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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 433 records · Page 24
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Alternative Fueling Station Locations

Alternative fueling stations are located throughout the United States and Canada, and their availability continues to grow. The Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC) maintains a website where you can find alternative fueling stations near you or on a route, obtain counts of alternative fueling stations by state, view maps, and more. The most recent dataset available for download here provides a "snapshot" of the alternative fueling station information for compressed natural gas (CNG), ethanol (E85), propane/liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), biodiesel (B20 and above), electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, and liquefied natural gas (LNG), as of July 29, 2021.

alt fuel↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cardinality-Regularized Hawkes-Granger Model

We propose a new sparse Granger-causal learning framework for temporal event data. We focus on a specific class of point processes called the Hawkes process. We begin by pointing out that most of the existing sparse causal learning algorithms for the Hawkes process suffer from a singularity in maximum likelihood estimation. As a result, their sparse solutions can appear only as numerical artifacts. In this paper, we propose a mathematically well-defined sparse causal learning framework based on a cardinality-regularized Hawkes process, which remedies the pathological issues of existing approaches. We leverage the proposed algorithm for the task of instance-wise causal event analysis, where sparsity plays a critical role. We validate the proposed framework with two real use-cases, one from the power grid and the other from the cloud data center management domain.

Ide, Tsuyoshi↗
DOE OSTI2025

Energy efficient integrated photonic systems based on inverse design

The energy footprint of modern information processing and communications systems is immense and utilizes a significant fraction of total global energy usage. Data centers alone consume over 70 billion kilowatt-hours per year. Much of this energy usage is intrinsic to the use of electronic wiring, making optical-based technologies a necessary and promising route to mitigating energy consumption in short- to medium-distance communication links. In this project, we developed and implemented a framework for the design of optical components, based on machine learning, which enables optical components relevant to optical information processing to be realized at their physical performance limits.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

ARM TBS and TigerShark deployment data in 2021

In 2021, observational data collected using ARM platforms, including seven TigerShark UAS flights and 133 tethered balloon system (TBS) flights, were archived by the ARM Data Center and made publicly available to the user community.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

MSD CoP Webinar: Quantum Computing Futures through a Multisector Lens

Context: This webinar featured two presentations examining quantum computing and its complex implications across the energy, water, and materials sectors. Olivier Ezratty introduced quantum computing, its anticipated applications and added value, and the hardware required to support these systems. He also discussed their energy demands and the role of the Quantum Energy Initiative in developing an interdisciplinary research field focused on these challenges. David McCollum then explored the opportunities and multisectoral challenges associated with next-generation, quantum-accelerated data centers, including their potential energy and resource impacts and the infrastructure chokepoints that could emerge. Together, the presentations emphasized the need for long-term planning and cross-cutting research collaboration as quantum computing technologies continue to develop. Presenters: Olivier Ezratty (Quantum Energy Initiative); David McCollum (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Moderator: Patrick M. Reed (MSD CoP Facilitation Team); Gokul Iyer (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) This webinar was held on: July 9th, 2026 from 1:00–2:30 PM EDT.

Quantum Computing↗
DOE OSTI2026

Supply Chain for Photovoltaics in the United States: 2024 in Review

Solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage system (BESS) technologies are two immediately available options for meeting U.S. electricity demands, which are increasing due to expansion of loads from end uses including data centers, buildings, vehicles, and factories. Globally, PV and BESS supply chains are dominated by products manufactured in China and elsewhere by Chinese companies. However, U.S. PV and BESS manufacturing have recently grown, with some capacity in each step of the PV supply chain, albeit not enough to currently meet demand with domestic manufacturing alone. This study analyzes U.S. PV supply chains and costs in 2024, for the crystalline silicon and cadmium telluride module supply chains. The full report additionally addresses the PV balance of system, inverter and BESS supply chains. The study concludes with an analysis of technology installation trends, government support for domestic manufacturing, manufacturing jobs, and the domestic content of PV systems installed in the United States in 2024.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Generic and ML Workloads in an HPC Datacenter: Node Energy, Job Failures, and Node-Job Analysis

HPC datacenters offer a backbone to the modern digital society. Increasingly, they run Machine Learning (ML) jobs next to generic, compute-intensive workloads, supporting science, business, and other decision-making processes. However, understanding how ML jobs impact the operation of HPC datacenters, relative to generic jobs, remains desirable but understudied. In this work, we leverage long-term operational data, collected from a national-scale production HPC datacenter, and statistically compare how ML and generic jobs can impact the performance, failures, resource utilization, and energy consumption of HPC datacenters. Our study provides key insights, e.g., ML-related power usage causes GPU nodes to run into temperature limitations, median/mean runtime and failure rates are higher for ML jobs than for generic jobs, both ML and generic jobs exhibit highly variable arrival processes and resource demands, significant amounts of energy are spent on unsuccessfully terminating jobs, and concurrent jobs tend to terminate in the same state. We open-source our cleaned-up data traces on Zenodo (https://doi. org/10.5281/zenodo.13685426), and provide our analysis toolkit as software hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/atlarge-research/2024-icpads-hpc-workload-characterization). This study offers multiple benefits for data center administrators, who can improve operational efficiency, and for researchers, who can further improve system designs, scheduling techniques, etc.

crossanalysis↗
DOE OSTI2021

Priority-enabled Load Balancing for Dispersed Computing

Opportunistic managed access to local in-network compute resources can improve the performance of distributed applications and reduce the dependence on shared network resources. Instead of backhauling application data to a centralized cloud data center for processing, networked services may be adaptively and continuously dispersed into shared compute resources that are closer to the source of need. While this approach has several benefits, support for mission-aware access to computation is often an afterthought, and is implemented as a brittle extension over traditional load-balancer solutions.In this work, we investigate the design of two priority-aware resource allocation strategies and two load-balancing dispatching strategies as first class citizens in an open-source dispersed computing middleware. We present a control theoretic analysis of these load-balancing primitives to identify weaknesses and strengths in our design, and recommend future directions. In parallel, we prototype two priority-aware allocation algorithms to validate our priority predictions. In initial experiments our prototype shows substantial gains in processing prioritized load. Finally, we make our source-code and experimental configurations open source.

Paulos, Aaron↗
DOE OSTI2021

Markets and Economic Requirements for Fission Batteries and Other Nuclear Systems

Fission Batteries (FBs) are nuclear reactors defined by five characteristics which enable large-scale deployment: cost competitive, standardized sizes for economic mass production, easy installation and removal, secure and safe unattended operation with high reliability. FBs are not defined by technology or power level. Technical and market considerations suggest that most FBs will produce 20 to 30 MWt. This proceedings reports on the outcomes of two workshops that were held in January 2021 to better define markets and economic challenges for FBs. Three major markets were identified. The largest market is the industrial and commercial heat market. There are about 4000 industrial users (excluding utilities) that require more than one megawatt of heat. The number of customers versus size of heat demand was determined. In a low-carbon world there is the potential for many additional customers—including expanded biofuels production and district heat. The second market is for non-grid electricity. This includes co-generation plants that produce heat and electricity for a single customer. The third market is the maritime market with ~100,000 ships worldwide. In the United States, natural gas is the low-cost energy option today and will remain so unless constraints or taxes impact its use. If restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, the FB competition includes natural gas with carbon capture, biofuels, hydrogen and grid electricity. Natural gas with carbon capture is not economically viable on a small scale. Biofuels may be expensive but may be the economically preferred option for locations with small energy demands of a few megawatts. Hydrogen is a potential competitor with many of the characteristics of natural gas. Grid electricity is not a competitive source of heat. For FBs to be economically competitive, the price of delivered heat must be $20-50/MWh ($6-15/million BTU). The economically competitive range for non-grid electricity is estimated at $70-100/MWh. These electricity prices are competitive with the retail prices of electricity in many parts of the United States for the customer. FBs are not expected to be competitive selling wholesale electricity to the grid. To achieve the aforementioned cost targets for heat and electricity markets, FB designers must (1) maximize the power output within the constraints of a FB (e.g., truck transportability, passive decay heat removal), (2) drastically reduce the size of onsite staff, (3) adopt core designs with low fuel costs (enrichment and fabrication), and (4) develop a system design that is efficiently manufactured in factories. The business case depends upon more than being just a replacement for natural gas. The largest incentives for adoption of FBs is where they create new markets and new sources of revenue. An example is the paper and pulp industry that burns biomass wastes to provide heat and electricity to make paper. An external heat source could meet the demand for heat and electricity by the paper process and enable converting waste biomass into liquid biofuels rather than burning to provide heat. Other markets, such as data centers, are driven by special energy requirements such as extreme reliability. Most customers are not in the energy business but need heat and electricity to produce a product—a manufactured good, education, retail sales (shopping malls), marine transport or some other product. As a consequence, there will be large incentives to lease rather than own FBs. Leasing avoids the regulatory challenges that remain with the owner of the FB. Leasing creates large incentives for FP standardization of sizes and transportability to maintain the value of the FB at the end of the lease—similar to the leasing of jet engines and aircraft. The economic constraints combined with technical constraints suggest competitive FBs will likely have outputs exceeding 10 MWt. There appear to be little incentives for very long-lived reactor cores because such machines require much larger inventories of fuel. Maintenance requirements and the options to provide technology updates may favor shorter lifetimes (~5 years). The assessment is that there is the potential for FBs to be economically viable and play a major role in global decarbonization in three markets: heat, non-grid electricity and maritime applications.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Reducing Commercial Building Process Loads and Refrigeration Unit Energy Consumption

This resource provides guidance on larger PPLs, many of which are hardwired. Examples include elevators, enterprise servers, freezers, and water fountains with chillers, which are often collectively referred to as "process loads." This resource also outlines how to assess process loads in a building, describes the procedure for identifying which loads to target for reduction, and provides an overview of reduction strategies. In this resource, process loads are broken into five categories - food handling, refrigeration, internal mobility, data center and information technology, and water handling.

commercial buildings↗
DOE OSTI2023

Progress Update from the EV Charging Working Group (#982)

The EV charging working group (#982) was formed in summer 2022 to define the equip, points, relationships, and operational data related to Level 1-2 (AC) and Level 3 (DC) Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE). Last year, the working group developed formal EVSE-related equipment definitions, where were merged into the Project Haystack documentation in November 2022. More recently the group has also been working to expand and improve Haystack definitions related to electrical equipment and circuits. This initiative is important both for EV charging related applications and to improve Project Haystack's appeal to other industry verticals such as data centers, commercial building electrification, and more. In this presentation we will share the working group's motivation, progress, and near-term objectives.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗
DOE OSTI2023

Evaluating Portable Parallelization Strategies for Heterogeneous Architectures in High Energy Physics

High-energy physics (HEP) experiments have developed millions of lines of code over decades that are optimized to run on traditional x86 CPU systems. However, we are seeing a rapidly increasing fraction of floating point computing power in leadership-class computing facilities and traditional data centers coming from new accelerator architectures, such as GPUs. HEP experiments are now faced with the untenable prospect of rewriting millions of lines of x86 CPU code, for the increasingly dominant architectures found in these computational accelerators. This task is made more challenging by the architecture-specific languages and APIs promoted by manufacturers such as NVIDIA, Intel and AMD. Producing multiple, architecture-specific implementations is not a viable scenario, given the available person power and code maintenance issues. The Portable Parallelization Strategies team of the HEP Center for Computational Excellence is investigating the use of Kokkos, SYCL, OpenMP, std::execution::parallel and alpaka as potential portability solutions that promise to execute on multiple architectures from the same source code, using representative use cases from major HEP experiments, including the DUNE experiment of the Long Baseline Neutrino Facility, and the ATLAS and CMS experiments of the Large Hadron Collider. This cross-cutting evaluation of portability solutions using real applications will help inform and guide the HEP community when choosing their software and hardware suites for the next generation of experimental frameworks. We present the outcomes of our studies, including performance metrics, porting challenges, API evaluations, and build system integration.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Analysis of NCERC Critical Experiments with ENDF/B Nuclear Data Libraries

Nuclear data (ND) libraries are the backbone of the nuclear industry, as they are the collections of tabulated probabilities that define sub-atomic particle interactions with matter. In the areas of criticality safety and experiments, no evaluated nuclear data files (ENDF) are more important than those containing neutron cross section data. It is upon these files, and accompanying radiation transport codes, that practitioners are enabled to safely design both subcritical and critical systems. Likewise, in a symbiotic fashion, it is the same critical assemblies which are used primarily to validate that the cross sections are correct. The ENDF/B library, the United States’ national library maintained by the National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), is soon releasing a new version, ENDF/B-VIII.1. Prior to the official release, several beta versions of the library were prepared and tested in simulation suites. The work presented here are results comparing the newest ENDF/B beta release (ENDF/B-VIII.1b3) and ENDF/B-VIII.0 with recent experiments done at the National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC) as well as correlated experiments from the Los Alamos Critical Experiments Facility (LACEF). These NCERC and LACEF experiments were performed in part to provide validation for various cross sections that were identified as insufficient in the ENDF/B-VIII.0. In particular, lead, copper, fluorine, and chlorine, as well as the major actinides, were targeted from the last decade of critical experiments.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

How To Determine and Verify Operations and Maintenance Savings in Energy Savings Performance Contracts

Operations and maintenance (O&M) savings frequently occur in energy savings performance contracts (ESPCs). During FY 2022, 37% of reported annual cost savings for projects awarded under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) ESPC indefinite delivery indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts and in the performance period were due to O&M or other energy- and/or water-related cost savings, with the balance (63%) from utility cost savings (i.e., energy or water cost savings). Sometimes the energy- and water-related cost savings are acknowledged and included in payments within ESPCs; other times, for various reasons, they are not. As presented in this guide, FEMP recommends including energy- and water-related cost savings that are O&M (including related repair and replacement) savings in the financial aspects of an ESPC, to the extent such savings can be documented. Inclusion of these savings will help augment project scopes and/or lower interest costs (by shortening financing terms). However, there is a burden of proof as to what constitutes acceptability in O&M savings that needs to be carefully considered and documented in individual projects. Beyond promoting a key tenet used in U.S. federal performance contracting—that savings must be from actual budgets and therefore based on the level of O&M that is actually occurring, not what should have been performed—FEMP also recommends good practice in establishing and documenting O&M baselines, formulating the rationale for baseline adjustments during the performance period, and conducting ongoing verification activities. This document concludes with five examples of how O&M savings may be handled, in situations ranging from the partial displacement of O&M contracts to consolidation and “virtualization” of servers in data centers. A key theme that permeates this guide is the importance of thoroughly documenting all conditions and assumptions used in the development of and accounting for O&M costs and savings throughout the ESPC life cycle, from baseline-setting to measurement and verification (M&V) of the savings during each year of the performance period. Doing so not only prevents internal claims of non-performance (especially in the case of staff turnover during the contract term), but also simplifies ordering agency and energy service company (ESCO) response in the event of scrutiny from oversight organizations, such as government audits. While this guide focuses on federal ESPCs, it may also be applicable when O&M savings are included in utility energy service contracts (UESCs) and non-federal ESPCs.

Voss, Phil↗
DOE OSTI2024

Multi-resonant switched capacitor power converter architecture

A switched-capacitor (SC) network in an SC converter is controlled to operate at varying resonant modes to achieve high conversion ratio efficiency, at a low circuit component count. These power converters are suited to numerous application areas including improving energy efficiency of data centers. A family of resonant switched capacitor (SC) converters with multiple operating phases are presented “Multi-Resonant SC Converters”. Described in detail are an 8-to-1 Multi-Resonant-Doubler (MRD) converter and a 6-to-1 Cascaded Series-Parallel (CaSP). The topology of these converters make them amenable to combining like units in parallel toward reaching higher power levels.

Ye, Zichao↗
DOE OSTI2025

Hierarchical Resilience Planning for Networked Microgrids: A Case Study of Puerto Rico

Microgrids can be designed to enhance the energy resilience of communities and critical infrastructures, such as hospitals, data centers, and communication networks, which are vulnerable to frequent weather-related disruption. Coordinating multiple microgrids in a network can leverage the geographical diversity of load and generation resources while enabling resilient and cost-effective planning of the distribution system. Designing a networked microgrid is complex, involving intricate technical assessment, cost-benefit analysis, site-specific requirements, and the evaluation of existing resources. Therefore, this paper proposes a hierarchical resilience planning framework and performs an extensive techno-economic analysis for the design of a networked microgrid. Hierarchical resilience planning involves technology sizing at an individual community level to meet the critical load and satisfy resilience criteria, and resource optimization at networked microgrid level to provide a higher level of resilience and energy adequacy. A real-world case of Puerto Rico's cooperative microgrid “Microrred de la Montaña” is investigated considering localized electricity tariffs, site-specific demand profiles, solar generation, and existing hydro resources. Multiple optimization scenarios are developed based on the resiliency requirement to estimate the capacity of solar photovoltaic and battery energy storage (BES) to be installed at each substation. The results provide the optimal sizing for individual community and networked microgrid to withstand 1day and 3-day outages along with the criteria for critical load.

13 - HYDRO ENERGY↗