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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 487 records · Page 27
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2022

Hygrothermal simulation of exterior retrofits in a cold climate

This work presents results from moisture modeling as part of a project undertaken by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and its research partners, the University of Minnesota, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The research goal is to identify exterior wall retrofit systems for cold climates that are low cost, energy efficient, and do not result in moisture durability problems. A base case wall was identified representing a typical wood frame construction, circa 1950. Retrofit options were selected based on input from industry, academia, and published work and seven options were constructed and installed at the University of Minnesota’s cold weather exposure facility in Cloquet, MN. Measurements were carried out during winter months and the data was used for model validation. Hygrothermal simulations were then carried out using WUFI (Version 6.4) in accordance with standard ANSI/ASRHAE 160-2016, Criteria for Moisture-Control Design Analysis in Buildings. Simulations were run out to three years and results show that the exterior retrofits improve thermal performance and do not negatively impact moisture durability of the existing wall.

Aldykiewicz Jr, Antonio↗
DOE OSTI2022

Solar Decathlon Celebrates 20 Years of Building Impact

The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon® is a collegiate competition that has inspired students worldwide to enter the clean energy workforce since its inception. Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2022, the Solar Decathlon has challenged more than 25,000 students to create efficient, affordable buildings powered by renewables, while promoting student innovation, STEM education, and workforce development opportunities in the buildings industry. Compelling graphics, videos, and visuals are being developed to launch a 20th anniversary campaign in January 2022. These graphics include an interactive 20th anniversary infographic, a "Solar Decathlon - By the Numbers" video, and a graphic highlighting the diverse group of more than 25,000 past participants. In presenting these graphics at the ACEEE summer 2022 panel, attendees will be exposed to the latest communications techniques to apply to their own work. The Solar Decathlon invests in compelling visuals to recruit and inspire an imaginative and diverse group of participants each year - something that organizations of all sizes in the energy efficiency sector also need to do as they recruit for new talent. The Virtual Village of the 2020 Build Challenge homes (with more than 11,000 unique views) and the map of past competition houses highlight the competition's emphasis on multimedia that connects with competitors and the general public. Using more than 4,400 publicly available photos, including engaging virtual event snapshots with Department of Energy leaders, the Solar Decathlon captures the innovate ideas of the Build Challenge and Design Challenge teams in a way that everyone can understand.

collegiate competition↗
DOE OSTI2023

MEASUR Up: Identifying opportunities in a facility

The commercial and industrial sectors account for nearly half of the total U.S. energy consumption. To help these sectors reduce their energy intensity, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) designed the Better Buildings, Better Plants Initiative. Through this initiative, more than 900 industrial, commercial, public and residential organizations commit to long-term sustainability goals and share their proven energy efficiency strategies, which inspire others to tap into the continued potential for energy efficiency. Collectively, these organizations have saved 2.5 quadrillion BTUs of energy, equivalent to US$15.3 billion, and 155 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. Within the initiative, the Better Plants side of the program focuses specifically on the industrial sector. More than 270 industrial partners have taken advantage of the unique selection of resources offered including workforce development programs, information sharing, peer-to-peer networking, diagnostic tool loans and software tools. One of the most powerful tools off ered is a revitalization of the legacy DOE software tools used by industry for decades. These have been transformed into a new, free, opensource software tool suite: MEASUR (Manufacturing Energy Assessment Software for Utility Reduction)

Armstrong, Kristina↗
DOE OSTI2024

Ground Source Heat Pump Screening Tool and Related Resources

This archive contains both a link to Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) Screening Tool and related resources documenting its development, technical features, and applications. The web-based screening tool is a techno-economic analysis resource designed to evaluate the feasibility, costs, and benefits of implementing GSHP systems in buildings across various U.S. climate zones. It is intended for use by building owners, HVAC system designers, and installers to support decision-making in residential and commercial applications, incorporating advanced modeling capabilities such as ground heat exchanger design. The included resources detail the tool's creation and use, covering topics such as innovative ground heat exchanger design methodologies, the development of an open library of g-functions for borehole configurations, and studies on GSHP performance and economic viability in retrofitting single-family homes.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Advanced Reactor Designs Security Analysis, Risk, and Recommendations: Risks, Consequences, and Possible by-Design Mitigation Approaches Associated with Select Advanced Reactors

Next-generation advanced reactors (ARs) incorporate enhanced safety systems, have smaller source terms, and feature compact modular designs, which should lessen their collective risk profiles. However, to fully evaluate risk, security needs to be a part of the equation. Without taking security into consideration, safety systems and components in the new ARs may be vulnerable to sabotage. These base attributes, coupled with enhanced security features specific to AR design through sound engineering and security-by-design (SeBD), should provide developers and operators with lower inherent security risk profiles. Building security early into the AR design may remove or passively secure potential critical targets from an adversary’s reach , thereby increasing overall safety and security. An integrated approach and diverse design team that includes engineering, operations, and security experts are fundamental to building security into the design without sacrificing fundamental operational efficiencies and principles. The objective of this project was to evaluate the security and safety interfaces for five classes of reactors, identify potential security vulnerabilities of structures, systems, and components (SSC), and underscore the need to consider security alongside safety in the design o f these concepts. The five reactor classes evaluated in this project and presented in this report are molten-salt reactors (MSR), high temperature gas reactors (HTGR), sodium-fast reactors (SFR), advanced light-water reactors (ALWR), and microreactors. These designs were selected because they reflect the concepts that are closest to market deployment and have received significant resource investments from the public and private sector. This project assesses the inherent security risks posed by common classes of ARs, provides a methodology and framework to assess security along with safety, and offers an analysis of potential mitigation strategies that could be incorporated. For each AR technology, the SSCs that relate to radionuclide source safety functions are discussed to understand the SSC contribution to safety and relative importance in the protective strategy for the design. The assumptions that went into evaluating each reactor concept originated from generic publicly available nonproprietary information and should not directly be used to qualify an absolute risk profile nor to rank specific AR designs. Instead, the purpose of the analysis is to understand and compare the generic inherent security risks of different AR technologies.

98 - NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, SAFEGUARDS, AND PHYSICAL↗
DOE OSTI2024

IEA Wind TCP Task 49: Reference Site Conditions for Floating Wind Arrays

This report, prepared within Work package 1 of IEA Wind Task 49, presents reference site conditions for floating wind arrays to serve as a design basis for the techno-economic design of reference floating wind arrays. Data of the reference sites presented here are publicly available in an open database and thus support fast development and comparable design of floating wind arrays for various relevant conditions. The development of these reference sites drew on existing open access datasets and ongoing research projects of task participants. Six classes were identified that describe relevant key conditions for the design and development of floating wind arrays: met-ocean conditions, seabed conditions, coastal infrastructure, environmental impact, socio-economic impact, as well as regulations and permissions. The reference sites for the techno-economic design of floating wind arrays are based on a concept with building blocks to synthesize purpose-built site representations. In each of the identified classes with influencing design factors, building blocks are used to describe the characteristic properties and their spread. However, the latter three classes (i.e., environmental impact, socio-economic impact, regulations and permissions) are not included in the reference site conditions due to limited knowledge and lack of reliable criteria to quantify their impact on the techno-economic design in numeric parameters. Building blocks with key parameters for the techno-economic design of floating wind arrays are provided for met-ocean conditions, seabed conditions, and coastal infrastructure. For met-ocean conditions, multiple sites were selected for detailed analysis that represent a range of conditions across the pipeline of floating wind projects. Wind conditions and sea states are separated, and each location considers both the severity of wind and waves e.g. one site may have a moderate wave condition but severe wind condition. From this pipeline, eleven representative sites were selected where both site-specific analysis was available within the consortium, and where they represent different parts of the global pipeline. The eleven sites are: Hannibal (Italy), Humboldt (US), Ulsan (South Korea), MoneyPoint One (Ireland), Havbredey (UK), Fukushima (Japan), Utsira Nord (Norway), Gulf of Maine (US), Sud de la Bretagne II (France), Sorlige Nordsjo II (Norway). Each of these sites is summarized in the main report while more details about the studies and analyses behind the datasets are provided in the appendix. For seabed conditions, general information about the geotechnical parameters is provided and a baseline is established for the geotechnical parameters and stratigraphy that may be encountered on the sites. A set of six 'synthetic cases' is defined as building blocks providing the different parameters required for design under each case/soil condition. For the coastal infrastructure, general information about the main requirements is provided that a port should comply with to provide a satisfactory service during the construction of floating offshore wind arrays. Minimum port infrastructural requirements are provided for three types of ports.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

IEA Wind Task 49: Reference Site Conditions for Floating Wind Arrays

The commercial-scale deployment of floating offshore wind (FOW) projects is expected to take place in a diverse range of sites that may differ significantly from existing fixed-bottom projects. FOW farms are particularly sensitive to the water depth and the meteorological and oceanographic (metocean) and geotechnical conditions at the project site due to the wave-induced system motions and loads as well as the anchoring system constraints imposed by the seafloor conditions. Uncertainty around the site conditions will permeate through all aspects of project design, leading to suboptimal and overly conservative designs, increased costs, and adversely affected performance. As FOW expands into a global industry, metocean and geotechnical conditions will increasingly vary for projects located in different geographic regions or in far-from-shore, deep-water sites. This study represents the outputs of work package 1 of International Energy Agency Wind Task 49, which focuses on the integrated design of floating wind arrays. The primary goal of this study is to establish the type of parameters and constraints required to characterize FOW array reference sites; provide a realistic and publicly available set of reference site conditions to the FOW community as a baseline set of data for individual research projects; identify and categorize any critical gaps in the existing data or methodologies required to define reference site characteristics; and inform and support the design of reference FOW arrays. A building block concept was developed for synthesizing reference sites for the design of FOW arrays. The building blocks include three classes of site conditions focusing on the techno-economic design of FOW projects: metocean conditions, seabed conditions, and coastal infrastructure. All reference site data produced and collected in this study are publicly available.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Advancing Construction through the Buildings Workforce: Preprint

Buildings are America's energy hogs, consuming over 70 percent of all electricity and over 50 percent of all natural gas produced across the country. Achieving a clean energy future requires us to reinvent how buildings manage energy resources and how consumers demand it. The U.S. Department of Energy is investing in a range of technological advancements that are paving the way to a future where buildings are no longer simply energy consumers, but rather are part of an integrated system that help manage energy resources in a way that supports the electricity grid. This paradigm shift presents an opportunity to increase the efficiency of the built environment, but will only be realized if we build a knowledgeable workforce to design, construct, and operate these high-performance buildings in step with the rate of technological advancement.

ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION↗
DOE OSTI2020

The effect of lighting environment on task performance in buildings – A review

The effects of indoor environmental conditions on human health, satisfaction, and performance have been the focal point of research for decades. This paper reviews and summarizes the impact of lighting environment on task performance, specifically for the built environment audience. Existing studies included a variety of performance tests on cognitive performance and perception, visual acuity and reaction, memory, reasoning, and labor productivity. Illuminance, luminance ratio and correlated color temperature were found to affect performance in different ways, reflecting the impact of experimental techniques, conditions, performance evaluation methods used and data analysis methods. These were reviewed and categorized, with discussion on limitations related to sample size, modeling approach, carryover effects and other factors affecting individual differences in performance, with recommendations for future improvement. Although no universal conclusions can be made, in general, task performance seems to improve with higher illuminances, contrast ratios in the range of 7–11:1 (while always making sure that glare will not occur in the space) and higher correlated color temperature, while spectral tuning in the red or blue wavelengths has also shown positive effects. To obtain more generic evidence, future studies should be more consistent in terms of experimental procedures and overall light conditions, and also consider the effects of vertical illuminance, daylight provision/control, and outside views on task performance. Finally, studying performance with multi-factorial designs in a human-centered optimized manner (such as deploying variable lighting scenarios optimized for various tasks) can lead to deeper understanding of lighting effects on task performance, and ultimately to improved lighting design and operation in buildings overall.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

Basic Design Layout of a Modular Pumped Hydro Teaching Unit

This work was originally completed in July 2015 as a proposal to Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) for their engineering program and a follow up to a feasibility study completed for the Community College the year earlier as indicated below. The work was ahead of its time and funding was hard to obtain to implement a project. This work is now being formally released for distribution to a wider audience based on the evolving circumstances in greater society that now favor this approach with funding more readily available. Due to the distribution outside of SFCC, specific architectural drawing sets of the pertinent buildings called out in the design have been removed. No changes to the design have been made. The design layout utilizing a building is not meant to limit the implementation of the design. The elevation difference required may be obtained with a building, a small hill, jacking up the upper tank, or similar means. The design presented is a basic design, identifying major components and how they are connected together. The user may change components under their own liability. All local applicable codes and standards must be followed when building an actual unit, under the authority of a responsible engineer or owner. Appropriate measures must be followed to protect people from hazards such as electricity, water pressure, and general construction. A leak test to verify water tightness of the system should be conducted prior to any operations. The vision of this design is to allow a class of 10 to 15 students to construct the assembly within a month or so time period, and then learn to operate the assembly at their school location under the guidance of their instructor. This will allow the students to learn about the practical concept of storing electricity with water, and gain a hands on experience of the real world challenges faced with full Modular Pumped Hydro Projects.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Reticular exploration of uranium-based metal—organic frameworks with hexacarboxylate building units

We report that the rational reticular design of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) from building units of known geometries is essential for enriching the diversity of MOF structures. Unexpected and intriguing structures, however, can also arise from subtle changes in the rigidity/length of organic linkers and/or synthetic conditions. Herein, we report three uranium-based MOF structures—i.e., NU-135X (X = 0, 1, 2)—synthesized from trigonal planar uranyl nodes and triptycene-based hexacarboxylate ligands with variable arm lengths. A new chiral 3,6-connected nuc net was observed in NU-1350, while the extended versions of the ligand led to 3-fold catenated MOFs (NU-1351 and NU-1352) with rare 3,6-connected cml-c3 nets. Lastly, the differences in the topology of NU-1350 and NU-1351/NU-1352 could be attributed to the slight distortions of the shorter linker in the former from the ideal trigonal prism geometry to an octahedral geometry when coordinated to the trigonal planar uranyl nodes.

3,6-connected net↗
DOE OSTI2024

Optimal experimental design: Formulations and computations

Questions of ‘how best to acquire data’ are essential to modelling and prediction in the natural and social sciences, engineering applications, and beyond. Optimal experimental design (OED) formalizes these questions and creates computational methods to answer them. This article presents a systematic survey of modern OED, from its foundations in classical design theory to current research involving OED for complex models. We begin by reviewing criteria used to formulate an OED problem and thus to encode the goal of performing an experiment. We emphasize the flexibility of the Bayesian and decision-theoretic approach, which encompasses information-based criteria that are well-suited to nonlinear and non-Gaussian statistical models. We then discuss methods for estimating or bounding the values of these design criteria; this endeavour can be quite challenging due to strong nonlinearities, high parameter dimension, large per-sample costs, or settings where the model is implicit. A complementary set of computational issues involves optimization methods used to find a design; we discuss such methods in the discrete (combinatorial) setting of observation selection and in settings where an exact design can be continuously parametrized. Finally we present emerging methods for sequential OED that build non-myopic design policies, rather than explicit designs; these methods naturally adapt to the outcomes of past experiments in proposing new experiments, while seeking coordination among all experiments to be performed. Throughout, we highlight important open questions and challenges.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Potential benefits and optimization of cool-coated office buildings: A case study in Chongqing, China

Increasing envelope facet albedos considerably reduces solar heat gain, thus yielding building cooling energy savings. Few studies have explored the potential benefits of utilizing cool coatings on building envelopes (“cool-coated buildings”) based on life-cycle cost analysis. A holistic approach integrating the field testing, building energy simulation, and a 20-year life-cycle-based optimization was developed to explore cool-coated building performance and the maximum net savings of optimal building envelope retrofit and design. Experimental results showed that applying cool coatings to a west wall of an office building in Chongqing, China reduced its exterior surface temperature by up to 9.3 °C in summer. Additionally, simulation results showed that in Chongqing, making the roof and walls cool could reduce annual HVAC electricity use by up to 11.9% in old buildings (with poorly insulated envelopes) and up to 5.9% in new buildings. Retrofitting old buildings with a cool roof provided the net savings per modified area with present values up to 42.8 CNY/m2; retrofitting a new building with a cool roof or cool walls was not cost-effective. Optimizing both envelope insulation and envelope albedo can achieve 5.6 times the net savings of optimizing the insulation only, and 1.6 times that of optimizing albedo only.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

A review of select human-building interfaces and their relationship to human behavior, energy use and occupant comfort

In recent years, research has emerged to quantitatively and qualitatively understand occupants' interactions with buildings. However, there has been surprisingly little research on building interfaces and how their design, context (e.g., location), and underlying logic impact their usability and occupants’ perceived control, as well as the resulting comfort and energy performance. This means that research is needed to better understand how occupants interact with building interfaces in both commercial and residential applications; both applications are important to address as there are many differences in interface types, level of control and understanding, and even expectations of engagement. Herein, this paper provides a cursory review and discussion of select common building interfaces: windows, window shades/blinds, thermostats, and lighting controls. The goal of this paper is to review literature related to these human-building interfaces to explore interface characteristics, current design and use challenges, and relationships between building interfaces and occupants. Human-building interface interactions are complex, more research is needed to understand design, use, and characteristics. Common themes emerged throughout the literature review to explain occupant interactions (or lack of interactions) with building interfaces, which included thermal and visual comfort, ease and access of control, interface/control placement, poor interface/control design, lack of understanding, and social-behavioral dynamics.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2025

Electrical and Thermal Load Impacts of Three District Heating and Cooling Designs for an Existing Community in Washington, DC

District energy systems that provide building heating and cooling are a promising option to provide low-cost, energy efficient heating and cooling solutions for communities. As some buildings move to electrified heating designs, there may be significant increases in electric grid demand, particularly in the winter. District energy systems may be able to help reduce these high electrical demands on the electric grid, while also providing decreased overall energy consumption with an increased flexibility in electrical energy usage. To evaluate and compare district options for district-based heating and cooling, an existing neighborhood of Washington, DC consisting of 35 existing buildings was selected as a case study. This study models and compares a fourth generation (4G) district heating and cooling systems that provide hot and chilled water from a central plant directly to each prosumer and a fifth generation (5G) district heating and cooling systems that provide near-ambient water via geothermal boreholes to interface with an energy transfer station with a heat pump at each prosumer. These district systems are compared against a baseline of the non-connected buildings with their self-contained and current HVAC systems. The neighborhood was selected as a good candidate for a district system for its diversity of loads (mix of different commercial and property types) and the availability of building characteristics. URBANopt District Energy Systems (DES) was used to model the buildings and create initial Modelica models for the district systems. Finally, the DES models were tuned and simulated in Dymola, and the outputs were post-processed for verification and to calculate the electrical and thermal grid impact metrics. This is the first documentation of this workflow and its complete analysis. The three designed systems are compared via their grid metrics including: total energy consumption, electrical demand peak loads, daily peak-to-valley ratios, and system ramping. A detailed discussion is provided about how each system impacts and interacts with the electric grid.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

An open source analysis framework for large-scale building energy modeling

Full integration of building energy modelling into the design and retrofit process has long been a goal of building scientists and practitioners. However, significant barriers still exist. Among them are the lack of available: (1) configurable technology stacks for performing both small- and large-scale analyses, (2) different classes of algorithms compatible with common design workflows, and (3) analysis tools for effectively visualizing large-scale simulation results. This article discusses the OpenStudio® Analysis Framework: a scalable analysis framework for building energy modelling that was developed to overcome the three barriers listed above. The framework is open-source and scalable to facilitate wider adoption and has a clearly defined application programming interface upon which other applications can be built. It runs on high-performance computing systems, within cloud infrastructure, and on laptops, and uses a common workflow to enable different classes of algorithms. Lessons learned from previous development efforts are also discussed.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2023

Maximum-impact Adversary Design for Network-based Control System: A Case Study on Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has dramatically improved the efficiency of today's building operation and management. By connecting controllable devices into a communication network, control signals can be easily passed to the devices, and operating status can be acquired from measurable ends with minimal effort. However, this all-connected configuration could also expose the network-based control system (NBCS) to malicious actions, such as cyberattacks. One of the common NBCSs is the building automation system. With the promotion of grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs), there has been increasing attention on securing the buildings from the network perspective. This research proposes a maximum-impact adversary design framework so that the adversary can provide the most adversarial impact on the controlled system while remaining stealthy. The proposed framework is numerically demonstrated on a network-based building energy and control system. The building energy system is built in a Modelica-based simulation environment and controlled by the state-of-the-art ASHRAE Guideline 36 control sequences. The control commands at the supervisory level, generated from the Guideline 36 controller, are assumed to be sent to local devices through communication networks using the BACnet protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed maximum-impact adversary on such a system can stealthily affect the building system's performance to its maximum extent. It is anticipated that results can be used by researchers and practitioners in the building automation industry to design efficient and robust cyber-attack detection algorithms, especially for stealthy attacks.

Chu, Mengyuan↗
DOE OSTI2023

A multiplexed bacterial two-hybrid for rapid characterization of protein–protein interactions and iterative protein design

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are crucial for biological functions and have applications ranging from drug design to synthetic cell circuits. Coiled-coils have been used as a model to study the sequence determinants of specificity. However, building well-behaved sets of orthogonal pairs of coiled-coils remains challenging due to inaccurate predictions of orthogonality and difficulties in testing at scale. To address this, we develop the next-generation bacterial two-hybrid (NGB2H) method, which allows for the rapid exploration of interactions of programmed protein libraries in a quantitative and scalable way using next-generation sequencing readout. We design, build, and test large sets of orthogonal synthetic coiled-coils, assayed over 8,000 PPIs, and used the dataset to train a more accurate coiled-coil scoring algorithm (iCipa). After characterizing nearly 18,000 new PPIs, we identify to the best of our knowledge the largest set of orthogonal coiled-coils to date, with fifteen on-target interactions. Our approach provides a powerful tool for the design of orthogonal PPIs.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗