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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 631 records · Page 35

Improving the reliability of machine learned potentials for modeling inhomogeneous liquids

The atomic-scale response of inhomogeneous fluids at interfaces and surrounding solute particles plays a critical role in governing chemical, electrochemical, and biological processes. Classical molecular dynamics simulations have been applied extensively to simulate the response of fluids to inhomogeneities directly, but are limited by the accuracy of the underlying interatomic potentials. Here, we use neural network potentials (NNPs) trained to ab initio simulations to accurately predict the inhomogeneous responses of two distinct fluids: liquid water and molten NaCl. Although NNPs can be readily trained to model complex bulk systems across a range of state points, we show that to appropriately model a fluid's response at an interface, relevant inhomogeneous configurations must be included in the training data. In order to sufficiently sample appropriate configurations of such inhomogeneous fluids, we develop protocols based on molecular dynamics simulations in the presence of external potentials. We demonstrate that NNPs trained on inhomogeneous fluid configurations can more accurately predict several key properties of fluids—including the density response, surface tension and size-dependent cavitation free energies—for liquid water and molten NaCl, compared to both empirical interatomic potentials and NNPs that are not trained on such inhomogeneous configurations. This work therefore provides a first demonstration and framework to extract the response of inhomogeneous fluids from first principles for classical density-functional treatment of fluids free from empirical potentials.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Real-time tracking of structural evolution in 2D MXenes using theory-enhanced machine learning

In situ Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS) combined with Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) has traditionally been pivotal for understanding how material processing choices affect local structure and composition. However, the ability to monitor and respond to ultrafast transient changes, now achievable with EELS and TEM, necessitates innovative analytical frameworks. Here, we introduce a machine learning (ML) framework tailored for the real-time assessment and characterization of in operando EELS Spectrum Images (EELS-SI). We focus on 2D MXenes as the sample material system, specifically targeting the understanding and control of their atomic-scale structural transformations that critically influence their electronic and optical properties. This approach requires fewer labeled training data points than typical deep learning classification methods. By integrating computationally generated structures of MXenes and experimental datasets into a unified latent space using Variational Autoencoders (VAE) in a unique training method, our framework accurately predicts structural evolutions at latencies pertinent to closed-loop processing within the TEM. This study presents a critical advancement in enabling automated, on-the-fly synthesis and characterization, significantly enhancing capabilities for materials discovery and the precision engineering of functional materials at the atomic scale.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

The probabilistic neural network architecture for high speed classification of remotely sensed imagery

In this paper we discuss a neural network architecture (the Probabilistic Neural Net or the PNN) that, to the best of our knowledge, has not previously been applied to remotely sensed data. The PNN is a supervised non-parametric classification algorithm as opposed to the Gaussian maximum likelihood classifier (GMLC). The PNN works by fitting a Gaussian kernel to each training point. The width of the Gaussian is controlled by a tuning parameter called the window width. If very small widths are used, the method is equivalent to the nearest neighbor method. For large windows, the PNN behaves like the GMLC. The basic implementation of the PNN requires no training time at all. In this respect it is far better than the commonly used backpropagation neural network which can be shown to take O(N6) time for training where N is the dimensionality of the input vector. In addition the PNN can be implemented in a feed forward mode in hardware. The disadvantage of the PNN is that it requires all the training data to be stored. Some solutions to this problem are discussed in the paper. Finally, we discuss the accuracy of the PNN with respect to the GMLC and the backpropagation neural network (BPNN). The PNN is shown to be better than GMLC and not as good as the BPNN with regards to classification accuracy.

Chettri, Samir R.↗

Predicting resistive wall mode stability in NSTX through balanced random forests and counterfactual explanations

Abstract Recent progress in the disruption event characterization and forecasting framework has shown that machine learning guided by physics theory can be easily implemented as a supporting tool for fast computations of ideal stability properties of spherical tokamak plasmas. In order to extend that idea, a customized random forest (RF) classifier that takes into account imbalances in the training data is hereby employed to predict resistive wall mode (RWM) stability for a set of high beta discharges from the NSTX spherical tokamak. More specifically, with this approach each tree in the forest is trained on samples that are balanced via a user-defined over/under-sampler. The proposed approach outperforms classical cost-sensitive methods for the problem at hand, in particular when used in conjunction with a random under-sampler, while also resulting in a threefold reduction in the training time. In order to further understand the model’s decisions, a diverse set of counterfactual explanations based on determinantal point processes (DPP) is generated and evaluated. Via the use of DPP, the underlying RF model infers that the presence of hypothetical magnetohydrodynamic activity would have prevented the RWM from concurrently going unstable, which is a counterfactual that is indeed expected by prior physics knowledge. Given that this result emerges from the data-driven RF classifier and the use of counterfactuals without hand-crafted embedding of prior physics intuition, it motivates the usage of counterfactuals to simulate real-time control by generating the β N levels that would have kept the RWM stable for a set of unstable discharges.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

A Data Library of Liquid Clouds Modelled With a Large Eddy Simulation Framework

We describe a library of atmospheric large eddy simulations (LES) of liquid-phase boundary layer clouds constructed to enable aerosol–cloud–turbulence interaction studies, support parameterization evaluation and development, and provide training data for machine learning applications. The simulations use a modern LES framework designed for high numerical accuracy, coupled to a detailed spectral bin microphysical scheme. Case studies are configured to represent observed conditions in four key global cloud regions—the Northeastern Atlantic, Northeastern Pacific, Continental United States and Southern Ocean—following a semi-idealised approach. The library also includes aerosol concentration halving and doubling experiments to expose the sensitivities of the case studies to aerosol perturbations. Simulation results are compared to observations on a case-by-case basis, then the library's coverage is evaluated in terms of spreads in meteorological factors and atmospheric boundary layer attributes.

aerosol↗

Using AI for Management of Field Emission in SRF Linacs

Field emission control, mitigation, and reduction is critical for reliable operation of high gradient superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) accelerators. With the SRF cavities at high gradients, the field emission of electrons from cavity walls can occur and will impact the operational gradient, radiological environment via activated components, and reliability of CEBAF’s two linacs. A new effort has started to minimize field emission in the CEBAF linacs by re-distributing cavity gradients. To measure radiation levels, newly designed neutron and gamma radiation dose rate monitors have been installed in both linacs. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques will be used to identify cavities with high levels of field emission based on control system data such as radiation levels, cryogenic readbacks, and vacuum loads. The gradients on the most offending cavities will be reduced and compensated for by increasing the gradients on least offensive cavities. Training data will be collected during this year’s operational program and initial implementation of AI models will be deployed. Preliminary results and future plans are presented.

Carpenter, Adam↗

Using AI for Management of Field Emission in SRF Linacs

Field emission control, mitigation, and reduction is critical for reliable operation of high gradient superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) accelerators. With the SRF cavities at high gradients, the field emission of electrons from cavity walls can occur and will impact the operational gradient, radiological environment via activated components, and reliability of CEBAF’s two linacs. A new effort has started to minimize field emission in the CEBAF linacs by re-distributing cavity gradients. To measure radiation levels, newly designed neutron and gamma radiation dose rate monitors have been installed in both linacs. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques will be used to identify cavities with high levels of field emission based on control system data such as radiation levels, cryogenic readbacks, and vacuum loads. The gradients on the most offending cavities will be reduced and compensated for by increasing the gradients on least offensive cavities. Training data will be collected during this year’s operational program and initial implementation of AI models will be deployed. Preliminary results and future plans are presented.

Carpenter, Adam↗

State Identification for Planetary Rovers: Learning and Recognition

A planetary rover must be able to identify states where it should stop or change its plan. With limited and infrequent communication from ground, the rover must recognize states accurately. However, the sensor data is inherently noisy, so identifying the temporal patterns of data that correspond to interesting or important states becomes a complex problem. In this paper, we present an approach to state identification using second-order Hidden Markov Models. Models are trained automatically on a set of labeled training data; the rover uses those models to identify its state from the observed data. The approach is demonstrated on data from a planetary rover platform.

Aycard, Olivier↗

Data–driven and constrained optimization of semi–local exchange and nonlocal correlation functionals for materials and surface chemistry

Reliable predictions of surface chemical reaction energetics require an accurate description of both chemisorption and physisorption. Herein, we present an empirical approach to simultaneously optimize semi-local exchange and nonlocal correlation of a density functional approximation to improve these energetics. A combination of reference data for solid bulk, surface, and gas-phase chemistry and physical exchange-correlation model constraints leads to the VCML-rVV10 exchange-correlation functional. Owing to the variety of training data, the applicability of VCML-rVV10 extends beyond surface chemistry simulations. It provides optimized gas phase reaction energetics and an accurate description of bulk lattice constants and elastic properties.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Missing Wedge Completion via Unsupervised Learning with Coordinate Networks

Cryogenic electron tomography (cryoET) is a powerful tool in structural biology, enabling detailed 3D imaging of biological specimens at a resolution of nanometers. Despite its potential, cryoET faces challenges such as the missing wedge problem, which limits reconstruction quality due to incomplete data collection angles. Recently, supervised deep learning methods leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have considerably addressed this issue; however, their pretraining requirements render them susceptible to inaccuracies and artifacts, particularly when representative training data is scarce. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a proof-of-concept unsupervised learning approach using coordinate networks (CNs) that optimizes network weights directly against input projections. This eliminates the need for pretraining, reducing reconstruction runtime by 3–20× compared to supervised methods. Our in silico results show improved shape completion and reduction of missing wedge artifacts, assessed through several voxel-based image quality metrics in real space and a novel directional Fourier Shell Correlation (FSC) metric. Our study illuminates benefits and considerations of both supervised and unsupervised approaches, guiding the development of improved reconstruction strategies.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Cyber-Physical Events Emulation Based Transmission and Distribution Co-Simulation for Situation Awareness and Grid Anomaly (SAGA) Detection: Preprint

Energy management of transmission and distribution networks is becoming more challenged with the accelerated increasing of distributed energy resources (DERs) such as distributed photovoltaic (PV) generation and distributed energy storage. To better analyze the impacts of DERs on both transmission and distribution systems, a comprehensive transmission and distribution co-simulation platform should be developed. Furthermore, with DERs more actively participated in system operation such as providing real time grid services, their cyber vulnerability should be better understood to maintain system reliability. This paper discussed a cyber-physical events emulation based transmission & distribution co-simulation platform to perform different cyber events emulation and analyze the impacts of cyber physical events happened in distribution system on the T&D system operation. The case studies with both a transmission network and a synthetic distribution network data validate that the proposed T&D co-simulation platform can perform comprehensive cyber physical events emulation. Therefore, with extensive simulation using the proposed model, the system operator can accumulate adequate training data for the system situation awareness and grid anomaly detection purpose.

31 CESER - Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Securit↗

Unveiling the Potential of MeshGraphNets for Predicting Subsurface Evolution in Carbon Storage Projects

This is the conference paper accompanying an oral presentation “Unveiling the Potential of MeshGraphNets for Predicting Subsurface Evolution in Carbon Storage Projects” at the 17th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies GHGT-17 held in Calgary, Canada, October 20-24 , 2024. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is critical for mitigating climate change but requires effective subsurface reservoir management to ensure safe containment of injected CO2. Accurate predictions of reservoir pressure and saturation are essential for assessing long-term CCS performance. Traditional numerical simulations, while effective, are computationally intensive, time-consuming, and constrained by data discretization. Previous work has shown the effectiveness of MeshGraphNets (MGN), a graph-based machine learning framework, as an innovative alternative for predicting reservoir behavior. MGN leverages graph neural networks (GNNs) and mesh representations to model complex geological formations, offering superior adaptability across different discretizations and reservoir configurations. Classic MGN implementations utilize an autoregressive technique to predict future behavior based on current predictions, but this technique is hampered by error accumulation over time. To enhance the model accuracy in time-series predictions, this study implemented a multi-step rollout strategy that integrates autoregressive predictions during training to stabilize prediction of saturation over time. Using the Illinois Basin – Decatur Project (IBDP) dataset, comprising 100 simulations of CO2 injection, pressure, and saturation changes, the framework demonstrated its ability to learn spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics. With inputs including permeabilities, porosities, and injection rates, MGN accurately predicted CO2 plume evolution over time, even with limited training data. Moreover, the addition of a multi-step rollout procedure during training improved the ability of MGN to predict stably over time by ~15%. This research positions MGN, enhanced with multi-step rollout capabilities, as a robust and efficient tool for CCS applications. It advances the field by enabling precise, computationally efficient predictions of reservoir behavior, providing a foundation for the broader adoption of machine learning frameworks in CCS and other geoscience domains.

Holcomb, Paul↗

The Past, Present and Future of Structural Health Monitoring: An Overview of Three Ages

This paper presents an overview of the discipline of structural health monitoring (SHM), organised in terms of three proposed ages. The first age is delineated by the prehistory of SHM and the period where nondestructing testing methods evolved into an organised set of principles built upon physics-based models; this age ended when the model-based approaches reached an impasse in terms of their ability to properly deal with real-world problems. The second age of SHM began with a transition to data-based methods based on statistical pattern recognition, which provided a holistic approach to SHM problems for the first time. This age arguably ended when the methods foundered in situations where the necessary training data were scarce. It is argued here that the third age began with the development of population-based SHM, which has been designed to overcome the problem of data scarcity. As there is very limited space in a single article to provide a comprehensive overview, an appendix has been provided here that gives a very systematic bibliography of SHM reviews—a meta-bibliography.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Learning epistatic polygenic phenotypes with Boolean interactions

Detecting epistatic drivers of human phenotypes is a considerable challenge. Traditional approaches use regression to sequentially test multiplicative interaction terms involving pairs of genetic variants. For higher-order interactions and genome-wide large-scale data, this strategy is computationally intractable. Moreover, multiplicative terms used in regression modeling may not capture the form of biological interactions. Building on the Predictability, Computability, Stability (PCS) framework, we introduce the epiTree pipeline to extract higher-order interactions from genomic data using tree-based models. The epiTree pipeline first selects a set of variants derived from tissue-specific estimates of gene expression. Next, it uses iterative random forests (iRF) to search training data for candidate Boolean interactions (pairwise and higher-order). We derive significance tests for interactions, based on a stabilized likelihood ratio test, by simulating Boolean tree-structured null (no epistasis) and alternative (epistasis) distributions on hold-out test data. Finally, our pipeline computes PCS epistasis p-values that probabilisticly quantify improvement in prediction accuracy via bootstrap sampling on the test set. We validate the epiTree pipeline in two case studies using data from the UK Biobank: predicting red hair and multiple sclerosis (MS). In the case of predicting red hair, epiTree recovers known epistatic interactions surrounding MC1R and novel interactions, representing non-linearities not captured by logistic regression models. In the case of predicting MS, a more complex phenotype than red hair, epiTree rankings prioritize novel interactions surrounding HLA-DRB1 , a variant previously associated with MS in several populations. Taken together, these results highlight the potential for epiTree rankings to help reduce the design space for follow up experiments.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Bottom-up design of actinide materials from molecular clusters: Demonstration of a general-purpose simulation capability leveraging machine-learned atomic potentials

Actinide thin-film coatings such as uranium dioxide (UO 2 ) play an important role in nuclear reactors and other mission-relevant applications, but realization of their potential requires a deep fundamental understanding of the chemical vapor deposition (CVD) processes used for their growth. The slow experimental progress can be attributed, in part, to the standard safety guidelines associated with handling uranium byproducts, which are often corrosive, toxic, and radioactive. Accurate simulation techniques, when used in concert with experiment, can improve laboratory safety, material durability, and deliverable timeframes. However, state-of-the-art computational methods are either insufficiently accurate or intractably expensive. To remedy this situation, in this project we suggested a machine-learning (ML) accelerated workflow for simulating molecular clustering toward deposition. As a benchmark test case, we considered molecular clustering in steam and assessed independent components of our workflow by comparing with measured thermodynamic properties of water. After analyzing each component individually and finding no fundamental barrier to realization of the workflow, we attempted to integrate the ML component, a Sandia-developed tool called FitSNAP. As this was the first application of FitSNAP to atoms and molecules in the gas phase at Sandia, the method required more fitting data than was originally anticipated. Systematic improvements were made by including in the fit data diatomic potentials, molecular single-bond-breaking curves, and symmetry-constrained intermolecular potentials. We concluded that our strategy provides a feasible pathway toward modeling CVD and related processes, but that extensive training data must be generated before it can be of practical use.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Results from the Crop Identification Technology Assessment for Remote Sensing (CITARS) project

The author has identified the following significant results. It was found that several factors had a significant effect on crop identification performance: (1) crop maturity and site characteristics, (2) which of several different single date automatic data processing procedures was used for local recognition, (3) nonlocal recognition, both with and without preprocessing for the extension of recognition signatures, and (4) use of multidate data. It also was found that classification accuracy for field center pixels was not a reliable indicator of proportion estimation performance for whole areas, that bias was present in proportion estimates, and that training data and procedures strongly influenced crop identification performance.

Bauer, M. E.↗

Improving Acoustic Models by Watching Television

Obtaining sufficient labelled training data is a persistent difficulty for speech recognition research. Although well transcribed data is expensive to produce, there is a constant stream of challenging speech data and poor transcription broadcast as closed-captioned television. We describe a reliable unsupervised method for identifying accurately transcribed sections of these broadcasts, and show how these segments can be used to train a recognition system. Starting from acoustic models trained on the Wall Street Journal database, a single iteration of our training method reduced the word error rate on an independent broadcast television news test set from 62.2% to 59.5%.

Witbrock, Michael J.↗

Predicting Long-Range Traversability from Short-Range Stereo-Derived Geometry

Based only on its appearance in imagery, this program uses close-range 3D terrain analysis to produce training data sufficient to estimate the traversability of terrain beyond 3D sensing range. This approach is called learning from stereo (LFS). In effect, the software transfers knowledge from middle distances, where 3D geometry provides training cues, into the far field where only appearance is available. This is a viable approach because the same obstacle classes, and sometimes the same obstacles, are typically present in the mid-field and the farfield. Learning thus extends the effective look-ahead distance of the sensors.

Turmon, Michael↗