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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

SoRcer Test Utqiagvik Deployment for Ionograms (STUDI) Field Campaign Report

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has developed a passive broadband radio frequency (RF) receiver, called a Sounder Receiver (SoRcer), as an ionospheric diagnostic instrument. These systems can produce ionospheric specifications to characterize the local ionosphere. The specifications from the SoRcers can then be used to inform data assimilation models; monitor diurnal, seasonal, or other cyclical changes; and detect irregularities or abnormalities in the ionosphere, such as traveling ionospheric disturbances (TIDs), sporadic E, and spread F.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Advancing Platooning with ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems) Control Integration and Assessment

Application of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) to heavy duty trucks known as truck platooning has shown fuel economy improvements on the test track under ideal driving conditions. However, limited test data is available to assess the truck platooning under real-world driving conditions. Under this Cummins-led project that was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, truck platooning with CACC has been tested on a real-world interstate highway and the results of the project are reviewed in this report. At first, the real-world driving conditions were characterized using National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Fleet DNA database to define test factors, including route, terrain, and highway traffic. Afterward, both test track and on-highway testing guided by SAE J1321 procedures were conducted to assess truck platooning under controlled and real-world driving conditions. On-highway testing was done on a highway route in Indiana, consisting of low, medium, and high road grade segments. The highway test results of 2-truck and 3-truck platooning showed considerably reduced fuel savings compared to the controlled test track data, which mainly stems from the traffic or high-grade portions of the route. However, integration of Cummins powertrain and vehicle eco-driving features such as predictive cruise control and neutral coasting called ADEPT™ on the lead truck showed an improvement of fuel saving for the trucks in CACC operation. Furthermore, the importance of tire connectivity in efficient and safe operation of the trucks in platooning is characterized.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

Underground Test Area (UGTA) Sampling Plan for Corrective Action Units 101 and 102: Central and Western Pahute Mesa, Nevada National Security Site, Nevada

The purpose of this groundwater sampling plan (referred to herein as “the Plan”) is to describe the approach for collecting and analyzing groundwater samples to meet the objectives of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Environmental Management (EM) Nevada Program’s Underground Test Area (UGTA) Activity. The Plan is focused on the Central and Western Pahute Mesa corrective action units (CAUs 101 and 102). The remaining UGTA CAUs are in the final stage of the UGTA strategy (Closure Report [CR] stage), and monitoring requirements for these CAUs are described in their respective CRs. The Plan supersedes the Nevada National Security Site Integrated Groundwater Sampling Plan and its ensuing Record of Technical Change (ROTC) (DOE/EMNV, 2019b). The Plan is designed to ensure compliance with the UGTA Quality Assurance Plan (QAP) and its ensuing ROTC (DOE/EMNV, 2018), and the Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (FFACO) (1996, as amended). The Plan is implemented by the Environmental Program Services (EPS) contractor. Implementation of the Plan provides data to complete corrective actions prescribed by the FFACO to protect the public from groundwater contaminated by historical underground nuclear testing. The Plan’s scope comprises sample collection and analysis requirements for assessing the extent of groundwater contamination from underground nuclear testing. Sampling wells located in the communities surrounding the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) is performed by other organizations (e.g., management and operating [M&O] contractor) and is therefore not included within the Plan. The results of the community sampling are presented in the annual NNSS environmental reports.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

A Full-length Quench Antenna for MQXFA Production Series Quadrupole Magnet Testing

The MQXFA production series quadrupoles being built for the Hi-Lumi (HL) LHC upgrade by the US Accelerator Upgrade Project (US-HL-LHC AUP) will have very limited instrumentation for characterizing quench events that occur during magnet training and performance validation testing. In order to understand the origin of the quenches, and whether they have some implication for ongoing magnet fabrication, it was decided to build a full-length Quench Antenna (QA) with axial resolution of 50mm to be employed during cold testing in the anticryostat used for magnetic measurements. The goal is to have fineresolution, full-length coverage detection of quench events axially, as well as to have azimuthal resolution on the order of the cable width (about 1 degree for the cross-section), in a device that can be used both for vertical and horizontal testing. To achieve this, a 5m long QA with 128 channels of high-speed data acquisition has been designed and fabricated. The cylindrical antenna features an array of 12 full-length, dipole- and quadrupole-bucked coils positioned radially in the QA interior for azimuthal localization, and over 100 individual channels of short, high-sensitivity, antennas etched as flexible PCB circuits (which also buck dipole and quadrupole fields) wrapped circumferentially on the cylinder exterior in steps of 50mm along the magnet length for axial detection. This report discusses the design, construction and analysis of the MQXFA QA, and first results from using the antenna during quench testing in the production magnets.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗
DOE OSTI2021

Ganged-PV System Evaluation

The following report contains data and data summaries collected for the SkySun LLC elevated Ganged PV arrays. These arrays were fabricated as a series of PV panels in various orientations, suspended by cables, at the National Solar Thermal Test Facility (NSTTF) at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). Starting in February of 2021, Sandia personnel have collected power and accelerometer data for these arrays to assess design and operational efficacy of varying ganged- PV configurations. The purpose of this power data collection was to see how the various array orientations compare in power collection capability depending on the time of day, year, and the specific daily solar direct normal irradiance (DNI). The power data was collected as a measurement of the power output from the various series strings. The project team measured direct current (DC) voltage and current from the respective arrays. The accelerometer data was collected with the purpose of demonstrating potential destructive mode shapes that could take place with each of the arrays when exposed to high winds. This allowed the team to evaluate whether impacts with respect to specific array orientations using suspended cables is a safe design. All data collection was performed during calendar year 2021.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Concrete Structure Health Monitoring Using Vibro-acoustic Testing and Machine Learning

Assessment and management of aging concrete structures in nuclear power plants require a more systematic approach than simple reliance on margins of safety in existing codes. Research is required to deploy online monitoring capability to assess the health of concrete structures in nuclear power plants and perform predictive analytics based on heterogeneous measurements, in order to reduce the operation and maintenance costs. The research effort described in this report focuses on the health monitoring of concrete slabs containing reactive aggregates using the vibro-acoustic modulation (VAM) technique and predictive modeling. The research is developing an approach to enable detection, localization, and estimation of the extent of degradation in concrete slabs due to alkali-silica reaction (ASR). The project outcomes are generic and extendable to other degradation modes in concrete. A concrete slab without reinforcements was cast at Vanderbilt University and cured in aggressive conditions to accelerate ASR degradation. In this report, we develop a methodology for the automation of VAM testing, and the construction of machine learning models to facilitate damage localization in concrete structures. We investigate how machine learning models based on physics simulation data can be effectively utilized for damage localization (damage location and depth) and estimation in a concrete slab specimen. Our study indicates that these models could potentially support damage localization and estimation for NPP structures.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2025

Analyze the real-time performance of the optimized fiber-PTR instrument

An instrument to perform in-reactor, real-time thermal property measurements of nuclear fuels and materials was recently designed, optimized, and tested at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Research Reactor. It was the second insertion experiments of a total of two rounds. Here we report the collection and analysis of the real-time captured thermal diffusivity data on the preloaded SiC. With the optimized design, the instrument temperature had been successfully raised as we expected. Only one probe (the top one) returned real-time thermal diffusivity in a time span of approximately two days. Measured thermal diffusivity of the preloaded SiC was significantly lower than the literature value at the same temperature, indicating a significant influence from the irradiation induced microstructure damage. Meanwhile, the real-time thermal diffusivity value continuously reduced with time, indicating the dynamic microstructure evolution. The possible reasons of the probes that did not return data were hypothesized. The further optimization of the instrument with the objective to improve the measurement accuracy and instrument survivability is also discussed.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Vulcan Test Platform: Demonstrating the Data Center as a Flexible Grid Asset

Explosive data center demand is outpacing grid infrastructure development. AI workloads and hyperscale cloud growth are creating unprecedented power requirements, while traditional grid expansion faces multi-year development timelines, regulatory hurdles, and decarbonization challenges. Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners recognized this impending crisis years ago and founded Verrus to develop an innovative solution: data centers that function as grid assets rather than passive loads. The Verrus approach integrates proprietary grid-aware controls with battery energy storage systems (BESS) in a medium-voltage architecture that delivers three critical capabilities: Fast-responding demand flexibility that can service requests from the utility within 10 seconds, Uninterrupted transition to islanded operation during grid disturbances, Continuous uptime assurance while maintaining all customer service level commitments Through Verrus' strategic partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), we validated these capabilities on Vulcan, a 70 MW utility-scale test platform powered by NREL's ARIES Virtual Emulation Environment. This deployment-ready technology has successfully demonstrated that Verrus data centers can deliver meaningful grid services while maintaining mission-critical reliability. This technical report outlines the design, methodology, and results of this emulated deployment, demonstrating that data centers can play a pivotal role in enhancing grid flexibility and reliability, without sacrificing service level guarantees.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2020

A search for cosmogenic neutrinos with the ARIANNA test bed using 4.5 years of data

The primary mission of the ARIANNA ultra-high energy neutrino telescope is to uncover astrophysical sources of neutrinos with energies greater than 10 16 eV. A pilot array, consisting of seven ARIANNA stations located on the surface of the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, was commissioned in November 2014. We report on the search for astrophysical neutrinos using data collected between November 2014 and February 2019. A straight-forward template matching analysis yielded no neutrino candidates, with a signal efficiency of 79%. We find a 90% confidence upper limit on the diffuse neutrino flux of E 2 Φ=1.7× 10 -6 GeV cm -2 s -1 sr -1 for a decade wide logarithmic bin centered at a neutrino energy of 1018,eV, which is an order of magnitude improvement compared to the previous limit reported by the ARIANNA collaboration. The ARIANNA stations, including purpose built cosmic-ray stations at the Moore's Bay site and demonstrator stations at the South Pole, have operated reliably. Sustained operation at two distinct sites confirms that the flexible and adaptable architecture can be deployed in any deep ice, radio quiet environment. We show that the scientific capabilities, technical innovations, and logistical requirements of ARIANNA are sufficiently well understood to serve as the basis for large area radio-based neutrino telescope with a wide field-of-view.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Simulation of Deuterium Oxidation in a Room with a Fire

A series of experiments where deuterium was released in trace amounts into a room with a fire were performed at Sandia National Laboratories. This report describes the corresponding effort to model the test series using SIERRA/FUEGO. The objective of this modeling effort was to produce a simulation test matrix that can be utilized to help interpret the corresponding experiments and be used to assess the credibility of using the SIERRA/FUEGO simulations as a surrogate for real tritium reaction data for mock fire and release studies. The simulations assessed multiple configurations of fire size and location and overall found that there was low conversion of deuterium to oxidized deuterium. There are some notable differences between the simulation predictions and the experimental results, such as the simulations generally predicting higher amounts of deuterium conversion compared to the experiment. A strategy to address modeling uncertainties and unknowns is also given in this report.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Observation of D → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) μ + ν μ and test of lepton flavor universality with D → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) ℓ + ν ℓ

By analyzing 7.93 fb − 1 of e + e − collision data collected at the center-of-mass energy of 3.773 GeV with the BESIII detector operated at the BEPCII collider, we report the observation of the semimuonic decays of D + → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) 0 μ + ν μ and D 0 → K 1 ( 1270 ) − μ + ν μ with statistical significances of 12.5 σ and 6.0 σ , respectively. Their decay branching fractions are determined to be B [ D + → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) 0 μ + ν μ ] = ( 2.36 ± 0.2 0 − 0.27 + 0.18 ± 0.48 ) × 10 − 3 and B [ D 0 → K 1 ( 1270 ) − μ + ν μ ] = ( 0.78 ± 0.1 1 − 0.09 + 0.05 ± 0.15 ) × 10 − 3 , where the first and second uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively, and the third originates from the input branching fraction of K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) 0 → K − π + π 0 or K 1 ( 1270 ) − → K − π + π − . Combining our branching fractions with the previous measurements of B [ D + → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) 0 e + ν e ] and B [ D 0 → K 1 ( 1270 ) − e + ν e ] , we determine the branching fraction ratios to be B [ D + → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) 0 μ + ν μ ] / B [ D + → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) 0 e + ν e ] = 1.03 ± 0.14 − 0.15 + 0.11 and B [ D 0 → K 1 ( 1270 ) − μ + ν μ ] / B [ D 0 → K 1 ( 1270 ) − e + ν e ] = 0.74 ± 0.13 − 0.13 + 0.08 . Using the branching fractions measured in this work and the world-average lifetimes of the D + and D 0 mesons, we determine the semimuonic partial decay width ratio to be Γ [ D + → K ¯ 1 ( 1270 ) 0 μ + ν μ ] / Γ [ D 0 → K 1 ( 1270 ) − μ + ν μ ] = 1.22 ± 0.10 − 0.09 + 0.06 , which is consistent with unity as predicted by isospin conservation. Published by the American Physical Society 2025

Ablikim, M.↗
DOE OSTI2021

Search for Neutrino-Induced Neutral Current Delta Radiative Decay in MicroBooNE and a First Test of the MiniBooNE Low Energy Excess Under a Single Photon Hypothesis (submitted to PRL)

We report results from a search for neutrino-induced neutral current (NC) resonant Δ(1232) baryon production followed by Δ radiative decay, with a h0.8i GeV neutrino beam. Data corresponding to MicroBooNE’s first three years of operations (6.80×10 20 protons on target) are used to select single-photon events with one or zero protons and without charged leptons in the final state (1γ1p and 1γ0p, respectively). The background is constrained via an in-situ high-purity measurement of NC π 0 events, made possible via dedicated 2γ1p and 2γ0p selections. A total of 16 and 153 events are observed for the 1γ1p and 1γ0p selections, respectively, compared to a constrained background prediction of 20.5 ± 3.65(sys.) and 145.1 ± 13.8(sys.) events. The data lead to a bound on an anomalous enhancement of the normalization of NC Δ radiative decay of less than 2.3 times the predicted nominal rate for this process at the 90% confidence level (CL). The measurement disfavors a candidate photon interpretation of the MiniBooNE low-energy excess as a factor of 3.18 times the nominal NC Δ radiative decay rate at the 94.8% CL, in favor of the nominal prediction, and represents a greater than 50-fold improvement over the world’s best limit on single-photon production in NC interactions in the sub-GeV neutrino energy range.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Response of a Pressurized Water Reactor Dashpot Region to Commercial Drying Cycles

The purpose of this report is to document updates to the simulation of commercial vacuum drying procedures at the Nuclear Energy Work Complex at Sandia National Laboratories. Validation of the extent of water removal in a dry spent nuclear fuel storage system based on drying procedures used at nuclear power plants is needed to close existing technical gaps. Operational conditions leading to incomplete drying may have potential impacts on the fuel, cladding, and other components in the system. A general lack of data suitable for model validation of commercial nuclear canister drying processes necessitates additional, well-designed investigations of drying process efficacy and water retention. Scaled tests that incorporate relevant physics and well-controlled boundary conditions are essential to provide insight and guidance to the simulation of prototypic systems undergoing drying processes. This report documents testing updates for the Dashpot Drying Apparatus (DDA), an apparatus constructed at a reduced scale with multiple Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) fuel rod surrogates and a single guide tube dashpot. This apparatus is fashioned from a truncated 5×5 section of a prototypic 17×17 PWR fuel skeleton and includes the lowest segment of a single guide tube, often referred to as the dashpot region. The guide tube in this assembly is open and allows for insertion of a poison rod (neutron absorber) surrogate.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2021

The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey quasar sample: testing observational systematics on the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurement

ABSTRACT Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are considered to be a very robust standard ruler against various systematics. This premise has been tested against observational systematics, but not to the level required for the next generation of galaxy surveys such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid. In this paper, we investigate the effect of observational systematics on the BAO measurement of the final sample of quasars from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 16 in order to prepare and hone a similar analysis for upcoming surveys. We employ catalogues with various treatments of imaging systematic effects using linear and neural network-based non-linear approaches and consider how the BAO measurement changes. We also test how the variations to the BAO fitting model respond to the observational systematics. As expected, we confirm that the BAO measurements obtained from the DR16 quasar sample are robust against imaging systematics well within the statistical error, while reporting slightly modified constraints that shift the line-of-sight BAO signal by less than 1.1 per cent. We use realistic simulations with similar redshift and angular distributions as the DR16 sample to conduct statistical tests for validating the pipeline, quantifying the significance of differences, and estimating the expected bias on the BAO scale in future high-precision data sets. Although we find a marginal impact for the eBOSS QSO data, the work presented here is of vital importance for constraining the nature of dark energy with the BAO feature in the new era of big data cosmology.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Big Data Synchrophasor Monitoring and Analytics for Resiliency Tracking (BDSMART)

This report contains key findings from a project titled Big Data Synchrophasor Monitoring and Analytics for Resiliency Tracking (BDSMART), which was carried out through a collaborative effort of a team of researchers from Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, Temple University, and Quanta Technology, LLC. The in-kind support came from OSIsoft (acquired by AVEVA), which provided their PI Historian software to demonstrate the use case of streaming PMU data. The first section of the report describes the project goals and objectives related to the development of Machine Learning (ML) models capable of detecting and classifying events by processing phasor measurements captured in the field by Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). The data for this study was contributed by the utilities/ISOs from the Western and Eastern interconnects and ERCOT, further referred to as Interconnect B (IC B), Interconnect A (IC A), and Interconnect C (IC C), respectively. The approach that the BDSMART Research Team proposed and the key research tasks defined by the team are outlined in this section. The next section describes the technical approach. We first discuss the data constraints related to the PMU measurements and data interpretation constraints imposed by the data contributors. They provided neither the topological information of the grid nor PMU placement locations and captured recorded data at very few locations in the system with the reporting rate of either 30 or 60 fps. The recordings are mostly positive sequence voltage, frequency, and ROCOF, and in some limited cases, three-phase voltages and currents. We then reflect on the bad data issues that stem from poor recording practices and vague definitions of the PMU status bits to supposedly be used for bad data identification. Finally, the data discovery points to imprecise time stamps with incomplete event start/end time, as well as inconsistent and incomplete event labeling, which combined make the implementation of the data models using supervising learning quite challenging. Following the data discovery study, we hypothesize that because the IC B data has the most complete labels, we should focus our model development on that data and then test it on data from other interconnects. We also define the common metrics used to evaluate the results from the ML algorithm tests. We concluded this section by summarizing the common ML models we used and explaining how we implemented and tested them. The issues from this section are expanded in the Training Dataset Report from this project. The final section of this report deals with the accomplishments and conclusions. As the accomplishments, we formulate the problem we are solving and what is achieved by solving the problem. We then reflect on each of the analytics tools we developed and point out the performance of each tool when applied to solving the mentioned problems. We reference this work for further details to the papers we published on each tool. In the conclusions, we give recommendations on how to improve future PMU recording practices to facilitate the ML algorithm implementation and guidance for the future standardization work aimed at clarifying the ambiguities associated with the PMU status bits. We finally list future tasks that can bring about further improvements in the proposed algorithms. The issues from this section are expanded in the Training, and Test Dataset Report filed at the project completion date.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Update on the Investigation of Commercial Drying Cycles Using the Advanced Drying Cycle Simulator

The purpose of this report is to document updates on the apparatus to simulate commercial vacuum drying procedures at the Nuclear Energy Work Complex at Sandia National Laboratories. Validation of the extent of water removal in a dry spent nuclear fuel storage system based on drying procedures used at nuclear power plants is needed to close existing technical gaps. Operational conditions leading to incomplete drying may have potential impacts on the fuel, cladding, and other components in the system during subsequent storage and disposal. A general lack of data suitable for model validation of commercial nuclear canister drying processes necessitates well-designed investigations of drying process efficacy and water retention. Scaled tests that incorporate relevant physics and well-controlled boundary conditions are essential to provide insight and guidance to the simulation of prototypic systems undergoing drying processes. This report documents a new test apparatus, the Advanced Drying Cycle Simulator (ADCS). This apparatus was built to simulate commercial drying procedures and quantify the amount of residual water remaining in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel assembly after drying. The ADCS was constructed with a prototypic 17×17 PWR fuel skeleton and waterproof heater rods to simulate decay heat. These waterproof heaters are the next generation design to heater rods developed and tested at Sandia National Laboratories in FY20. This report describes the ADCS vessel build that was completed late in FY22, including the receipt of the prototypic length waterproof heater rods and construction of the fuel basket and the pressure vessel components. In addition, installations of thermocouples, emissivity coupons, pressure and vacuum lines, pressure transducers, and electrical connections were completed. Preliminary power functionality testing was conducted to demonstrate the capabilities of the ADCS. In FY23, a test plan for the ADCS will be developed to implement a drying procedure based on measurements from the process used for the High Burnup Demonstration Project. While applying power to the simulated fuel rods, this procedure is expected to consist of filling the ADCS vessel with water, draining the water with applied pressure and multiple helium blowdowns, evacuating additional water with a vacuum drying sequence at successively lower pressures, and backfilling the vessel with helium. Additional investigations are expected to feature failed fuel rod simulators with engineered cladding defects and guide tubes with obstructed dashpots to challenge the drying system with multiple water retention sites.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Utah FORGE: Well 16B(78)-32 DTS, RFS DSS Strain, and Absolute Strain Circulation Test Fiber Optic Data - August 2024

This dataset contains processed fiber optic measurements collected during the extended cross-well circulation test at the Utah FORGE site in August 2024. The data was acquired from the 16B(78)-32 well using distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) technology, including distributed temperature sensing (DTS) on multimode fiber and distributed strain sensing (DSS) measurements on single-mode fiber. The dataset includes Brillouin absolute strain, Rayleigh frequency shift (RFS) DSS strain change, RFS DSS strain change rate, and temperature (DTS) data, all stored in HDF5 format. Time coordinates are provided in UTC, and depth measurements are given in measured depth relative to the rotary kelly bushing (MD RKB) in feet. The spatial sampling on the RFS DSS strain data and the Brillouin Absolute Total Strain data is 20 cm and the spatial sampling on the DTS data is 1m. The dataset is accompanied by a report from Neubrex, which provides further documentation.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

Development of a Test-Bed for Testing and Refining EarthEn’s Supercritical CO 2 Based Energy Storage System

EarthEn’s energy storage concept leverages supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO 2 ) as a working fluid and relies on compact, high-performance components operating at elevated pressures and temperatures. To accelerate component development and reduce technical risk prior to larger-scale demonstrations, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) developed a 100 kW-scale sCO 2 test-bed under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with EarthEn (CRADA NO. NFE-24-10050). The objective of the work was to design and construct a flexible experimental facility capable of reproducing key thermodynamic state points and heat-transfer conditions relevant to EarthEn’s thermal energy storage (TES) cycle, with particular emphasis on enabling development and evaluation of next-generation heat exchangers and TES concepts. The test-bed consists of a closed-loop sCO 2 circulation system housed within an open-topped enclosure. In its as-installed configuration, dense-phase sCO 2 is recirculated through a printed circuit recuperator, an electrically heated section, a throttling device used to simulate turbine expansion, and a water-cooled printed circuit heat exchanger that rejects heat to the building chilled-water system before returning to the pump. The pump is driven by a variable frequency drive, enabling controlled adjustment of flow and operating point. A comprehensive instrumentation suite was integrated to support both safe operation and high-quality data collection. Installed sensors include Coriolis flow meters for sCO 2 flow rate and density, resistance temperature detectors and thermocouples distributed throughout the loop (including the heated section and key heat exchanger ports), and pressure transducers for absolute and differential pressure measurements. The facility was designed to support high-pressure (19 MPa nominal) and high-temperature (575°C nominal) operation with credited overpressure protection provided by a rupture disk. Nominal operating conditions were selected to support 100 kW-class testing while maintaining flexibility for non-heated and heated shakedown, control development, and future integration of advanced TES test sections. In parallel with facility development, a system-level thermal-hydraulic model was created using Modelica-based tools to support component sizing, anticipate performance over targeted test conditions, and establish a framework for future model calibration against experimental data. At the conclusion of the project performance period, the facility was in final assembly, and the pressure boundary was nearly completed. However, several practical challenges associated with high-pressure/high-temperature systems and specialized component procurement impacted schedule and prevented initial pump-driven operation and full commissioning within the available resources. This report documents the as-built design, operating capabilities, and instrumentation, and it summarizes key lessons learned related to heater fabrication and testing, first-of-a-kind assembly factors, specialty flange supply constraints, and fill pump corrective actions. Finally, it outlines a phased plan for future commissioning and experimental campaigns, including control and instrumentation shakedown, heater characterization, model calibration, and testing at state points representative of EarthEn’s TES cycle.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗