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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 415 records · Page 23

Classroom aerosol dispersion modeling: experimental assessment of a low-cost flow simulation tool

The purpose of this study was to assess the utility of a low-cost flow simulation tool for an indoor air modeling application by comparing its outputs with the results of a physical experiment, as well as those from a more advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package. In this study, five aerosol dispersion tests were performed in two different classrooms by releasing a CO 2 tracer gas from six student locations. Resultant steady-state concentrations were monitored at 13 locations around the periphery of the room. Subsequently, the experiments were modeled using both a low-cost tool (SolidWorks Flow Simulation) and a more sophisticated tool (STAR-CCM+). Models were evaluated based on their ability to predict the experimentally measured concentrations at the 13 monitoring locations by calculating four performance parameters commonly used in the evaluation of dispersion models: fractional mean bias (FB), normalized mean-square error (NMSE), fraction of predicted value within a factor of two (FAC2), and normalized absolute difference (NAD). The more sophisticated model performed better in 15 of the 20 possible cases (five tests at four parameters each), with parameters meeting acceptance criteria in 19 of 20 cases. However, the lower-cost tool was only slightly worse, with parameters meeting acceptance criteria in 18 of 20 cases, and it performed better than the other tool in 3 of 20 cases. Because it provides useful results at a fraction of the monetary and training cost and is already widely accessible to many institutions, such a tool may be worthwhile for many indoor aerosol dispersion applications, especially for students or researchers just beginning CFD modeling.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

High-resolution climate model datasets for energy infrastructure planning in a renewable-dependent future

Electrification and renewables deployment efforts are amplifying the interdependence of the climate and energy systems. Increases in climate model resolution, which is now approaching that of reanalysis datasets and operational weather forecast models, present a unique opportunity to use future climate projections for energy infrastructure planning. In this Perspective, we review recent developments in high-resolution climate modeling, which have been driven by increased computing power and advanced software tools. We then look ahead to discuss how high-resolution climate data can be used to plan for a renewable-dependent future, and envision a unified climate-energy model framework that captures the two-way feedbacks between these interdependent systems.

climate change↗

The 4D Camera: An 87 kHz Direct Electron Detector for Scanning/Transmission Electron Microscopy

We describe the development, operation, and application of the 4D Camera—a 576 by 576 pixel active pixel sensor for scanning/transmission electron microscopy which operates at 87,000 Hz. The detector generates data at ~480 Gbit/s which is captured by dedicated receiver computers with a parallelized software infrastructure that has been implemented to process the resulting 10–700 Gigabyte-sized raw datasets. The back illuminated detector provides the ability to detect single electron events at accelerating voltages from 30 to 300 kV. Through electron counting, the resulting sparse data sets are reduced in size by 10--300× compared to the raw data, and open-source sparsity-based processing algorithms offer rapid data analysis. The high frame rate allows for large and complex scanning diffraction experiments to be accomplished with typical scanning transmission electron microscopy scanning parameters.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

SYMBIOSYS: A Methodology for Performance Analysis of Composable HPC Data Services

Microservices are a powerful new way of building, customizing, and deploying distributed services owing to their flexibility and maintainability. Several large-scale distributed platforms have emerged to serve the growing needs of data-centric workloads and services in commercial computing. Concurrently, high-performance computing (HPC) systems and software are rapidly evolving to meet the demands of diversified applications and heterogeneity. The interplay of hardware factors, software configuration parameters, and the flexibility offered with a microservice architecture makes it nontrivial to estimate the optimal service instantiation for a given application workload. Further, this problem is exacerbated when considering that these services operate in a dynamic and heterogeneous HPC environment. An optimally integrated service can be vastly more performant than a haphazardly integrated one. Existing performance tools for HPC either fail to understand the request-response model of communication inherent to microservices or they operate within a narrow scope, limiting the insight that can be gleaned from employing them in isolation. We propose a methodology for integrated performance analysis of HPC microservices frameworks and applications called SYMBIOSYS. We describe its design and implementation within the context of the Mochi framework. This integration is achieved by combining distributed callpath profiling and tracing with a performance data exchange strategy that collects fine-grained, low-level metrics from the RPC communication library and network layers. The result is a portable, low-overhead performance analysis setup that provides a holistic profile of the dependencies among microservices and how they interact with the Mochi RPC software stack. Using HEPnOS, a production-quality Mochi data service, we demonstrate the low-overhead operation of SYMBIOSYS at scale and use it to identify the root causes of poorly performing service configurations.

microservices↗

Miniaturized Magnetoelastic Sensor System

This article describes the design, assembly, and implementation of a hand-held, magnetic-field-based sensor system that can be adapted for a variety of sensing applications. The miniaturized system is based on Chemical Identification by Magneto-Elastic Sensing (ChIMES) technology, which uses three concentric solenoid coils to wirelessly interrogate a sensor body comprised of a response material coupled to a magnetoelastic wire. The response material expands when it encounters a target, imposing mechanical stress on the wire and altering its magnetic permeability. The sensor bodies are passive, requiring no external power source, and they are small, measuring about 15 mm in length and 3.0 mm in diameter. Up to four sensor bodies can be configured as an evenly-spaced linear array. The sensor system operates by applying a low-frequency, current-stabilized, filtered triangle wave to a uniform-density excitation coil to switch the magnetic domains within the wire. Further, the responses from the sensors are picked up by a detection coil as stress-induced changes in the Faraday voltage, and the strong magnetic field induced by the excitation coil in the detection coil is nullified by a cancellation coil reverse-wound in series with the detection coil. The responses of the sensors in an array are separated in time by a linear gradient dc biasing coil. The sensors can be interrogated through metallic and nonmetallic barriers. The signals from the detection coil and the excitation coil are digitized by a pair of bipolar analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). A Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC) and associated software perform data acquisition and control all aspects of the sensor system hardware. The program allows the user to select the number of sensors in the array, the type of signal that is being collected, and the number of samples to take. The program also allows for signal processing of the sensor data, such as baseline correction. The program can differentiate sensor peaks from each other and calculate the magnitude of each sensor response with less than 1% error. The data are then displayed along with a graph of the signal.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

The Silver Lining

Clouds are shareable scientific instruments that create the potential for reproducibility by ensuring that all investigators have access to a common execution platform on which computational experiments can be repeated and compared. By virtue of the interface they present, they also lead to the creation of digital artifacts compatible with the cloud, such as images or orchestration templates, that go a long way-and sometimes all the way-to representing an experiment in a digital, repeatable form. In this article, I describe how we developed these natural advantages of clouds in the Chameleon testbed and argue that we should leverage them to create a digital research marketplace that would make repeating experiments as natural and viable part of research as sharing ideas via reading papers is today.

Cloud computing↗

Performance Testing and Assessment of Protection Scheme Using Real-Time Hardware-in-the-Loop and IEC 61850 Standard

The main challenge of the microgrid is to design a suitable protection scheme due to the complexity of the architecture of the microgrid. The importance of the proposed protection technique is threefold. First, it presents a co-simulation platform to integrate between a simulated model on power system computer aided design (PSCAD)/real time digital simulator computer aided design (RSCAD) software’s and physical devices schweitzer engineering laboratories (SEL) 421-7 relays to protect the microgrid that includes different resources connected based on inverter interface. Second, it presents a comprehensive hardware/software setup to test the protective relays in a closed loop system and shows how to configure the protective relay’s International Electrotechnical Commission 61850 communications. Third, IEEE 1588 standard is used to provide sub nanoseconds latency between the simulated model that emulated on real time digital simulator (RTDS) and the external devices. Also, the measurement signals are synchronized between RTDS and the external devices using giga-transceiver synchronization card (GTSYNC) interface card and SEL-2488 satellite-synchronized network clock. The results showed that the co-simulation infrastructure introduces a highly dependable design, analysis, and testing environment for cyber and physical data flow in the system. Besides that, the voltages at ac/dc sides and frequency at fault condition were maintained due to the energy storage device contributions at different modes of operation.

42 ENGINEERING↗

A Simple, Scalable Large Deformation Solid Mechanics Implementation in the MOOSE Framework

This article describes a large deformation solid mechanics solver implemented as part of the freely available and open source MOOSE finite element simulation framework. The article documents the choices made in developing the solid mechanics framework and describes novel formulations for the gradient operator and constitutive modeling framework made to simplify implementations of different coordinate systems, stabilized gradient operators, and different constitutive model inputs and outputs. In the process, the article describes a new formulation that casts objective integration of the Cauchy stress as a linear transformation of the small stress rate. Finally, the article presents key implementation details and examines the parallel efficiency of the solid mechanics solver implemented in MOOSE. The implementation retains a good weak scaling efficiency beyond 1,000 parallel processes. The article includes a discussion of the factors limiting the parallel efficiency of implicit, large deformation solid mechanics codes on current high-performance computers, with the main current limitation being the scalability of the algebraic multigrid methods used to solve the linearized equilibrium equations.

Applied computing → Computer-aided design↗

Towards Seamless Interoperability of MPI-OpenMP Applications

A chasm exists between mathematical software libraries written for MPI-based applications and those written for OpenMP applications. Recently, however, PETSc enables the simple use of its MPI-based linear solvers from OpenMP applications. Separately, the MPICH MPI development team has started a new project to allow almost seamless MPI use in OpenMP applications. Both proposed approaches would result in a similar user experience. Here, we discuss the reasons for these projects and their potential for providing more numerical library choices for OpenMP applications, including the unlimited assortment of linear solvers available in PETSc. In addition, we present the performance of an application using the first approach, demonstrating its efficacy.

MPI↗

Modeling Framework to Analyze Performance and Structural Reliability of Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cells

Solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC) have been receiving significant attention recently because of their high energy efficiency and fast hydrogen production. In this study a multi-physics model to simulate the SOEC performance and structural reliability of a state-of-the-art planar SOEC design was developed. The electrochemical reactions, fluid dynamics, species transport, electron transfer, and heat transfer were modeled in the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software STAR-CCM+. The thermomechanical analysis and the associated structural reliability evaluations were conducted using the commercial finite element analysis software ANSYS. The electrochemistry model was validated by using the experimentally obtained current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of the electrode-supported SOECs. The reliability analysis using a risk-of-rupture approach showed low failure probabilities under standard operating conditions considered in this study. For cells operated at voltages well above a thermoneutral voltage, the reliability evaluations indicated a potential risk of cell failure, but the damage was concentrated locally in specific areas of the cell which typically do not lead to total loss of cell function. The presented approach provides insights for evaluating representative cell and stack performances and structural reliability without intensive testing and for developing optimally performing and structurally reliable SOECs for efficient hydrogen generation.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

The Study on the Shock Wave Propagation Rule of a Gas Explosion in a Gas Compartment

Combined with the k-ε turbulence model of general application, a refined finite element model of a utility tunnel’s gas compartment filled with the methane/air mixture is developed. A series of analyses are made by using the powerful industry-leading computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software flame acceleration simulator (FLACS) to study the shock wave propagation rule in the gas compartment. The longitudinal and transversal distribution laws of the explosion shock wave are gained taking into consideration the spatial characteristics of the gas compartment. The influences of a few parameters, such as initial conditions and section size of the gas compartment, on the shock wave propagation rule are further discussed. The basic procedure for predicting the peak pressure of the blast wave is provided by considering the initial conditions and the gas compartment, and the corresponding injury effect of the explosion wave on the living beings is assessed. The investigation demonstrates that the peak pressure by the coupled effect between the initial conditions is significantly influenced, especially at the upper and lower gas explosion limits. The peak pressure increases gradually as the width or height increases, and both basically meet the linear relation. The proposed method can forecast the peak pressure of the explosion shock wave in the gas compartment accurately. According to the peak pressure longitudinal and transversal distributions of the blast wave, the peak pressure is far greater than the killing pressure threshold in the underground and closed space; consequently, it is not safe for the living beings in the gas compartment.

Lin, Shu-Chao↗

Sodium Fluid Properties

This software is used to compute numerous properties for the liquid and vapor phases of sodium.

Andrs, David↗

Potassium Fluid Properties

This software is used to compute numerous properties for the liquid and vapor phases of potassium.

Andrs, David↗