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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
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2014

Strontium Iodide Instrument Development for Gamma Spectroscopy and Radioisotope Identification

Development of the Europium-doped Strontium Iodide scintillator, SrI2(Eu), has progressed significantly in recent years. SrI2(Eu) has excellent material properties for gamma ray spectroscopy: high light yield (>80,000 ph/MeV), excellent light yield proportionality, and high effective atomic number (Z=49) for high photoelectric cross-section. High quality 1.5 and 2 diameter boules are now available due to rapid advances in SrI2(Eu) crystal growth. In these large SrI2(Eu) crystals, optical self-absorption by Eu2+ degrades the energy resolution as measured by analog electronics, but we mitigate this effect through on-the-fly correction of the scintillation pulses by digital readout electronics. Using this digital correction technique we have demonstrated energy resolution of 2.9% FWHM at 662 keV for a 4 in3 SrI2(Eu) crystal, over 2.6 inches long. Based on this digital readout technology, we have developed a detector prototype with greatly improved radioisotope identification capability compared to Sodium Iodide, NaI(Tl). The higher resolution of SrI2(Eu) yields a factor of 2 to 5 improvement in radioisotope identification (RIID) error rate compared to NaI(Tl).

energy resolution↗
DOE OSTI2011

EnergyPlus Graphical User Interface

LBNL, Infosys Technologies and Digital Alchemy are developing a free, comprehensive graphical user interface (GUI) that will enable EnergyPlus to be used more easily and effectively by building designers and other professionals, facilitating its widespread adoption. User requirements have been defined through a series of practitioner workshops. A new schematic editor for HVAC systems will be combined with different building envelope geometry generation tools and IFC-based BIM import and export. LBNL and Digital Alchemy have generated a detailed function requirements specification, which is being implemented in software by Infosys, LBNL and and Digital Alchemy. LBNL and practitioner subcontractors will develop a comprehensive set of templates and libraries and will perform extensive testing of the GUI before it is released in Q3 2011. It is planned to use an Open Platfom approach, in which a comprehensive set of well documented Application Programming Interfaces (API's) would be provided to facilitate both the development of third party contributions to the official, standard GUI and the development of derivative works.

Source record↗
DOE OSTI2012

Superluminal Labview Code

This labview code is used to set the phase and amplitudes on the 72 antenna of the superluminal machine, and to map out the radiation patter from the superluminal antenna.Each antenna radiates a modulated signal consisting of two separate frequencies, in the range of 2 GHz to 2.8 GHz. The phases and amplitudes from each antenna are controlled by a pair of AD8349 vector modulators (VMs). These VMs set the phase and amplitude of a high frequency signal using a set of four DC inputs, which are controlled by Linear Technologies LTC1990 digital to analog converters (DACs). The labview code controls these DACs through an 8051 microcontroller.This code also monitors the phases and amplitudes of the 72 channels. Near each antenna, there is a coupler that channels a portion of the power into a binary network. Through a labview controlled switching array, any of the 72 coupled signals can be channeled in to the Tektronix TDS 7404 digital oscilloscope. Then the labview code takes an FFT of the signal, and compares it to the FFT of a reference signal in the oscilloscope to determine the magnitude and phase of each sideband of the signal. The code compensates for phase and amplitude errors introduced by differences in cable lengths.The labview code sets each of the 72 elements to a user determined phase and amplitude. For each element, the code runs an iterative procedure, where it adjusts the DACs until the correct phases and amplitudes have been reached.

Wheat, Robert↗
DOE OSTI2015

SHOCKED SURFACE STEREO IMAGING WITH FIBER-OPTIC IMAGING PROBES

“A picture tells a thousand words”—this is a concept that captivates everyone, from the casual observer to the experimental physics scientist. To bring this concept to light in support of Stockpile Stewardship subcritical experiments executed at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), we have developed a new diagnostic tool to investigate the behavior of materials under high-explosive dynamic shock conditions. For the Leda subcritical experiment executed in August, 2014, a single line-of-sight imaging system was designed and fielded as a stretch diagnostic goal for National Security Technologies, LLC (NSTec). For the Lyra series, beginning with the Orpheus experiment in September 2015, a newly created dynamic stereo surface imaging (DSSI) capability was deployed. The DSSI diagnostic records a high-speed image sequence that allows scientists to peer inside an imploding hydrodynamic test article with stereoscopic imaging.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2021

Integration of Dynamical System Scaling to RAVEN and Facility Application

As part of the design optimization and model validation effort within the hybrid energy systems program, the research to implement dynamical system scaling (DSS) code to RAVEN is funded under the Integrated Energy System program in collaboration with the Digital Reactor Technology & Development department. The DSS data processing algorithm has been coded within the RAVEN framework along with other metrics and postprocessing models. The implemented code was tested using a gravity-driven draining tank draining case modeled in RELAP5-3D and generated data was successfully postprocessed based on the scaling analyses defined by DSS. Postprocessed data concluded less agreement for the tank exit velocity and indicated that the modeled input deck for RELAP5-3D requires modification to enforce minimal pressure differential effects to the draining process.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2020

Data Collection and Analysis Challenges and Mitigation Strategies for Quantitative Human Factors Research Studies in Nuclear Power Plant Modernization

The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program Plant Modernization Pathway is conducting targeted research and development (R&D) to address aging and reliability concerns with the legacy instrumentation and control and related information systems of the U.S. LWR fleet. In this effort, the application of human factors engineering (HFE) provides an important role in ensuring new digital plant technologies enable broad innovation and business improvement with continued operational safety. Evaluation is a key activity in HFE, which often occurs iteratively through the system design lifecycle. While qualitative methods are important in collecting information of how users perform tasks through observations, quantitative methods are equally important in assessing system design based on performance. In collecting and analyzing this quantitative data, there are notable challenges in the nuclear HFE domain that may threaten the validity and reliability of the inferences made in these studies. Notable challenges include small sample size and limited resources, large error variance and small effect size, an “adding test features to losing degrees of freedom” dilemma, non-normal distribution, and heterogeneity of variance. The results in control room usability studies are often statistically non-significant, which makes it hard to interpret. This work discusses these challenges across different scientific viewpoints and provides real-world examples of these challenges in practice. Collectively, the objective of this work is to position these challenges to the larger data science community as a means of identifying future opportunities to address these issues.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2024

BESSIE: Battery & Energy Storage Supply Chain Analysis, Mitigation Deployment, and Tools

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) and their associated power electronic interfaces are key components to delivering clean and more resilient energy, providing much-needed fast-ramping, emergency discharge, generation, and operations support to the electric grid. These services have grown to be invaluable over the past ten years and will soon be an irreplaceable element of energy delivery. The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) strives to address these challenges through a strategic approach to supply chain risk assessment and mitigation for BESS and related digital energy equipment through the BESSIE project under the Center for Securing Digital Energy Technology. Recognizing that decreasing dependence on a foreign supply chain will take significant time and investment, BESSIE’s focus is strategically addressing battery supply chain risks by pairing short-term steps to operate securely through today’s risks with long-term steps to shape the supply chain over the coming years.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2014

Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program: Digital Architecture Project Plan

There are many technologies available to the nuclear power industry to improve efficiency in plant work activities. These range from new control room technologies to those for mobile field workers. They can make a positive impact on a wide range of performance objectives – increase in productivity, human error reduction, validation of results, accurate transfer of data, and elimination of repetitive tasks. It is expected that the industry will more and more turn to these technologies to achieve these operational efficiencies to lower costs. At the same time, this will help utilities manage a looming staffing problem as the inevitable retirement wave of the more seasoned workers affects both staffing levels and knowledge retention. A barrier to this wide-scale implementation of new technologies for operational efficiency is the lack of a comprehensive digital architecture that can support the real-time information exchanges needed to achieve the desired operational efficiencies. This project will define an advanced digital architecture that will accommodate the entire range of system, process, and plant worker activity to enable the highest degree of integration, thereby creating maximum efficiency and productivity. This pilot project will consider a range of open standards that are suitable for the various data and communication requirements of a seamless digital environment. It will map these standards into an overall architecture to support the II&C developments of this research program.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2017

PROVIDING PLANT DATA ANALYTICS THROUGH A SEAMLESS DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

As technology continues to evolve and become more integrated into a worker’s daily routine in the Nuclear Power industry the need for easy access to data becomes a priority. Not only does the need for data increase but the amount of data collected increases. In most cases the data is collected and stored in various software applications, many of which are legacy systems, which do not offer any other option to access the data except through the application’s user interface. Furthermore the data gets grouped in “silos” according to work function and not necessarily by subject. Hence, in order to access all the information needed for a particular task or analysis one may have to access multiple applications to gather all the data needed. The industry and the research community have identified the need for a digital architecture and more importantly the need for a Seamless Digital Environment. An SDE provides a means to access multiple applications, gather the data points needed, conduct the analysis requested, and present the result to the user with minimal or no effort by the user. In addition, the nuclear utilities have identified the need for research focused on data analytics. The effort should develop and evaluate use cases for data mining and analytics for employing information from plant sensors and database for use in developing improved business analytics. Idaho National Laboratory is leading such effort, which is conducted in close collaboration with vendors, nuclear utilities, Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, and Electric Power Research Institute. The goal of the study is to research potential approaches to building an analytics solution for equipment reliability, on a small scale, focusing on either a single piece of equipment or a single system. The analytics solution will likely consist of a data integration layer, predictive and machine learning layer and the user interface layer that will display the output of the analysis in a straight forward, easy to consume manner. This paper will describe the study and the initial results.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗
NASA NTRS2014

Introduction

The 2014 SPIE Sensing Technologies for Global Health, Military Medicine and Environmental Monitoring conference embraced a wealth of state-of-the-art information in basic and applied science. This event covered the latest developments in the following areas: Non-invasive Disease Diagnostics for Global Health- This opening series of two consecutive sessions focused on oral biospecimen based rapid assays and point-of-care devices for the detection of pathogens causing infectious diseases, biomarkers for cancer, and analytes for noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes. They also covered presentations on the human proteasome and microbiome with linkage to human diseases and diagnostic approaches. The sessions were built on the past experience and expertise of the National Institutes of Health, National Institutes of Dental and Craniofacial Research. Military Medicine I: Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD-This assembly covered oral-biomarker based diagnostics for brain damage and TBI as well as prevention and rehabilitation technologies. Neurorehabilitation and noninvasive neuromodulation were also discussed as critical approaches for effective functioning. Military Medicine II: Physiology and Medicine of Extreme Environments and Spaceflight-This scientific segment showcased physiological, pharmacological and diagnostic sensing methodologies during spaceflight per the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as military-relevant toxicans and future sensing trends per the Department of Defense. It also included latest technologies to determine hydration status in warfighters, eye surgery using the latest laser technologies, and sensing tools for blood analysis.  Sensing Technologies for Disease Diagnostics and Environmental Monitoring-This closing series of two consecutive sessions provided the venues to learn and discuss more results on the next generation of diagnostic tools and field technologies for diseases, including biomarker detection by digital imaging, multiplex technologies, capillary electrophoresis and molecular platforms serving as labs-on-chips. This conference allowed cross-fertilization of ideas, projects and collaborative work by a multidisciplinary audience of national and international colleagues from the academia, industry and federal government: The National Institutes of Health, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Defense.

Wotring, Virginia E.↗
DOE OSTI2018

Digital Engineering Ecosystem for Innovative Nuclear Technologies

The construction, aerospace, and automotive industries have achieved considerable cost and schedule savings by utilizing virtual design. This program will develop a connected ecosystem of tools to support the design of innovative nuclear technologies. This ecosystem will develop a formal representation of information (data ontology) and systems software to facilitate digital engineering.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2015

Projection Microstereolithography for Architected Materials

Stereolithography (SL) is a prominent paradigm in the realm of additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, which refers to fabrication approaches that build “bottom up” by adding material. Pioneered in 1984 by Chuck Hull, SL relies on light-activated solidification of a liquid photosensitive resin in a layer-by-layer fashion, with the geometry of each layer defined by sectioning a three-dimensional (3D) computer model by closely-spaced parallel planes. The maturation of the technology over nearly three subsequent decades has resulted in the wide availability of commercial SL products, such as the ProJet series from 3D Systems, Inc. (which uses the proprietary acronym SLA to refer to SL technology), which routinely produces parts with 50-100 µm resolution in all three axes, and overall dimensions of 0.25-0.5 m. In the most general terms, advancements in SL technology have generally been aimed at achieving four goals: decreasing (1) system cost and (2) minimum feature size (i.e. improving resolution), while (3) increasing overall part size and (4) build speed. SL systems can be broadly categorized into two classes, by the way in which they deliver illumination to produce the shape of each object layer to be fabricated: laser-scanning and mask projection approaches. Commercially-available SL systems incorporate the laser-scanning approach, following the original scheme described by Hull, since digital image projection technology has only emerged relatively recently as a viable alternative. A significant limitation of laser scanning is the relatively slow speed of rastering the laser to form each layer’s pattern, highlighting the need for a dynamic mask-based approach to polymerize larger areas in a single exposure. The recent proliferation of digital display technologies (referred to as spatial light modulators or SLMs) has enabled the implementation of such “dynamic masking,” increasing system throughput by allowing a complete image layer to be cross-linked simultaneously. These mask projection SL systems are gaining greater prominence, and the landscape of some of the parameters available for system design, as implemented in recent work by a variety of investigators, has been reviewed by Lambert et al.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
NASA NTRS1973

Design of a fault tolerant airborne digital computer. Volume 2: Computational requirements and technology

This final report summarizes the work on the design of a fault tolerant digital computer for aircraft. Volume 2 is composed of two parts. Part 1 is concerned with the computational requirements associated with an advanced commercial aircraft. Part 2 reviews the technology that will be available for the implementation of the computer in the 1975-1985 period. With regard to the computation task 26 computations have been categorized according to computational load, memory requirements, criticality, permitted down-time, and the need to save data in order to effect a roll-back. The technology part stresses the impact of large scale integration (LSI) on the realization of logic and memory. Also considered was module interconnection possibilities so as to minimize fault propagation.

Ratner, R. S.↗