Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “network flow”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 631 records · Page 35

Impacts of Experimentally Obtained Harmonic Spectrums of Residential Appliances on Distribution Feeder

Owing to the increased use of power electronic based appliances and energy-efficient home equipment such as modern lighting loads, the percentage of nonlinear loads has increased in the distribution system, which can impact system performance, loss, and stability. Thus a comprehensive knowledge of their power quality and harmonic analysis is essential to improve the load models, voltage stability assessment, determination of possible interactions at harmonic frequencies, protection planning, and the effect of system impedance. This paper focuses on harmonic load flow analysis for multiple residential load types to determine the expected impacts on an modeled distribution secondary. For this study, the household appliances include lighting, power electronic, resistive, and motor loads with a nominal supply voltage of 120 V single-phase or 240 V split phase at a nominal frequency of 60 Hz. The harmonic spectrums, as obtained from the experimental evaluation of real loads, are used to inform the harmonic load flow for a detailed secondary network, including the distribution service transformer extracted from a real distribution feeder's model. Additionally, the impact of voltage harmonics on a three-phase test load is presented with experimental results. The harmonic data of the transformer terminal voltage, as obtained from the former load flow study, are scaled to generate the source voltage for the three-phase configuration of the grid simulator to make the test setup very similar to a typical secondary design in the U.S.

ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION↗

Distribution of centrality measures on undirected random networks via the cavity method

The Katz centrality of a node in a complex network is a measure of the node’s importance as far as the flow of information across the network is concerned. For ensembles of locally tree-like undirected random graphs, this observable is a random variable. Its full probability distribution is of interest but difficult to handle analytically because of its “global” character and its definition in terms of a matrix inverse. Leveraging a fast Gaussian Belief Propagation-Cavity algorithm to solve linear systems on tree-like structures, we show that i) the Katz centrality of a single instance can be computed recursively in a very fast way, and ii) the probability P ( K ) that a random node in the ensemble of undirected random graphs has centrality K satisfies a set of recursive distributional equations, which can be analytically characterized and efficiently solved using a population dynamics algorithm. We test our solution on ensembles of Erdős-Rényi and Scale Free networks in the locally tree-like regime, with excellent agreement. The analytical distribution of centrality for the configuration model conditioned on the degree of each node can be employed as a benchmark to identify nodes of empirical networks with over- and underexpressed centrality relative to a null baseline. We also provide an approximate formula based on a rank- 1 projection that works well if the network is not too sparse, and we argue that an extension of our method could be efficiently extended to tackle analytical distributions of other centrality measures such as PageRank for directed networks in a transparent and user-friendly way.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Application of the TranAir full-potential code to complete configurations

The TranAir computer code solves the full-potential equation for transonic flow by combining a rectangular box of flow-field grid points with networks of surface panels. Complex geometry is easily represented since surface conforming flow-field grids are not used. Application of TranAir to the F-16A is presented for free-stream Mach numbers of 0.6 and 0.90, at an angle of attack of four degrees.

Erickson, L. L.↗

Optimal Power Flow Pursuit

This paper considers distribution networks featuring inverter-interfaced distributed energy resources, and develops distributed feedback controllers that continuously drive the inverter output powers to solutions of AC optimal power flow (OPF) problems. Particularly, the controllers update the power setpoints based on voltage measurements as well as given (time-varying) OPF targets, and entail elementary operations implementable onto low-cost microcontrollers that accompany power-electronics interfaces of gateways and inverters. The design of the control framework is based on suitable linear approximations of the AC power-flow equations as well as Lagrangian regularization methods. Convergence and OPF-target tracking capabilities of the controllers are analytically established. Overall, the proposed method allows to bypass traditional hierarchical setups where feedback control and optimization operate at distinct time scales, and to enable real-time optimization of distribution systems.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Flow Reconstruction in A Transonic Turbine Cascade Using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNS)

This paper investigates the application of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) for the analysis of turbine blades in a transonic cascade. The 2-D flow field in a transonic turbine cascade is reconstructed in three ways: the traditional forward approach (PINN not trained on experimental data), by training the PINN using discrete sets of experimentally measured pressure at midspan, and in the inverse sense where no inlet or outlet pressure boundary conditions are applied. Comparisons between the PINN solutions to measured data are made. This is repeated for three different turbine blades with distinct loading characteristics. Good agreement is shown between a CFD calculation of the CMC7 blade, and the PINN model trained with all data. The PINN is trained utilizing all available data, half the available data, data from only the leading edge region, and data from only the trailing edge region. The forward problem results deviate the most from experimental data but show promise. Solutions from the assisted training cases show that the PINN can reconstruct the flow field with acceptable accuracy when trained on measurements along the entire blade. In the inverse case, it is shown that to simultaneously achieve acceptable errors for inlet Mach number and outlet isentropic Mach number, the PINN must be trained on the static pressure data along the entire blade.

Machine Learning↗

Virtual-Voltage Partition-Based Approach to Optimal Transmission Switching

This article deals with optimal transmission switching (OTS) problems involving binary decisions about network topology and nonconvex power flow constraints. We adopt a semidefinite programming formulation for the optimal power flow (OPF) problem that, however, remains nonconvex due to the presence of discrete variables and bilinear products between the decision variables. To tackle the latter, we introduce a physically inspired, virtual-voltage approximation that leads to provable lower and upper bounds on the solution of the original problem. To deal with the exponential complexity caused by the discrete variables, we introduce a graph partition-based algorithm that breaks the problem into several parallel mixed-integer subproblems of smaller size. Simulations on the IEEE bus test cases demonstrate the high degree of accuracy and affordable computational requirements of our approach.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Adaptive Protection of Scientific Backbone Networks Using Machine Learning

In this article, we propose a new protection scheme for backbone networks to guarantee high service availability. The presented scheme does not require any reconfiguration immediately after the failure (i.e., it is proactive). At the same time, it does not require any reserved backup network resources either. To achieve these seemingly contradictory goals, we utilize the recent advancements in Machine Learning (ML) to implement a network intelligence that periodically re-allocates the unused capacity as protection bandwidth to meet the service availability requirements of each connection. Our goal is achieved by two components (1) predicting the traffic for the next period on each link, and (2) intelligently selecting the best fit dedicated protection scheme for the next period depending on the estimated unused (spare) bandwidth and the previous service availability violations. Note that re-allocating protection bandwidth affects neither the operational connections nor the current best practice of operators to over-provision network bandwidth to support elephant flows. Finally, we provide a case study on the real traffic from Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), a high-speed, international scientific backbone network. The key benefit of our framework is that adaptively utilizing the over-provisioned bandwidth for spare capacity is sufficient to improve the availability from three-nines to five-nines (in ESnet for the 30 examined connections). The drawback is negligible bandwidth limitations; the user perceives a minor and very temporal bandwidth limitation in less than 0.1% of the time.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Determining the Impact of Personal Mobility Carbon Allowance Schemes in Transportation Networks

We know that personal mobility carbon allowance (PMCA) schemes are designed to reduce carbon consumption from transportation networks. PMCA schemes influence the travel decision process of users and accordingly impact the system metrics including travel time and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Here, we develop a multi-user class dynamic user equilibrium model to evaluate the transportation system performance when PMCA scheme is implemented. The results using Sioux-Falls test network indicate that PMCA schemes can achieve the emissions reduction goals for transportation networks. Further, users characterized by high value of travel time are found to be less sensitive to carbon budget in the context of work trips. Results also show that PMCA scheme can lead to higher emissions for a path compared with the case without PMCA because of flow redistribution. The developed network equilibrium model allows us to examine the change in system states at different carbon allocation levels and to design parameters of PMCA schemes accounting for population heterogeneity.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Embedding hard physical constraints in neural network coarse-graining of three-dimensional turbulence

In recent years, deep learning approaches have shown much promise in modeling complex systems in the physical sciences. A major challenge in deep learning of partial differential equations is enforcing physical constraints and boundary conditions. In this work, we propose a general framework to directly embed the notion of an incompressible fluid into convolutional neural networks, and apply this to coarse-graining of turbulent flow. These physics-embedded neural networks leverage interpretable strategies from numerical methods and computational fluid dynamics to enforce physical laws and boundary conditions by taking advantage the mathematical properties of the underlying equations. Here, we demonstrate results on three-dimensional fully developed turbulence, showing that this technique drastically improves local conservation of mass, without sacrificing performance according to several other metrics characterizing the fluid flow.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Feedback Power Cost Optimization in Power Distribution Networks with Prosumers

Here, we propose a feedback control approach for solving optimal power flow (OPF) problems in power distribution networks (DNs) based on a projected gradient scheme, where the cost is given by the sum of functions of local power injections. This approach does not require detailed knowledge of the grid model and enables real-time tracking of the optimal generation configuration. Moreover, the communication burden is minimal: only a broadcast from a central entity, called the Network Supervisor (NS), to the agents in the network is needed. Hence, agents do not have to share local information that can be sensitive, e.g., their power injections or the value of the local costs. Our approach is then used to solve a particular OPF problem targeting DNs with high penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs) in which the energy cost is given by the remuneration that the DERs owners receive for the service they provide.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

A Novel Equivalent Model of Active Distribution Networks Based on LSTM

Dynamic behaviors of distribution networks are of great importance for the power system analysis. Nowadays, due to the integration of the renewable energy generation, energy storage, plug-in electric vehicles, and distribution networks turn from passive systems to active ones. Hence, the dynamic behaviors of active distribution networks (ADNs) are much more complex than the traditional ones. The research interests how to establish an accurate model of ADNs in modern power systems are drawing a great deal of attention. In this paper, motivated by the similarities between power system differential algebraic equations and the forward calculation flows of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), a long short-term memory (LSTM) RNN-based equivalent model is proposed to accurately represent the ADNs. First, the adoption reasons of the proposed LSTM RNN-based equivalent model are explained, and its advantages are analyzed from the mathematical point of view. Then, the accuracy and generalization performance of the proposed model is evaluated using the IEEE 39-Bus New England system integrated with ADNs in the study cases. Here, it reveals that the proposed LSTM RNN-based equivalent model has a generalization capability to capture the dynamic behaviors of ADNs with high accuracy.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Technical note: Using long short-term memory models to fill data gaps in hydrological monitoring networks

Abstract. Quantifying the spatiotemporal dynamics in subsurface hydrological flows over a long time window usually employs a network of monitoring wells. However, such observations are often spatially sparse with potential temporal gaps due to poor quality or instrument failure. In this study, we explore the ability of recurrent neural networks to fill gaps in a spatially distributed time-series dataset. We use a well network that monitors the dynamic and heterogeneous hydrologic exchanges between the Columbia River and its adjacent groundwater aquifer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford site. This 10-year-long dataset contains hourly temperature, specific conductance, and groundwater table elevation measurements from 42 wells with gaps of various lengths. We employ a long short-term memory (LSTM) model to capture the temporal variations in the observed system behaviors needed for gap filling. The performance of the LSTM-based gap-filling method was evaluated against a traditional autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) method in terms of error statistics and accuracy in capturing the temporal patterns of river corridor wells with various dynamics signatures. Our study demonstrates that the ARIMA models yield better average error statistics, although they tend to have larger errors during time windows with abrupt changes or high-frequency (daily and subdaily) variations. The LSTM-based models excel in capturing both high-frequency and low-frequency (monthly and seasonal) dynamics. However, the inclusion of high-frequency fluctuations may also lead to overly dynamic predictions in time windows that lack such fluctuations. The LSTM can take advantage of the spatial information from neighboring wells to improve the gap-filling accuracy, especially for long gaps in system states that vary at subdaily scales. While LSTM models require substantial training data and have limited extrapolation power beyond the conditions represented in the training data, they afford great flexibility to account for the spatial correlations, temporal correlations, and nonlinearity in data without a priori assumptions. Thus, LSTMs provide effective alternatives to fill in data gaps in spatially distributed time-series observations characterized by multiple dominant frequencies of variability, which are essential for advancing our understanding of dynamic complex systems.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

STAR FORMATION IN TURBULENT MOLECULAR CLOUDS WITH COLLIDING FLOW

Using self-gravitational hydrodynamical numerical simulations, we investigated the evolution of high-density turbulent molecular clouds swept by a colliding flow. The interaction of shock waves due to turbulence produces networks of thin filamentary clouds with a sub-parsec width. The colliding flow accumulates the filamentary clouds into a sheet cloud and promotes active star formation for initially high-density clouds. Clouds with a colliding flow exhibit a finer filamentary network than clouds without a colliding flow. The probability distribution functions (PDFs) for the density and column density can be fitted by lognormal functions for clouds without colliding flow. When the initial turbulence is weak, the column density PDF has a power-law wing at high column densities. The colliding flow considerably deforms the PDF, such that the PDF exhibits a double peak. The stellar mass distributions reproduced here are consistent with the classical initial mass function with a power-law index of –1.35 when the initial clouds have a high density. The distribution of stellar velocities agrees with the gas velocity distribution, which can be fitted by Gaussian functions for clouds without colliding flow. For clouds with colliding flow, the velocity dispersion of gas tends to be larger than the stellar velocity dispersion. The signatures of colliding flows and turbulence appear in channel maps reconstructed from the simulation data. Clouds without colliding flow exhibit a cloud-scale velocity shear due to the turbulence. In contrast, clouds with colliding flow show a prominent anti-correlated distribution of thin filaments between the different velocity channels, suggesting collisions between the filamentary clouds.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Propagating uncertainties in large-scale hemodynamics models via network uncertainty quantification and reduced-order modeling

Numerical simulations of the cardiovascular system are affected by uncertainties arising from a substantial lack of data related to the boundary conditions and the physical parameters of the mathematical models. Quantifying the impact of this uncertainty on the numerical results along the circulatory network is challenged by the complexity of both the morphology of the domain and the local dynamics. Here, we propose to integrate (i) the Transverse Enriched Pipe Element Methods (TEPEM) as a reduced-order model for effectively computing the 3D local hemodynamics; and (ii) a combination of uncertainty quantification via Polynomial Chaos Expansion and classical relaxation methods – called network uncertainty quantification (NetUQ) – for effectively propagating random variables that encode uncertainties throughout the networks. The findings demonstrate the computational effectiveness of computing the propagation of uncertainties in networks with nontrivial topology, including portions of the cerebral and the coronary systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Discrete Fracture Network Modeling and Simulation of Subsurface Transport for the Topopah Springs and Lava Flow Aquifers at Pahute Mesa, FY 15 Progress Report

This progress report for fiscal year 2015 (FY15) describes the development of discrete fracture network (DFN) models for Pahute Mesa. DFN models will be used to upscale parameters for simulations of subsurface flow and transport in fractured media in Pahute Mesa. The research focuses on modeling of groundwater flow and contaminant transport using DFNs generated according to fracture characteristics observed in the Topopah Spring Aquifer (TSA) and the Lava Flow Aquifer (LFA). This work will improve the representation of radionuclide transport processes in large-scale, regulatory-focused models with a view to reduce pessimistic bounding approximations and provide more realistic contaminant boundary calculations that can be used to describe the future extent of contaminated groundwater. Our goal is to refine a modeling approach that can translate parameters to larger-scale models that account for local-scale flow and transport processes, which tend to attenuate migration.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Preliminary Investigation of the Supersonic Flow Field Downstream of Wire-mesh Nozzles in a Constant-area Duct / Lawrence I. Gould

An investigation was conducted in a 3.4- by 3.4-inch duct to determine the characteristics of the supersonic flow downstream of four wire-mesh screen nozzles with nominal design Mach numbers in the range between 1.97 and 2.58. Two types of disturbances were observed in the flow field: a fine network of interacting expansion and compression waves which were formed immediately downstream of the screens and appeared to dissipate within 25 to 40 wave intersections; and relatively strong oblique shock waves that originated at the junctions of the screens and the walls and were reflected throughout the length of the duct. Regions of fairly uniform flow were found to exist. The total-pressure loss across the screens varied from 22 percent at Mach number 1.58 to 43 percent at Mach number 2.06.

WIND TUNNELS↗

A machine learning-based interaction force model for non-spherical and irregular particles in low Reynolds number incompressible flows

In this study, interaction force of non-spherical particles in low Reynolds number gas-solid flow is investigated by neural network approaches. An artificial neural network (ANN) model is developed to correlate the non-spherical particle shape and the flow conditions with the interaction force. To define the particle shape, spherical harmonic expansion is applied. Furthermore, variational autoencoder model is then used to extract latent geometric features. The latent vector is utilized as an input with the Reynolds number for the ANN. The interaction force data, which is used as output data of the ANN, is obtained by particle resolved direct numerical simulation for 5200 non-spherical particles. The proposed model enables unsupervised extraction for non-spherical particle shapes and accurate predictions on the interaction force without heavy computation. This study provides the model that can explain complicated shapes of particles and be applied to a large scale, computational fluid dynamics simulation.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗

Optimizing Power–Frequency Droop Characteristics of Distributed Energy Resources

This paper outlines a procedure to design power-frequency droop slopes for distributed energy resources (DERs) installed in distribution networks to optimally participate in primary frequency response. In particular, the droop slopes are engineered such that DERs respond in proportion to their power ratings and they are not unfairly penalized in power provisioning based on their location in the distribution network. The main contribution of our approach is that a guaranteed level of frequency regulation can be guaranteed at the feeder head, while ensuring that the outputs of individual DERs conform to some well-defined notion of fairness. The approach we adopt leverages an optimization-based perspective and suitable linearizations of the power-flow equations to embed notions of fairness and information regarding the physics of the power flows within the distribution network into the droop slopes. Time-domain simulations from a differential algebraic equation model of the 39-bus New England test-case system augmented with three instances of the IEEE 37-node distribution-network with frequency-sensitive DERs are provided to validate our approach.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗