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DOE OSTI2026

Intern Poster Session 08/13: Autonomous Nuclear Robotics: Applications in nuclear waste inspection and hot cell experiments

The nuclear industry is experiencing renewed interest in autonomous robotics, yet most deployed systems remain teleoperated with limited autonomy. This work presents two contributions toward fully autonomous nuclear robotic systems: autonomous waste inspection at the Hanford Site and an autonomous hot cell laboratory framework. Inspections of Hanford's underground waste storage tanks are performed manually at significant cost and personnel exposure. We developed a reinforcement-learning (RL) training pipeline for a custom-built inspection arm. In parallel, we are designing an autonomous laboratory framework for post-irradiation examination in hot cells at the Specimen Preparation Laboratory (SPL) that integrates computer vision, task and motion planning, hardware execution, and operator-in-the-loop control. These systems demonstrate a path toward safer, more efficient nuclear operations by reducing human exposure while maintaining rigorous human oversight at critical decision points.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2023

Analysis of a Runtime Data Sharing Architecture over LTE for a Heterogeneous CAV Fleet

This paper describes a lightweight runtime architecture for telemetry, communication, and control of cars deployed with advanced driver assistance systems where a human is in the loop with the car, via an LTE connection. The system architecture supports both local control decisions based on car sensors and safety algorithms as well as high-level input from external systems that may provide insight into traffic state ahead of sensor data. Implementation of the architecture is done in ROS and depends on open-source software packages for runtime decoding of information from the vehicle’s controller area network (CAN) and integration of GPS data from accompanying sensors. The contribution of the paper is to describe the overall architecture, the data it can communicate to other systems, performance of the system at runtime, and challenges faced when deploying the architecture across a heterogeneous fleet. Preliminary results from analysis of test data will provide insights into whether the use of high-latency communication can be effective for societal-scale intelligent transportation systems when applied in future scenarios

Richardson, Alex↗

DOE OSTI2022

Architecture Design and Validation for Autonomous Energy Systems

The architecture presentation discusses the requirement grid architecture design to integrate AES capabilities. Three NREL projects that cover control, communication, and operation architectures are discussed as reference AES implementations. Testing platforms and capabilities such as ADMS test bed are introduced to validate AES solutions and developed architectures.

architecture design↗

DOE OSTI2025

Microgrid Building Block Architecture, and Subcomponents Modeling and Demonstration in Controller Hardware-in-the-Loop

The recently proposed Microgrid Building Blocks (MBB) are ready-to-use components to build microgrids quickly, cheaply, and modularly. This work presents and demonstrates in controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) three key subcomponents of an MBB architecture: power converter topology, control scheme, and communication framework. The addressed architecture aims for systems interconnection such as microgrid to grid and microgrid to microgrid. This paper studies each subcomponent in detail and validates the efficacy of the architecture through CHIL results.

Adib, Aswad [ORNL] (ORCID:000000020997056X)↗

DOE OSTI2021

Standardization of the Distributed Ledger Technology cybersecurity stack for power and energy applications

The global trend towards the integration of distributed energy resources is opening the doors to advanced, complex, and distributedmarketplaces. Such advanced ecosystems, where utility-owned and non utility-owned assets can contribute towards grid operations,generally require distributed communication and grid architectures, which can be supported by Distributed Ledger Technologies(DLTs). However, the potential of DLTs for long-term scalable solutions in operational technology applications has not been fullyutilized, partly due to the lack of standardization across and between different DLTs, as well as other supporting building blocks(e.g., communication protocols). This paper attempts to address this gap by proposing a DLT cybersecurity stack specificallydesigned for researchers, DLT technology developers, and end users (such as utilities). The DLT cybersecurity stack has beennotionally mapped to related cybersecurity components, namely: the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, the TransmissionControl Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite, and existing Smart Grid architecture frameworks. In addition, the paper discussesseveral cybersecurity implications, and demonstrates the potential uses of the DLT stack through multiple power and energy usecases. It is important to note that the stack can be also applied to the DLT use cases that are outside the power and energy domain.This work has been performed by the Cybersecurity Task Force under the IEEE P2418.5 Blockchain for Energy Standard workinggroup that is stationed under the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Smart Buildings, Loads, and Customer Systems (SBLC)technical committee.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2022

A MW scale charging architecture for supporting extreme fast charging of heavy-duty electric vehicles

Extreme fast charging of electric vehicles technologies is coming. Heavy duty electric vehicles (HD-EVs) are in development and are expected to have multipliers bigger in battery capacity compared to the light duty counterparts. To meet short charging times, MW charging will be necessary. This paper presents a MW scale extreme DC fast charger with a communication and control architecture for HD-EVs. The system is validated in a controller hardware in the loop platform.

Starke, Michael↗

DOE OSTI2020

Industry 4.0 and Intelligent Manufacturing Processes: A Review of Modern Sensing Technologies

Digital Manufacturing technologies have quickly become ubiquitous in the manufacturing industry. The transformation commonly referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, has ushered in a wide range of communication technologies, connection mechanisms, and data analysis capabilities. These technologies provide powerful tools to create a more lean, profitable, and data-driven manufacturing processes. In this paper, we review modern communication technologies and connection architectures for Digital Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 applications. An introduction to Cyber-Physical Systems and a review of digital manufacturing trends is followed by an overview of data acquisition methods for manufacturing processes. Numerous communication protocols are presented and discussed for connecting disparate machines and processes. Flexible data architectures are discussed and examples of machine monitoring implementations are provided. Finally, select implementations of these communication protocols and architectures are surveyed with recommendations for future architecture implementations.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2022

Enhanced Control, Optimization, and Integration of Distributed Energy Applications (ECO-IDEA)

With support from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) partnered with Xcel Energy, Schneider Electric, Varentec, and Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to meet the goals of the Enabling Extreme Real-Time Grid Integration of Solar Energy (ENERGISE) program. This project developed and validated an innovative data-enhanced hierarchical control architecture that enables the efficient, reliable, resilient, and secure operation of future distribution systems with a high penetration of distributed energy resources like solar energy. The architecture enables a hybrid control approach where a centralized control layer is complemented by distributed control algorithms for solar inverters and autonomous control of grid edge devices. It is fully interoperable and includes all the cybersecurity aspects necessary for reliable and secure system operation. The hybrid approach can seamlessly integrate multiple voltage-regulation technologies, both at central and grid-edge levels, which enables reliable and efficient system operation in the face of unpredictable conditions. The overarching goal of the Eco-Idea project is to develop, validate, and deploy a unique and innovative Data-Enhanced Hierarchical Control (DEHC) architecture that comprehensively addresses the formidable challenges associated with proliferation of high penetration of distributed PV such as reverse power flows, transients from variability of PV systems, feeder load balancing, and voltage stability. These issues are exposing the weaknesses of existing grid operations and controls - including, but not limited to, lack of grid situational awareness, heuristic and slow-acting control actions, latency of control for emergency situations, and points of failure in communications. The proposed architecture will comprehensively resolve the deficiencies of current operational settings - where monitoring and control solutions proposed across industry and academia may not be interoperable and may not coexist in the same system - and will enable an efficient, reliable, resilient, and secure operation of future distribution systems with penetration of solar energy well beyond current limits. The DEHC architecture was developed and validated rigorously through hardware-in-loop simulations in the laboratory environment and deployed on the field.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2022

An Intelligent Power Electronic System for Secondary Use Batteries

This paper presents a plug-and-play power electronic system for integration of multiple energy storage system technologies. The system uses a communication and control architecture with individual developed modules to support scaling to larger systems for the electric grid. An optimization framework is also presented to demonstrate the functionality of the system. This system is shown to work in hardware with a constructed testbed to demonstrate different use cases and systems. Results are presented for a full efficiency cycle test.

Starke, Michael↗

DOE OSTI2021

A Low Voltage DC Power Electronic Hub to Support Buildings

This paper presents the communication, control, and architecture, for a low voltage (nominal 480V) hybrid AC/DC microgrid for supporting small commercial buildings with critical data center loads. The proposed system is based on a dc-power electronic hub (PEH) that seamlessly integrates renewable energy resources, energy storage, and back-up generation to support commercial building economical energy management and reliability. This PEH concept provides a parallelization of critical power to the commercial and industrial buildings leading to increased efficiency and reliability compared to traditional uninterruptable power supplies. The demonstration of the proposed PEH architecture and controls is conducted through a controller hardware in the loop validation.

Starke, Michael↗

DOE OSTI2020

An Authentication Vulnerability Assessment of Connected Lighting Systems

Emerging connected lighting systems (CLS) that incorporate distributed intelligence, network interfaces, and sensors can become data-collection platforms that enable a wide range of valuable new capabilities as well as greater energy savings in buildings and cities. However, CLS technology is currently at an early stage of development, and its increased connectivity introduces cybersecurity risks that are new to the lighting industry and that must be addressed for successful integration with other systems. While a number of existing frameworks, guidelines, and tests for evaluating cybersecurity vulnerability may apply to CLS in whole or in part, there is currently no mandatory requirement for cybersecurity testing or certification. The lighting industry, including technology developers and specification organizations, is currently evaluating the suitability of existing frameworks and guidelines for CLS. To support these efforts, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is conducting a series of studies intended to educate lighting industry stakeholders on specific cybersecurity practices and characterize their implementation in commercially available CLS with varying system architectures, network-communication technologies, and degrees of maturity. This study demonstrates that tests for authentication vulnerabilities can be developed with objective pass/fail criteria, therby facilitating comparisons between CLS. Based on the limited results of this study, it appears that the CLS that are being brought to market have varying levels of authentication vulnerability. It is hoped that these evaluations will support and perhaps accelerate industry discussions on the risks of specific security vulnerabilities, what vulnerabilities should be addressed by in-development of future lighting-specific best practices, and whether any such practices should be included in voluntary lighting standards.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2021

Centralized and Decentralized Optimal Control of Variable Speed Heat Pumps

Utility service providers are often challenged with the synchronization of thermostatically controlled loads. Load synchronization, as a result of naturally occurring and demand-response events, has the potential to damage power distribution equipment. Because thermostatically controlled loads constitute most of the power consumed by the grid at any given time, the proper control of such devices can lead to significant energy savings and improved grid stability. The contribution of this paper is the development of an optimal control algorithm for commonly used variable speed heat pumps. By means of selective peer-to-peer communication, our control architecture allows for the regulation of home temperatures while simultaneously minimizing aggregate power consumption, and aggregate load volatility. An optimal centralized controller is also explored and compared against its decentralized counterpart.

30 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION↗

DOE OSTI2023

Ultra: Underwater Laser Telecommunications & Remote Access (Final Report)

High speed wireless communication has proven elusive in subsea environments due to the inherent bandwidth limitations of acoustics and range limitations of other transmission modalities. A truly connected subsea system necessitates a high-speed, resilient architecture that can enable the integration of new sensor technologies and edge analytics and allow closed-loop monitoring and control of subsea operations for integrity monitoring and optimization. Like terrestrial Internet of Things applications, the realization of this “digital subsea” vision requires the application of high speed, point-to-point wireless technologies to complement rather than replace “hard-wired” communications such as optical fiber or acoustic systems. This work addresses the development of ULTRA (Underwater LASER Telemetry and Remote Access), an ultra-long range underwater laser communications system for use in critical points of the subsea communications architecture to increase reliability, operational flexibility, and reduce communication system maintenance associated with physical subsea connections.

02 PETROLEUM↗

DOE OSTI2024

Privacy Preserving Federated Learning for Advanced Scientific Ecosystems

We present a framework to provide privacy preserving (PP) federating learning (FL) across multiple computational and experimental facilities. This work joins the compute capabilities of National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory Research Cloud (ORC) with simulated experimental data, such as those produced at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Spallation Neutron Source (SNS). We describe the software infrastructure developed to provide privacy for computational and experimental networks. We developed algorithmic privacy across the federated system by embedding database security, computation, and communication into the federation architecture, utilizing scientific tools developed by the experimental community.

Archibald, Rick [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000245389780)↗

DOE OSTI2020

Evaluation of PETSc on a Heterogeneous Architecture, the OLCF Summit System: Part II - Basic Communication Performance

Nearest-neighbor communication is at the heart of many high-performance parallel computations. We report on the performance of such communication on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility system Summit in the context of the PETSc communication module. The analysis in this report includes basic Ping-Pong point-to-point communication and regular and irregular nearest-neighbor communication.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2023

A Functional Reference Architecture and Assessment Thereof for the National Ignition Facility Industrial Controls Systems

The Industrial Control System (ICS) at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has an effective, well-established architecture based off a conventional cyclical software paradigm focused on maintainability and the identification of issues. This architecture exhibits scalability in ensuring expansions of the system conform to the existing architecture, modularity enough to allow relatively easy integrations of such expansions and works as a successful tool to introduce control system engineers new to the NIF ICS to the structure of the system at each layer. This architecture, like most software architectures, is object-oriented, lending itself to ease of understanding by control systems engineers and software engineers familiar with an object-oriented perspective. There are occasions, however, where engineers of other disciplines require insight into the functionality and structure of the ICS for the purposes of understanding fundamentally how their own system is or will be governed by the ICS, without the need for the details of operation of the ICS or the object-oriented view. For this reason, a functional architecture of the ICS could be a potent tool for communicating this insight. Even more powerful, a generalization of this proposed functional ICS architecture in the form of a National Ignition Facility and Photon Science (NIF & PS) Industrial Controls Reference Architecture could communicate this insight not just to systems governed by the ICS in the NIF proper, but across entirety of the NIF & PS Principal Associate Directorate (PAD), anywhere an instance of the ICS architecture is present, such as the approximately 40 “small labs” distributed across the directorate. Such a tool will provide an alternative means of understanding the implementation of these control systems, conducive to a larger variety of engineering and scientific disciplines.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2023

Distributed Grid-Sensing Service Layer: A System Architecture Blueprint

In this report, a scalable, decentralized, sensor-oriented communication blueprint is introduced. The proposed architecture has been specifically designed to support the mass deployment of sensors and also enable data consumers to access the underlying data streams using a distributed systems approach. With the proposed approach, sensors and data clients can be decoupled from the physical communication infrastructure and migrated into a modern, software-defined infrastructure ecosystem that can be configured to suit the end application’s requirements. In its current iteration, this blueprint defines the interactions, processes, and expected outcomes that each individual component within the architecture must support the overall ecosystem’s needs. Within this work, such an assembly of services is called the data bus; it represents the heart of the distributed grid sensing services architecture, a multiyear project that aims to design, implement, and test a reference sensor-data dissemination network that can support the needs of the extended grid state. We expect this blueprint to guide our future implementation efforts

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2020

Commercial building loads providing ancillary services In PJM

The adoption of low carbon energy technologies such as variable renewable energy and electric vehicles, coupled with the efficacy of energy efficiency to reduce traditional base load has increased the uncertainty inherent in the net load shape. Handling this variability with slower, traditional resources leads to inefficient system dispatch, and in some cases may compromise reliability. Grid operators are looking to future energy technologies, such as automated demand response (DR), to provide capacity-based reliability services as the need for these services increase. While DR resources are expected to have the flexibility characteristics operators are looking for, demonstrations are necessary to build confidence in their capabilities. Additionally, building owners are uncertain of the monetary value and operational burden of providing these services. To address this, the present study demonstrates the ability of demand response resources providing two ancillary services in the PJM territory, synchronous reserve and regulation, using an OpenADR 2.0b signaling architecture. The loads under control include HVAC and lighting at a big box retail store and variable frequency fan loads. The study examines performance characteristics of the resource: the speed of response, communications latencies in the architecture, and accuracy of response. It also examines the frequency and duration of events and the value in the marketplace which can be used to examine if the opportunity is sufficient to entice building owners to participate.

MacDonald, Jason↗