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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 OSTI2022

Validation Analysis of Medium-Scale Methanol Pool Fire Simulated in SIERRA/Fuego [Slides]

Analysis of methanol pool fire conducted as part of validation study for SIERRA/Fuego. Results showed trends & errors consistent with related studies. Area validation metric provides way to quantify model form uncertainty. AVM shows that more work could be done to understand how model form uncertainty varies with mesh resolution. There is a possible atypical use of MAVM on time-series data. AVM shows mismatch between predicted flame height and experimental value less sensitive to variations in mixture fraction than temperature. Mismatch about experimental value also more symmetric for mixture fraction. Our analysis showed that mixture fraction is preferable for this application.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2022

Study of Radiative Heat Transfer and Flow Physics from Medium-scale Methanol Pool Fire Simulations [Slides]

Analysis of methanol pool fire conducted as part of validation study for SIERRA/Fuego. Radiation model was effectively calibrated by modifying radiation model parameters for methanol. Computing integrated buoyancy flux, entrainment rate, and turbulent kinetic energy allowed for evaluation of less typical quantities in this validation study. Quantities were compared with experimental data or correlations and generally showed agreement. TKE needed fine mesh to be computed accurately. Predicted flame height less sensitive to variations in mixture fraction than temperature. Mixture fraction is a preferable threshold variable for this application.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2022

F-500 Fire Suppressant & Fixative Evaluation (FY22 Final Project Report)

The goal of this project was to conduct an evaluation of F-500 Multi-Purpose Encapsulator Agent for viability as a contamination fixative and fire suppression agent for specific applications related to work performed at the Pantex Plant and Y-12 National Security Complex.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2024

CO 2 Pipeline Analysis for Existing Coal-Fired Power Plants

Previous studies have examined the needs for CO 2 transport and storage to achieve a net zero emissions economy by 2050 (Abramson and Christensen, 2021; Greig and Pascale, 2021; Chen and Pawar, 2023). This analysis examines the minimum CO 2 pipeline infrastructure necessary to transport and store CO 2 captured from coal-fired power plants. This analysis also examines an additional network configuration considering minimizing the number of state border crossings, reflecting non-economic considerations that may impact pipeline buildout.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2024

National Fire Protection Association Spurs the Safe Adoption of EVs Through Education and Outreach

As electric vehicles (EV) and their charging infrastructure steadily increase in popularity across the U.S., growing pains still exist, impeding their true potential for growth. The barriers include a general lack of knowledge around EV systems, range anxiety, electrical workplace safety practices, code compliance and inspection for charging stations, maintenance garages and workers, insurance concerns, and the potential risks associated with damaged lithium-ion batteries (fires, re-ignition, water immersion, and stranded energy).NFPA partnered with SMEs, training development organizations, and Clean City Coalitions to create a series of common online trainings for each EV ecosystem sector, educating communities on the realities of EV proliferation, myths, facts, statistics, codes, and basic information for each sector to become versed in EV knowledge. We also constructed a workshop program for the many EV stakeholders who should be involved in setting up a strategic, cohesive outlook for the participating towns and cities.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Approaches for Water Removal in Direct-Fired sCO 2 Power Cycles

There is interest in investigation of water removal processes in direct fired sCO 2 flows, as this may potentially lead to greater system efficiency as the removal of this contaminant will result in sCO 2 behaving close to idealized behaviors. Water removal should be split into a two-step process, condensation of the water, followed by separation of the liquid phase water from the sCO 2 . The two main avenues of condensation are manipulation of pressure and temperature for phase change. For this paper, temperature-based phase change is the primary focus through the implementation of heat exchangers. Of the heat exchangers investigated it was found that printed circuit heat exchangers (PCHEs) could be an alternative for this use case, though the specific design of flow channel geometry and flow direction depends on the specific system case and cannot be determined at this point. For water separation there were four processes identified, all of which already assume water is in liquid phase at that point in the system. Of these separation avenues the best candidate is the hydrocyclone as it has a proven history of separating liquid-liquid phase mixtures with small density differences in oilfield use, in addition they have been investigated and modeled specifically for water separation for sCO 2 flows and the footprint is relatively small.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Environmental Compatibility Issues for Ni-Based Alloys in Direct-Fired Supercritical CO2 Power Cycles

Direct-fired supercritical CO2 (sCO2) power cycles offer potential for high-efficiency power generation from natural gas and other fossil fuels with built-in carbon capture. Ni-based superalloys are the leading candidates for the hottest portions of these systems, where they must endure long-term exposure to high-temperature, high-pressure, high-velocity, impure CO2-rich environments. Herein we describe results of various experimental testing campaigns conduced at NETL showing that under such conditions, several simultaneously occurring degradation modes may be active including surface oxidation, alloy carburization, and oxide volatilization. It will be shown that the rates of degradation can be strongly affected by the alloy composition, impurities in the CO2, manufacturing method (wrought vs additive), and other factors. The influence of these factors in controlling alloy degradation are discussed in the context of potential compatibility issues for components in real sCO2 systems, such as compact heat exchangers. Finally, as a potential remedial measure, ongoing work involving protective coatings suitable for complex geometries is presented.

alloy oxidation↗
DOE OSTI2025

Handbook for Performing Hydrocarbon Fuel Fires in XTF For Fast-Heat System Level Tests

This document serves to provide information on all aspects of a system level thermal qualification test including a description of the setup and conduct of a full system fuel fire test in the Thermal Test Complex (TTC) Crosswind Test Facility (XTF). This might be referred to as a “handbook” for future tests. This information is intended to assist technologists and test directors in performing these types of tests in the future.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2025

Tritium Containment Vessel Response to Thermal and Mechanical Abuse Environments for Fire Safety Assessments

This report evaluates leakage behavior from tritium containment vessels under thermal abuse and combined thermal-mechanical abuse conditions to better understand safety implications for releases occurring in a fire scenario. Surrogate gases were used for all tests in this report. Leakage through the valves from thermal pressurization was observed when heating rates >0.8°C/s were sustained to >300°C. Gas plumes were visualized from vessels that were heated above 260°C and then dropped.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2025

5G integrated edge computing platform for efficient component monitoring in coal-fired power plants

This project developed a cutting-edge 5G-integrated edge computing framework to enhance operational efficiency and reliability in coal-fired power plants through real-time component monitoring and anomaly detection. The initiative focused on leveraging distributed machine learning, federated learning, and 5G-based dynamic network slicing to support scalable, fault-tolerant monitoring environments to meet the operational requirements in industrial control systems. With a Distributed Edge Computing Service (DECS) orchestration, this project enabled federated learning at edge for condition monitoring and introduced adaptive client selection strategies to minimize communication overhead. Scalable distributed training was achieved using the Horovod framework, thus enhancing performance across edge nodes. In the realm of 5G networking, the project designed and deployed reconfigurable, QoS-aware network slicing tailored for operational technology (OT) environments, integrating software-defined networks to bolster cyber-resilience and enabling dynamic slicing for federated learning workloads. A significant milestone was the development of a virtualized ICS environment with 5G core integration—which allowed elastic and fault tolerant distributed training on real-world datasets such as NASA Bearings, Hydraulic Systems, and TEP. To broaden the impact of the project, a TRL-3 virtualized ICS testbed for research and education was designed. This project engaged several graduate and undergraduate students to conduct research on the cutting-edge technology, and it resulted in one PhD dissertation, one MS thesis, and over 14 peer-reviewed publications. With the support of this project students also participated in national cybersecurity competitions to improve their professional development skills.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2026

High-Accuracy and High-Stability Fiber-Optic Temperature Sensors for Coal Fired Advanced Energy

A research team at Michigan State University, led by Dr. Ming Han, has developed a revolutionary fiber-optic thermometer for use in next-generation coal-fired power plants. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, this new sensor is designed to measure extremely high temperatures with unmatched accuracy and long-term stability. Unlike conventional optical sensors that can give false readings due to mechanical strain and often drift out of calibration at high heat, this new technology uses a sealed gas chamber as its core. By measuring the temperature-dependent properties of the gas (air or argon), the sensor’s readings remain absolute and reliable, completely unaffected by the physical stresses on the surrounding equipment. The breakthrough design eliminates the need for complex and costly correction systems. It represents a fundamental shift in sensing technology, paving the way for a primary thermometer that maintains calibration and provides foundational accuracy essential for advanced energy systems.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2021

Slipstream Testing of Amine-Based Solvents at a Low-Rank Coal-Fired Power Plant

Conference presentation for 38th Annual International Pittsburgh Coal Conference, Virtual, September 20–23, 2021. To better assess mitigation strategies for aerosol reduction to extend solvent life, the University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) installed a pilot-scale CO 2 absorption system at a lignite-fired plant in central North Dakota. The pilot-scale system was operated using both commercial KS-1™ solvent and advanced KS-21™ solvent provided by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI). MHI’s proprietary amine emission reduction unit (AERU™) technology was installed downstream of the absorber columns to reduce solvent losses by recovering amines at the system outlet. Fine particulate loading was measured throughout the capture system with and without a WESP operating and using both solvents. Captured particulate was brought back to the EERC to be analyzed for chemical composition and to be examined by scanning electron microscopy for particulate structure. These variables were then correlated to performance of particulate control devices in reducing aerosol formation and solvent losses.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2025

Predicting soot and radiation in pool fires using flamelet methods

This work provides an overview of the ongoing research to better estimate radiation and soot in large-scale pool fires. The core focus of this presentation is on improvements to models for novel physics at larger scales.

Meehan, Michael Alexander [Sandia National Laborat↗
DOE OSTI2026

TES: Modelling Microbes to Predict Post-Fire Carbon Cycling in the Boreal Forest across Burn Severities (Exploratory Proposal)

Wildfires in boreal ecosystems represent a globally significant ecological process that is expected to be sensitive to changing climate as well as forest management strategies, but is currently insufficiently understood and represented in models. We sought to determine whether linking belowground microbial community composition, size, and activity to aboveground properties of burn severity and plant community composition (upland jack pine and upland spruce) would allow us to better model post-fire soil CO 2 fluxes using the Carbon, Organisms, Rhizosphere and Protection in the Soil Environment (CORPSE) model. We used an integrated modelling experimental approach, with mechanistic laboratory experiments designed to inform models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Sharing leaky-integrate-and-fire neurons for memory-efficient spiking neural networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained increasing attention as energy-efficient neural networks owing to their binary and asynchronous computation. However, their non-linear activation, that is Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron, requires additional memory to store a membrane voltage to capture the temporal dynamics of spikes. Although the required memory cost for LIF neurons significantly increases as the input dimension goes larger, a technique to reduce memory for LIF neurons has not been explored so far. To address this, we propose a simple and effective solution, EfficientLIF-Net, which shares the LIF neurons across different layers and channels. Our EfficientLIF-Net achieves comparable accuracy with the standard SNNs while bringing up to ~4.3× forward memory efficiency and ~21.9× backward memory efficiency for LIF neurons. We conduct experiments on various datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, TinyImageNet, ImageNet-100, and N-Caltech101. Furthermore, we show that our approach also offers advantages on Human Activity Recognition (HAR) datasets, which heavily rely on temporal information. The code has been released at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/EfficientLIF-Net.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2019

From Farms to Forests: Landscape Carbon Balance after 50 Years of Afforestation, Harvesting, and Prescribed Fire

Establishing reliable carbon baselines for landowners desiring to sustain carbon sequestration and identify opportunities to mitigate land management impacts on carbon balance is important; however, national and regional assessments are not designed to support individual landowners. Such baselines become increasingly valuable when landowners convert land use, change management, or when disturbance occurs. We used forest inventories to quantify carbon stocks, estimate annual carbon fluxes, and determine net biome production (NBP) over a 50-year period coinciding with a massive afforestation effort across ~80,000 ha of land in the South Carolina Coastal Plain. Forested land increased from 48,714 ha to 73,824 ha between 1951 and 2001. Total forest biomass increased from 1.73–3.03 Gg to 17.8–18.3 Gg, corresponding to biomass density increases from 35.6–62.2 Mg ha−1 to 231.4–240.0 Mg ha−1. Harvesting removed 1340.3 Gg C between 1955 and 2001, but annual removals were variable. Fire consumed 527.1 Gg C between 1952 and 2001. Carbon exported by streams was <0.5% of total export. Carbon from roots and other harvested material that remained in-use or in landfills comprised 49.3% of total harvested carbon. Mineral soil carbon accounted for 41.6 to 50% of 2001 carbon stocks when considering depths of 1.0 or 1.5 m, respectively, and was disproportionately concentrated in wetlands. Moreover, we identified a soil carbon deficit of 19–20 Mg C ha−1, suggesting opportunities for future soil carbon sequestration in post-agricultural soils. Our results provide a robust baseline for this site that can be used to understand how land conversion, forest management, and disturbance impacts carbon balance of this landscape and highlight the value of these baseline data for other sites. Our work also identifies the need to manage forests for multiple purposes, especially promotion of soil carbon accumulation in low-density pine savannas that are managed for red-cockaded woodpeckers and therefore demand low aboveground carbon stocks.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Measurements and Prediction of Ash Deposition in a Cyclone-Fired Boiler Operating under Variable Load Conditions

Measurements of ash deposition rates were made between the secondary superheater and reheater sections of a 450 MW cyclone-fired lignite boiler as the operational load varied from 33 to 100%. Significant reductions in deposition rates with a decrease in operational load were observed. To uncover the causative mechanisms behind these observations, operational data from the power plant were used to carry out computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations of the boiler. After ascertaining that the gas temperatures and velocities at various sections within the boiler were being represented adequately, decoupled simulations of the ash deposition process on the deposit probe were carried out using a finely resolved boundary layer mesh. Fly ash particle size distribution (PSD) and its concentration for the decoupled calculations were determined from stand-alone cyclone barrel simulations. The ash partitioning (mass %) between the fly ash and slag was found to be ~50:50, which was in line with previous field observations, and it did not vary significantly across different cyclone loads. The predicted PSD of the deposit ash was concentrated in the size range 10–30 microns, which was in agreement with cross-sectional images of the deposit obtained from the measurements. At lower loads, sharp variations in the deposition rates were predicted in the gas temperature range 950–1150 K. The particle kinetic energy—particle viscosity-based capture methodology utilized in this study in conjunction with appropriate ash compositions, ash viscosity models and gas temperature estimates can help estimate slagging propensities at different loads reasonably well in these systems.

Krishnamoorthy, Gautham (ORCID:0000000255205092)↗
DOE OSTI2020

Leaching Kinetics of Rare Earth Elements from Fire Clay Seam Coal

Recovery of rare earth elements (REEs) from coal samples collected from the Fire Clay coal seam using diluted mineral acid solutions was investigated. The initial processing step was coal recovery using conventional froth flotation which concentrated the REEs in tailing material resulting in an upgrade to values around 700 ppm on a dry whole mass basis. Leaching experiments were performed on the flotation tailings material using a 1.2 M sulfuric acid solution adjusted to a temperature of 75 °C to study the extractability of REEs from coal material. The effect of particle size, leaching time, leaching temperature, and solid concentration on REE leaching recovery were evaluated. The kinetic data obtained from leaching over a range of temperatures suggested that the leaching process follows the shrinking core model with possibly a mixed control mechanism that may be a result of several heterogenous materials leaching simultaneously. Leaching recovery increased rapidly at the beginning of the reaction then slowed as the system reached equilibrium. The apparent activation energy determined from test data obtained over a range of temperatures using 1 M sulfuric acid was 36 kJ/mol for the first 20 min of reaction time and 27 kJ/mol for the leaching period between 20 and 120 min. The leaching of light REEs during the initial stage was determined to be driven by a chemical reaction, followed by the formation of a product layer, which required lower activation energy in the later stage of leaching. In regards to the heavy REEs, the major mechanism for leaching is desorption and the product layer formation does not affect the heavy REEs significantly.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗