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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 559 records · Page 31
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2020

CCE Phase 4: Mitigations and Protections

During the first three phases, the CCE Team identified any instances of unverified trust in the organization’s technologies, processes, and procedures, any or all of which could be used to adversely impact the system. In Phase 4, the primary goal is to remove the possibility of the end effect—that is, to develop means or mechanisms that will ensure an adversary cannot achieve their Objective (identified in Phase 1) via cyber means. Such measures are known as “protections.” In some cases, this may not be possible, or the implementation of protections may not be desirable due to other considerations. In such cases, means and mechanisms should be developed that focus on putting an organization in a better position to identify adversary activities directed against it, increasing the cost of cyber-enabled sabotage for the adversary (including making things more difficult for the adversary and attempting to lower the chances an adversary may succeed), or decreasing the recovery cost of a victim organization. These measures are known as “mitigations.”

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2020

The 501vc®Fund - A New Model for Investing in Energy Innovation. Final report

Clean Energy Trust (CET) set out to identify approaches to attract new investors to early-stage cleantech businesses. Over the course of the project, significant research and validation was conducted on the feasibility of different pathways by which to secure additional financial support for early-stage clean energy startups. CET explored both a hybrid fund approach and a stand-alone, affiliated fund approach. Over the course of this work, CET developed quantitative models for optimum fund size and specifications, conducted extensive market research, evaluated fund implementation best practices, developed a strong understanding of the legal requirements for fund design, and identified likely candidates who could replicate this approach.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

PNT Resilience RFI Response

The use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) is a fundamental requirement for most navigation systems today, and this heavy reliance means that denial of GPS service (or extended threats) can pose a significant risk to modern navigation. There is an urgent need for enabling, high-accuracy navigation technologies that can operate without the need for GPS. Ideally, these solutions must be able to initialize in a completely GPS-free environment and continue to navigate even through challenging scenarios. The increasing risk posed to GPS means that trust in this platform is waning—and solutions are required. A future navigator should leverage GPS whenever possible and be capable of identifying and responding to risks while maintaining mission accuracy needs. In the absence of GPS, fully alternative navigation (altnav) technologies are required. This report describes an introductory view of altnav for GPS-impaired and contested environments. Various technologies are collected, presented, and evaluated as potential solutions. A wide snapshot of currently available technologies with a first-order summary of their potential is presented. While this report attempts to be as broad and complete as possible, this is a quickly evolving field.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Global Overview of Energy Storage Performance Test Protocols

As part of the World Bank Energy Storage Partnership, this document seeks to provide support and knowledge to a set of stakeholders across the developing world as we all seek to analyze the emerging opportunities and technologies for energy storage in the electric sector. As global prices for renewable energy have dropped dramatically over the last decade and continue to decline and the value of energy storage has increased in many systems, the World Bank technical teams and others have been hearing of a variety of problems. Related, developing countries have been asking a series of questions in this new area. This working group seeks to address the issues raised in part by creating this document and working to gather a variety of experts in this area from across the globe in support of the World Bank efforts. Performance testing, in combination with test beds (Working Group 2), is critical to fulfill the promise offered by these breakthrough technologies and critical to increasing trust in these systems and reducing risk. This document seeks to provide information to stakeholders in developing countries on the current global performance testing landscape of the battery (and broader) performance testing landscape. This document does that by summarizing testing protocols published by key global entities. From this summary, it can be concluded that there are several organizations within each region that set protocols for the testing and specifications of stationary energy storage systems. Across most of these entities, there are extensive protocols for testing batteries for electrical vehicles and mobile devices, but less for large scale energy storage system and their usage cases. The working group and the Partnership more generally agree that the nascent markets for certain technologies and rapid growth make testing more important than ever as these markets continue to mature. This document also seeks to provide a set of "guideposts" to new entrants by pointing out some of the key organizations globally that are currently engaged in performance testing of energy storage systems (often batteries but the larger organizations are likely to engage in tailored tests for emerging thermal and other storage technologies).

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

GANpiler

Focal Area(s): Rather than augment or replace physical models with machine learning, we instead preserve the existing models and augment the underlying code with faster surrogate models created by generative adversarial networks (GAN). To leverage the performance optimization, we also propose a runtime system and user interfaces that allow prediction and tracking of accumulated error as well as dynamic, per-process decision making as to which model (if any) to use for each iteration. Science Challenge: This proposal sits at the nexus of two hard problems. First, climate models based on machine learning will be, by their nature, difficult to trust once their predictions begin diverging from the consensus. Second, compilers and hardware have been making only incremental performance gains for decades. GPGPUs have provided a welcome performance boost for codes that can take advantage of them, but there is no similar technology on the horizon to provide the next performance leap.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

How AI Predicts the Untrained and Unseen

Focus Area: Model predictability improvements (Primary); Data optimization (secondary); Data complexity insights (secondary). The Scientific Challenge: If we believe that a future under extreme conditions will look very differently from today, we can likely agree that ML/AI models trained on past and present datasets will not be adequate to make reliable predictions into the future. This is true for water cycling, as well as biogeochemistry and other Earth system components and behaviors. Additionally, ML/AI models are inherently non-physical. Despite the flourishing success of ML/AI in many applications, such as computer vision, natural language process, and gaming, even the most sophisticated AI models don’t understand the very basic physical laws. Therefore, a natural question is: Can we trust ML/AI based predictions of Earth system behaviors that are fundamentally driven by physical laws? So, are physics models with meticulous process representation a better choice? Not exactly. Physical models, when firmly rooted in first principles, work great at predicting behaviors of systems with a well-defined set of boundary conditions and variables. However, as a complex system, the number of parameters and the degree of complexity and dynamics in processes, coupling, and scale dependent emergent behaviors make the Earth system behaviors very challenging to predict with physical models composed of deterministic laws. In addition, due to the lack of fundamental understandings, physical models often implement empirical correlations derived from observations with biases from locality of data generation. Because correlation is not necessarily causation or comply with first principles, scaling of model predictions beyond locality is often invalid. Beyond the limitation of models, physics or AI, our knowledge of the Earth system is limited by the lack of observational technologies and resources. Insufficient data density, dimensionality and diversity only offer a sliced (or projected) view of the Earth system, e.g. Plato’s Cave analogy, limiting our capability to better understand and represent fundamental processes in models.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Deployment of Community Scale Solar Photovoltaic Energy Systems in Forest County Potawatomi Community

FCPC is a federally recognized tribe with a membership of more than 1400. The Tribe has a reservation in Forest County, Wisconsin, and tribal trust lands in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, with significant governmental and business operations in both areas. Until relatively recently, FCPC was one of the poorest tribes in the Midwest. Due to its successful gaming operations, it now has improved its financial situation and is using its resources to benefit both its members and the general public through environmental and other community efforts, many of which are long-delayed because of the extended period of abject poverty. The Tribe has developed the long-term goal of becoming energy independent using renewable resources. In order to meet this goal, the Tribe has taken several important steps. As an interim step, FCPC is purchasing nearly 55 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy certificates (“RECs”) annually from certified renewable energy facilities in the United States. These RECs offset more than 100% of the present electricity use at all of the Tribe’s facilities. The Tribe is currently ranked number 11 on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Top 20 Local Government list of green power purchasers and is a member of the EPA’s Green Power Partnership. The original project suggested small scale installations on tribal homes and certain government buildings. The Tribe suggested that the project would result in 730 kw installed. By revising the project, the Tribe was able to install 938 kw and owns the largest installation in Northern Wisconsin with the 800 kW installation at the Potawatomi Carter Casino Hotel (“PCCH”). The PCCH installation, in summer months, can provide near 90% of the use during daylight hours. Although tracking was not immediately available FCPC has since confirmed significant production with certain quarterly savings nearing $210,000. These installations provide a reduction in facility costs providing more revenue for Tribal services including cultural, health, sustainable food sources, environmental preservation and other Tribal initiatives. Further, the installations have resulted in positive steps towards the Tribe’s goals of energy sovereignty and the use of 100% renewable clean energy. Finally, the PCCH project, specifically, has had the additional benefit of providing a likely area for a microgrid. The size of the installation and offset achieved have pushed the Tribe toward planning for storage and a microgrid system that would both further the Tribe’s energy goals and provide a safe haven for the Community during times of need.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

U.S. and Allied Cyber Security Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific (Workshop Summary)

On March 30, 31, and April 1, 2021, the Center for Global Security Research (CGSR) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) hosted a workshop titled "U.S. and allied Cyber Security Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific". This session brought together participants drawn across the policy, military, and private sector in the United States and among allied countries in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. The workshop evaluated threat perceptions, assessed cyber power in a regional context, and explored opportunities for building capacity and trust with allies, partners, and the private sector. The region's cyber threat landscape is marked by increasing malicious activity, with threats persistent and ever-growing. Grounded by this strategic reality, the workshop advocated for 1) a concerted push into the arena of norm setting from the bottom up, 2) an agreed metric by which to assess progress, and 3) the creation of future lines of collaborative effort for the United States and its allies to ensure an open, interoperable, and secure internet.

45 MILITARY TECHNOLOGY, WEAPONRY, AND NATIONAL DEF↗
DOE OSTI2021

Manufacturing Management System Overview [Slides]

Vision: Institute a trusted manufacturing capability within the ALDWP Production Agency enabling digital product acceptance and access to digital manufacturing post-production activities. Mission: Establish a modern manufacturing infrastructure that ensures operator credentials, minimized human transcription errors, capable of managing all aspects of manufacturing including digital data acquisition, NCR resolution, and product acceptance, while providing an effective and intuitive user experience. Strategy: Constitute the modern manufacturing infrastructure to minimize risk and plant disruption while incrementally involving the capability.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Optimization-based algorithms for nonlinear mechanics and frictional contact

An optimization-based strategy for solving nonlinear mechanics problems is proposed. In contrast to typical nonlinear equation solver algorithms that aim to find zeros in the residual force function, we minimize an energy (or energy-like) function to encourage solutions which are locally stable equilibria. These smooth and potentially non-convex objective functions are minimized using a preconditioned conjugate-gradient trust-region algorithm. Contact is formulated as an inequality constrained minimization problem, and is solved with an augmented Lagrangian algorithm. Friction is included in the approach via a regularized quasi-potential energy, and other dissipative behavior is included through the use of variational constitutive updates. Finally, to accelerate convergence rates for the Lagrange multipliers, we propose a novel multiplier update algorithm utilizing the Fischer-Burmeister function, and demonstrate super-linear solver convergence for some applications.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Coal-dependent Communities in Transition: Identifying Best Practices to Ensure Equitable Outcomes

The U.S. coal industry is experiencing a sharp increase in the numbers of retired and/or decommissioned coal-fired power plants across the U.S. In the years between 2010-2019, around 102 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired generating capacity has been announced to be decommissioned, representing more than 546 coal-fired power plant units, and an additional 17 GW is planned to be decommissioned by 2025. This change in the energy production landscape presents an impact on the social, environmental, and economic prospects of coal-dependent communities. This report examined the role of communities in the coal power plant decommissioning process and provided community-identified best practices to ensure an equitable process. The experiences of four coal-dependent communities—Wise County, VA, Muskegon, MI, Anderson County, TN, and Becker, MN—are presented as case studies to understand the impacts of the decommissioning process, and associated best practices, from the communities’ perspective. The report results highlight the need to recognize that the decommissioning decision-making process must be community-based to be equitable. Each community’s input is key to the transition away from coal power because there is no one-size-fits-all development plan. In other words, each community’s trajectory through the decommissioning process—from the retirement decision-making stage to the final site redevelopment phase—is unique because each community has distinct needs and wants from the energy transition. What is best for one community may not be suited for another. Ultimately, the framework for site development and community revitalization post-decommissioning cannot be universal because each community’s profile—from a social, cultural, and economic perspective—is different. Community impacts of power plant decommissioning are not limited to job and revenue losses. Communities are likely to be impacted culturally, socially, environmentally, and have long-term health-based impacts that should be acknowledged and addressed in post-retirement plans. Commonly identified decommissioning best practices include: Early and continued engagement throughout, with a number of mediums for communication and feedback (e.g., in-person sessions, virtual meetings, written comment opportunities); Early planning of post-decommissioning projects to replace lost jobs, revenue, and economic activity; Recognition (and mitigation, if possible) of social impacts on the community due to plant closure; Transparency throughout the process, with trusted information being provided about the decommissioning process and timeline; potential impacts on the workforce, economy, and environment; and the feasibility of alternative site uses; Identification of funding sources, technical experts, and/or strategic partnerships to support decommissioning and the affected communities upfront; and, Acknowledgment of communities as stakeholders who have a role in the conversation and right to determine their futures. Three key areas for assisting coal-dependent communities affected by the energy transition: Technical assistance: assessment of site feasibility for alternative uses or to repower with new technologies; Cross-partnership engagement and collaboration: facilitate knowledge-sharing of “lessons learned” about the decommissioning process between communities and provide guidance for decision-making processes; and, Financial assistance: access to grant and/or loan programs to assist with redevelopment survey, bolster community economic security through job creation, and cover environmental clean-up costs. Technical assistance, cross-partnership engagement, and financial aid can be mobilized to help communities throughout various stages of the decommissioning process, including the retirement decision, the site reclamation phase, and eventual revitalization of the site and surrounding community.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗
DOE OSTI2021

Test Information Management System (Report FY 2020 and FY 2021)

Delivery Environments supported work in Fiscal Years 2020 and 2021 to develop the Test Information Management System (TIMS). This effort involved creating a suite of tools consisting of a database and the uploading and downloading scripts. It has been demonstrated that the TIMS database is suitable for archiving raw measurements performed on various measured test articles. The TIMS database has been populated with data from the TRUST projects in FY 20 and FY 21. This included the functional data in the Sensors records as well as metadata stored in records in several other tables. The performed work demonstrated that a database archiving validation test data and integrating it with engineering analysis simulations has a great potential to increase the efficiency, responsiveness, and confidence in the modeling, simulation, and validation efforts for future (and current) weapon systems and assemblies in normal and abnormal environments. In this report, we also discuss how the records belonging to the same project should be arranged, what are the minimum requirements for linking the records using the tabular links, and we provide several recommendations to the projects engineers and the database administrator to improve the TIMS database.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2021

Exploring Explicit Uncertainty for Binary Analysis (EUBA)

Reverse engineering (RE) analysts struggle to address critical questions about the safety of binary code accurately and promptly, and their supporting program analysis tools are simply wrong sometimes. The analysis tools have to approximate in order to provide any information at all, but this means that they introduce uncertainty into their results. And those uncertainties chain from analysis to analysis. We hypothesize that exposing sources, impacts, and control of uncertainty to human binary analysts will allow the analysts to approach their hardest problems with high-powered analytic techniques that they know when to trust. Combining expertise in binary analysis algorithms, human cognition, uncertainty quantification, verification and validation, and visualization, we pursue research that should benefit binary software analysis efforts across the board. We find a strong analogy between RE and exploratory data analysis (EDA); we begin to characterize sources and types of uncertainty found in practice in RE (both in the process and in supporting analyses); we explore a domain-specific focus on uncertainty in pointer analysis, showing that more precise models do help analysts answer small information flow questions faster and more accurately; and we test a general population with domain-general sudoku problems, showing that adding "knobs" to an analysis does not significantly slow down performance. This document describes our explorations in uncertainty in binary analysis.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Experimental Procedure and Results for Contact Thermal Conductance Measurements performed during FY 2021

Weapons Test Engineering groups at LANL are responsible for testing and simulating weapon assemblies and subassemblies in support of qualification and certification of nuclear weapon systems. The complex nature of the assemblies themselves coupled with the loading environments, gives rise to low confidence and high uncertainties in the interpretation of both experimental and simulated results. In an effort to reduce these uncertainties, a project was started at LANL to perform focused and systematic experiments combined with simulations to increase confidence in both arenas. A key goal of the work performed under the Delivery Environments (DE) Testbeds to Reduce Uncertainties in Simulations and Tests TRUST program, focuses on identifying and minimizing sources of uncertainty associated with experimental and computational techniques. Specifically, with the above as motivation, a measurement procedure was developed by MST-8 to perform thermal conductivity measurements on cylinders of both similar and dissimilar metallic systems as a function of loading conditions and varying material interface morphologies between these components.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2021

Experimental Plan for the Vermiculite Study

Homes in which vermiculite, which can contain asbestos, is present are often deferred under the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) because of uncertainty in how to safely weatherize such homes from a client and worker perspective and the potential costs associated with alternative approaches. Recognizing this situation, the Department of Energy (DOE) tasked the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to perform a research project that scientifically identifies the asbestos exposure risks in weatherizing homes with existing vermiculite insulation. Current approaches being used by Grantees and Subgrantees to weatherize homes with existing vermiculite insulation were identified as part of the development of this experimental plan based on a review of Grantee Health and Safety Plans and communications with weatherization program staff from seven states. Other than deferral, these approaches include the following:1.) Abating (i.e., removing) the existing vermiculite using funding sources other than WAP (e.g., state funds, utility funds, the Zonolite Attic Insulation Trust Fund, and possibly homeowner contributions) because abatement is not allowed using WAP funds per Weatherization Program Notice (WPN) 17-7. 2.) Weatherizing the house as normal after testing reveals that the vermiculite contains less than 1% asbestos. 3.) Avoiding areas of the house where vermiculite is installed and weatherizing the remaining areas of the house as normal. 4.) Encapsulating the existing vermiculite insulation in an attic by blowing cellulose or other insulation over it. 5.) Weatherizing the areas of the house where vermiculite is installed using unique/alternative approaches developed specifically for that house. Blower door testing is also impacted by the presence of vermiculite due to the concern of bringing asbestos fibers into the space. Some states address this by performing pressurized blower door tests, whereas other states prohibit blower door testing entirely when vermiculite is present. This research project will focus on gathering data on home occupant and weatherization worker exposures to asbestos before, during, and/or after the weatherization of the homes containing vermiculite insulation using five of the six approaches identified above. Abatement of the existing vermiculite insulation will not be studied because it is not allowed using WAP funding per WPN 17-7 and, thus, is not a sustainable approach for WAP.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

Allyship:" How Can I Help?" [Slides]

Lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency, and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups of people.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2022

2020 Solar Decathlon Education Partner: Cooperative Research and Development (Final Report, CRADA Number CRD-19-00802)

The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon (DOE/SD) is a collegiate competition, comprising 10 contests, that challenges student teams to design and build highly efficient and innovative buildings powered by renewable energy. The winners will be those teams that best blend architectural and engineering excellence with innovation, market potential, building efficiency, and smart energy production. The DOE/SD is comprised of two Challenges--Design Challenge (annual, in April of each year at NREL in Golden, Colo.) and Build Challenge (biennial, held next in June/July 2020 in Washington D.C.). NREL provides competition management for DOE/SD. For over 35 years, EEBA has provided the most trusted resources for building science information and education in the construction industry. EEBA delivers turn-key educational resources and events designed to transform residential construction practices through high performance design, marketing, materials, and technologies. NREL and EEBA establish this CRADA to enable the success of the DOE/SD program in managing sponsorship funds and creating a professional education program. EEBA acted as an Education Partner to DOE/SD, which included: 1) accepting and dispersing sponsorship funds for DOE/SD; and 2) providing professional development content.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Evaluation of Synthetic Diamond Detectors for Fast Neutron and X-ray Detection [Slides]

Element6 has come out of a two year production pause (pre-COVID) with material that lacks their previous QC – some is excellent, but screening is needed. Applied Diamond can now make usable polycrystalline material, for applications not requiring absolute flux calibration. A large area possible (1cm 2 ). Great Lakes Crystal Technology has made great progress in two years, but still needs development to become a trusted supplier of single crystal material. LANL staff (Dongsung Kim) has developed proficient lithography and bonding expertise at CINT to make devices from vendor supplied material. LANL staff has continued and expanded capabilities for device testing at NSLS-II.

42 ENGINEERING↗