatedly, adapting them each time to a specific model’s parameters. This report describes an application developed specifically to improve user efficiency in reviewing 1-D curve dumps from FLAG.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Position Papers for the ASCR Workshop on the Science of Scientific-Software Development and Use

Software is an increasingly important component in the pursuit of scientific discovery. Both its development and use are essential activities for many scientific teams. At the same time, very little scientific study has been conducted to understand, characterize, and improve the development and use of software for science. Computational science teams have diversified over time to include contributions from domain scientists who provide expertise in scientific and engineering disciplines, applied mathematicians and computer scientists who provide optimal algorithms and data structures, and software and data engineers who provide methodologies and tools adapted and adopted from other software domains. These diverse contributions have enabled tremendous advances in the pursuit of scientific discovery, even as models, computer architectures, and software environments have become more complicated. With this increasing diversity, we believe the next opportunity for qualitative improvement comes from applying the scientific method to understanding, characterizing, and improving how scientific software is developed and used. We believe that this pursuit requires expertise from computational scientists themselves, and from the cognitive and social sciences as well as the software engineering research community. As we look to increase the productivity and sustainability of the scientific-software-development-and-use cycle, a more systematic application of the scientific method to understand processes for software development and use will be a valuable tool to guide future work and result in more usable and sustainable software. This workshop will bring together computer scientists, software engineering researchers, computational scientists, applied mathematicians, social scientists, cognitive scientists, and others, to explore how we can conduct such systematic investigations, what can be learned, and how doing so will benefit the scientific enterprise. The workshop will be structured around a set of breakout sessions, with every attendee expected to participate actively in the discussions. Afterward, workshop attendees — from DOE, industry, and academia — will produce a report for ASCR that summarizes the findings of the workshop.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2020

CiteSoft_Py

There is a need to provide a way for dev-users (Scientists, Engineers, and other Software Developers) to get credit (citations) when they contribute to an important software package - particularly a large package that is already established. Various solutions (including cross package) solutions do exist, but a simple standard format that can work between multiple packages and multiple languages in a modular way is not widely available. CiteSoft_py is a python implementation of CiteSoft. CiteSoft is a plain text standard consisting of a format and a protocol that exports the citations for the end-users for whichever softwares they have used. CiteSoft has been designed so that software dev-users can rely upon it regardless of coding language or platform, and even for cases where multiple codes are working in a coupled manner. The CiteSoft_py implementation includes python decorators to make wrappers for facile use. The purpose is that when dev-users (scientists, engineers and professional programmers) contribute to a collaborative software project, that the appropriate citations (e.g., journal article, conference proceeding) are provided to the end-user. The end-user does not need to know how to use a command line interface, API, etc.

Savara, Aditya↗
DOE OSTI2015

An Integrated Tool for Functional Requirements Analysis, Function Allocation and Task Analysis

The software application is called "HFE-Trace". This is an integrated method and tool for the management of Human Factors Engineering analyses and related data. Its primary purpose is to support the coherent and consistent application of the nuclear industry's best practices for human factors engineering work. The software is a custom Microsoft® Access® application. The application is used (in conjunction with other tools such as spreadsheets, checklists and normal documents where necessary) to collect data on the design of a new nuclear power plant from subject matter experts and other sources. This information is then used to identify potential system and functional breakdowns of the intended power plant design. This information is expanded by developing extensive descriptions of all functions, as well as system performance parameters, operating limits and constraints, and operational conditions. Once these have been verified, the human factors elements are added to each function, including intended operator role, function allocation considerations, prohibited actions, primary task categories, and primary work station. In addition, the application includes a computational method to assess a number of factors such as system and process complexity, workload, environmental conditions, procedures, regulations, etc.) that may shape operator performance. This is a unique methodology based upon principles described in NUREG/CR-3331 ("A methodology for allocating nuclear power plant control functions to human or automatic control") and it results in a semi-quantified allocation of functions to three or more levels of automation for a conceptual automation system. The aggregate of all this information is then linked to the Task Analysis section of the application where the existing information on all operator functions is transformed into task information and ultimately into design requirements for Human-System Interfaces and Control Rooms. This final step includes assessment of methods to prevent potential operator errors.

Hugo, Jacques↗
DOE OSTI2018

A self-referential HOWTO on release engineering

Release engineering is a fundamental part of the software development cycle: it is the point at which quality control is exercised and bug fixes are integrated. The way in which software is released also gives the end user her first experience of a software package, while in scientific computing release engineering can guarantee reproducibility. For these reasons and others, the release process is a good indicator of the maturity and organization of a development team. Software teams often do not put in place a release process at the beginning. This is unfortunate because the team does not have early and continuous execution of test suites, and it does not exercise the software in the same conditions as the end users. I describe an approach to release engineering based on the software tools developed and used by the GNU project, together with several specific proposals related to packaging and distribution. I do this in a step-by-step manner, demonstrating how this very paper is written and built using proper release engineering methods. Because many aspects of release engineering are not exercised in the building of the paper, the accompanying software repository also contains examples of software libraries.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2020

MIRaGE: Design Software for Metamaterials

Metamaterials are artificial optical structures that allow control of light in ways not found in, or offered by, naturally occurring materials. Sandia's Multiscale Inverse Rapid Group-theory for Engineered-metamaterials (MIRaGE) software, which won an R&D100 award in 2019, allows researchers to deterministically design and produce metamaterials with unique characteristics. MIRaGE also provides powerful autonomous optimization techniques for real-world performance in a rigorous, robust, and accurate manner.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2015

Integrated platform for optimized solar PV system design and engineering plan set generation

The Aurora team has developed software that allows users to quickly generate a three-dimensional model for a building, with a corresponding irradiance map, from any two-dimensional image with associated geo-coordinates. The purpose of this project is to build upon that technology by developing and distributing to solar installers a software platform that automatically retrieves engineering, financial and geographic data for a specific site, and quickly generates an optimal customer proposal and corresponding engineering plans for that site. At the end of the project, Aurora’s optimization platform would have been used to make at least one thousand proposals from at least ten unique solar installation companies, two of whom would sign economically viable contracts to use the software. Furthermore, Aurora’s algorithms would be tested to show that in at least seventy percent of cases, Aurora automatically generated a design equivalent to or better than what a human could have done manually. A ‘better’ design is one that generates more energy for the same cost, or that generates a higher return on investment, while complying with all site-specific aesthetic, electrical and spatial requirements.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

The Corrected Distortion model for Lagrangian spray simulation of transcritical fuel injection

In this work, we present a detailed implementation and validation of the droplet modeling framework proposed by Dahms and Oefelein (2016) into the engine commercial CFD software CONVERGE using the User Defined Function (UDF) interface. The model accounts for the nonlinear deformation and oscillation experienced by liquid spray droplet injected into high pressure and temperature. Lagrangian spray simulations of Engine Combustion Network (ECN) Spray A are performed. Model validation against standard experimental measurements of liquid velocity, vapor mixture fraction is conducted. To perform more rigorous model validation, new experimental measurements based on Diffused Back Illumination (DBI) are introduced. The new measurements are processed for Projected Liquid Volume (PLV), which offers as close as possible one-to-one model validation for liquid penetration while offering new insights into the spray physics. Comparison with a One-D model based on adiabatic mixing theory by Siebers (1999) and Desantes et al. (2007) are also conducted. Through these model validation exercises, it is shown that the new framework improves liquid-phase penetration predictions, following a tendency for enhanced evaporation, compared to the standard approach for both Reynolds Average Navier Stokes (RANS) and Large Eddy Simulation (LES). Additionally, at the liquid length, maximum mixture fraction values predicted by the new approach are in good agreement those of an adiabatic mixing model. Qualitative analysis of the spray behaviors during the early stage of the injection process reveals that the proposed framework predicts significant increase in droplet evaporation rate with lower drop drag compared to the current standard approach.

42 ENGINEERING↗