Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “Deltas”

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 649 records · Page 36
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2023

Time calibration and synchronization of the scintillation light detection system in ICARUS-T600

The ICARUS-T600 Liquid Argon (LAr) Time Projection Chamber (TPC) is presently used as a far detector of the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program at Fermilab (USA) to search for a possible LSND-like sterile neutrino signal at $\Delta m^2 \approx 1 eV^2$ with the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB). A light detection system, based on 360 large area Photo-Multiplier Tubes (PMTs), has been realized for ICARUS-T600 to detect VUV photons produced after the passage of ionizing particles in LAr. This system is fundamental for the TPC operation, providing an efficient trigger and contributing to the 3D reconstruction of events. Moreover, since the detector is exposed to a huge flux of cosmic rays due to its shallow depths operations, the light detection system allows for the time reconstruction of events, contributing to the identification and to the selection of neutrino interactions within the BNB spill gate. The correct time reconstruction of events requires the precise knowledge of the delay of each PMT channel and a good synchronization of recording electronics, this last based on fast sampling digitizers.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Bifacial PV Module Energy Modeling Validation Study

The cost delta between monofacial and bifacial photovoltaic (PV) modules was decreasing in 2018 when this study was initially proposed, making bifacial modules an attractive offering. However, there were limited field studies available that could be considered utility-scale representative, and PV module manufacturers were stating large ranges for the expected energy yield improvements of bifacial technology. This generated uncertainties regarding bifacial performance gains and the actual LCOE (levelized cost of energy). There was also relatively low confidence in the industry’s energy modeling tools’ ability to accurately predict bifacial energy yield, meaning that early adopters of bifacial modules were not able to fully account for the increased energy yield in their energy and financial models. The intent of this project was to provide the solar industry with greater certainty on the energy yield gains of bifacial modules and provide higher confidence in the ability for different energy modeling software to model bifacial PV site performance. Achieving this would allow for bifacial technology to become bankable (i.e. accepted by Independent Engineers, site financiers and other PV site stakeholders), offering a step change in PV site performance that had not been seen since the widespread adoption of the single-axis tracker. Over the course of this study other economic factors including a significant tariff exemption for bifacial modules resulted in accelerated adoption of bifacial technology throughout the US utility scale solar segment. The number of early adopters increased rapidly, and with many investors accepting this module choice the question of bifacial bankability was seemingly answered faster than expected. However, PVEL’s study has still achieved significant accomplishments in demonstrating the accuracy of bifacial modeling across three different software platforms. The results of this study have shown that the mean biased error (MBE) between the field data and the predicted values from all three software platforms were aligned with a maximum MBE of 1.3% and a minimum MBE of -1.8%.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Capability to Process and Characterize Uranium-Zirconium (U-Zr) and Uranium-Zirconium-Plutonium (U-Zr-Pu) Alloys

This work investigated co-reduction of anhydrous compounds of uranium, zirconium, and plutonium to produce uranium rich ternary nuclear fuel alloys. Metallothermic co-reduction is a novel method to produce all-metal nuclear fuels. Metal fuels offer thermal, fissility, compatibility, and security benefits over oxide fuels. Alloys of uranium–10% zirconium with plutonium contents of 0%, 2.5%, 5%, and 10% were produced, with yields of 60–85% of theoretical values in a traditional calciothermic bomb reduction apparatus. Microstructural analysis indicated transformation of uranium phase from gamma to beta and then alpha, in alternating lamellar plates typical of alpha phase uranium and delta phase uranium-zirconium, with zirconium and carbides at prior grain boundaries. Some of the analyses were inconclusive in their results and therefore require additional testing. Successful ternary co-reduction would simplify production of homogeneous feedstock and thereby streamline manufacture of homogeneous ternary metallic fuel.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Measuring the Multi-Neutron Antineutrino Cross Section at Low Charged Hadron Energy in MINERvA

Current and future accelerator neutrino oscillation experiments need neutrino interaction models with smaller systematic uncertainties to resolve much of delta CP phase space. Final state interactions (FSI) and scattering off of correlated nuclei (2p2h) are poorly understood processes that currently contribute large uncertainties to leading models. These processes have proven difficult to study because they often produce relatively low energy nucleons. Protons up to about 100 MeV are below the detection threshold of some accelerator neutrino detectors, and neutrons are usually discounted as undetectable. This poster presents a measurement of the multi-neutron antineutrino cross section at low available energy using the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. This interaction channel is particularly sensitive to FSI and 2p2h interactions. A sideband-driven background constraint that greatly reduces uncertainties on the result will be presented. The measured cross section is compared to GENIE v3 models with different FSI treatments and the SuSA model's 2p2h predictions.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Improving NOvA's Sterile Neutrino Search with the Booster Neutrino Beam

The NOvA experiment’s most recent search for eV-scale sterile neutrinos is systematically limited in the region of parameter space where $\Delta m^2_{41} \gtrsim 1~\mathrm{eV}^2$. This region of parameter space is preferred by sterile neutrino interpretations of current experimental anomalies; improving sensitivity here is high-priority. When added directly into the fit, additional data samples which are subject to orthogonal systematic uncertainties act as in-situ constraints, breaking the degeneracy between systematic uncertainties and sterile-induced oscillations. The NOvA experiment consists of two functionally identical detectors, 14.6 mrad off-axis of the NuMI beam, with the Near Detector (Far Detector) 1 km (810 km) from the beam source. The Near Detector’s position on-site at Fermilab means that it is also able to observe neutrinos from a second neutrino beam, the BNB, 160 mrad off-axis. NOvA has been taking BNB data since 2015, but has not yet analysed these data. The BNB and NuMI are subject to different beam-related uncertainties, allowing us to leverage this sample as an in-situ constraint. This poster will present the current status, preliminary simulations, and potential additional uses of this unique experimental setup

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Multigrid Reduction in Time for Chaotic and Hyperbolic Problems (Final Report)

The coming massive parallelism of exascale computing presents a pressing challenge for the many DOE simulations of time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs), which typically use traditional sequential time stepping methods. Since this traditional approach is inherently serial, it presents a sequential bottleneck when moving to exascale computing, because future performance gains will come through greater concurrency, not faster clock speeds. Thus, the goal of this work is to research parallelism in time, i.e., methods that compute multiple time values simultaneously, not sequentially. The focus will be on hyperbolic and chaotic problems of interest to DOE, with the goal of enabling scalable simulations of time-dependent hyperbolic and chaotic problems on future architectures. The chosen methodology for solving these problems parallel-in-time is multigrid, because multigrid (when it works) is a powerful, optimal, and scalable solver for discretized PDEs. Multigrid is already commonly used in many DOE simulations for scalably and optimally solving space-only PDE problems. The areas of hyperbolic and chaotic problems are chosen because of their relevance to problems of programmatic interest to DOE. However, these problems are also well-known to be difficult for parallel-in-time methods, with the most common method, parareal, diverging in many cases. The current state of-the-art for parallel-in-time at LLNL is the multigrid reduction in time (MGRIT) XBraid package, which also struggles for such problems, while still showing some improvement over parareal. In summary, new methods are needed for an efficient parallel-in-time scheme for hyperbolic and chaotic problems, and this work shall research promising new multigrid methods in this area. In particular, this work shall continue researching the directions from the current collaboration with Dr. Falgout, which are laid out in the work Toward Parallel in Time for Chaotic Dynamical Systems and showed the first known results of a parallel-in-time speedup for a chaotic problem. This work outlines two key improvements to XBraid for chaotic problems, the so-called “theta” and “delta-correction” methods. Here, these two improvements will be further researched and improved (including with a new relaxation method inspired by on Least Squares Shadowing (LSS)) and explored for more complicated problems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Calibration and Timing Performance of the Light Detection System in the ICARUS Detector

ICARUS is the largest Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) in operation and serves as the Far Detector of the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program at Fermilab. It aims to investigate the possible existence of sterile neutrinos with $\Delta m^2 \approx \SI{1}{eV^2}$ using the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) and explore physics beyond the Standard Model with the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam. The ICARUS light detection system, comprising 360 TPB-coated large-area Photo-Multiplier Tubes (PMTs), is crucial for triggering and event reconstruction. Due to its shallow installation, the detector is exposed to a high flux of cosmic rays, necessitating precise timing to reject background events and align neutrino interactions with the beam time profile. This talk will detail the timing inter-calibration procedures for the ICARUS light detection system, which achieve sub-nanosecond resolution. Additionally, the performance of the system in reconstructing the timing of neutrino interactions from the BNB and NuMI beams will be discussed. The results highlight the effectiveness of the ICARUS light detection system in enhancing the detector's capability for precise and reliable neutrino selection.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

SSTDR and FDR Detection of Un-Energized and Energized Cable Anomalies Including Thermal Degradation Using Machine Learning

Historically, cables are initially qualified for nuclear power plant use for 40 years. As plants extend their operating license to 60 and 80 years, continued use of these cables must shift to a performance-based approach since it is cost prohibitive to completely replace cables that are likely still capable of performing their design function. A variety of cable tests are available and are commonly applied during outages when the cables can be taken out of service. Frequency domain reflectometry (FDR) is one of these test methods that is being more broadly accepted and used because it not only detects anomalies along the cable with a low-voltage signal that does not stress the cable insulation, but the technique also locates the anomalies. This supports follow-up local inspection and local repair or partial replacement of a damaged cable segment. Currently, FDR testing is only applied to cables that are taken out of service since the test instrument would be damaged by operational voltages. A related technology that has found some acceptance in the aircraft and rail industry is spread spectrum time domain reflectometry (SSTDR). This technology has been implemented with a custom commercial instrument by LiveWire Innovation that is designed to operate on live cables up to 1000 volts and with a bandwidth of 48 MHz. Initial evaluation by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) of the Live Wire system indicated that a broader bandwidth (BW) SSTDR may be better for many kinds of flaws. This led PNNL to develop an SSTDR laboratory instrument suitable for tests up to 500 MHz bandwidth. Testing on energized cables is also desirable for online monitoring systems so an inductive clamshell coupler was developed that allows energized cables to be tested up to at least 5 kV and likely higher voltage levels. Dielectric spectroscopy and tan delta testing plus various laboratory destructive tests were included in this data acquisition campaign directed to feed a machine learning (ML) study. With these kinds of developments, online energized cable tests may be possible with industrial adoption of such hardware advances but it will be completely impractical to have highly skilled data analysts continually examine these complex signals for indications of damage or compromised conditions. If online testing is to be implemented in new test hardware, it must be accompanied by software that can interpret the signals and alert plant operators of changing or degraded conditions. The thermally aged, shielded cable investigated here was separately treated for ML analysis. Visual analysis of electrical data showed generally increasing peaks where the cable entered and exited the oven. These peaks were not exactly aligned with expected locations, but these differences were attributed to velocity of propagation calibration errors. Only supervised ML was applied to the thermally aged data as this data was only available shortly before the committed publication date of this report. The supervised ML was structured to divide the 0 to 70-day responses as ‘normal’ from 0 to 35 days or ‘anomalous’ from 36 to 70 days, based on cable tensile elongation at break (EAB) insulation characterization. Using 80% of the data for training and 20% for testing, the supervised ML predicted normal versus anomalous was 70% accurate. Important conclusions include: • Accuracy to predict the presence of cable damage is improved from the 2023 effort by more training data. Weighted accuracies for comparisons among the instruments ranged from 67 to 89 % for unsupervised ML and 71 to 99% for supervised ML. • Based on the synthetic data tests, the unsupervised models are more generalizable to unseen anomalies. The Multi-Layer Perceptron classifier (MLP) model reported as high as 99.7% accuracy on the test data, but this dropped to 58.3% when tested on the synthetic data. In contrast, the unsupervised Pointwise model only achieved 89.7% accuracy on the experimental data but reported 78.3% accuracy on the synthetic data. • The best anomaly indicators are higher frequency (400 MHz BW) FDR data. Other tests may be interesting but for this study, this was the best predicter.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2024

DUNE-PRISM: An Innovative Technique for Neutrino Oscillation Analysis

DUNE is a next generation long baseline (1300 km) neutrino experiment, designed to make precise measurements of CP violation in the lepton sector, determine the neutrino mass hierarchy ($\Delta m_{32}$ $^ 2$ ) and measure the neutrino oscillation parameters

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Electromagnetic shower reconstruction in the ICARUS liquid argon time projection chamber detector

The ICARUS-T600 liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) detector is taking data at shallow depth as the far detector of the Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program at Fermilab, to search for a possible sterile neutrino signal at $\Delta m^{2} \approx 1~\text{eV}^{2}$ with the Booster (BNB) and Main Injector (NuMI) neutrino beams at $\GeV{\sim 0.8}$ and $\GeV{\sim 2}$ average energies respectively. The LArTPC technology, developed by the ICARUS collaboration and now a standard in neutrino physics, offers impressive charged-particle imaging capabilities with $\sim1 \ \text{mm}$ spatial resolution, enabling efficient discrimination between track-like signatures (e.g., from muons, pions, and protons) and electromagnetic showers (from electrons and photons). Moreover, electron and photon signatures can be distinguished both with the calorimetric measurement of local energy depositions at the shower start and with the cm-scale conversion gap signature of photons. This contribution discusses event reconstruction at ICARUS focusing on Pandora, a multi-algorithm pattern recognition software widely used in LArTPC experiments. Over a hundred Pandora algorithms and tools are used to reconstruct cosmic rays and neutrino interactions in the ICARUS detector. Recent developments have focused on the reconstruction of electromagnetic shower signatures, crucial to ensure a robust and efficient reconstruction of charged-current $\nu_e$ interactions, which serve as a key signature of sterile neutrino oscillations at SBN. In this contribution, recent improvements to the reconstruction are discussed, focusing on the discrimination between tracks and electromagnetic showers using neutrino simulations and data.

Triozzi, Riccardo [Padua U.; INFN, Padua] (ORCID:0↗
DOE OSTI2025

Remote Sensing Approach for Monitoring Tree Health Adjacent to Transmission Corridors

This study presents an initial proof-of-concept for a satellite-based remote sensing approach to identify and monitor potential areas of poor tree health across the entire BPA service territory on an annual basis. We tested three variants of “delta peak NDVI” ( ΔPN ) change detection metrics that express interannual variation in primary productivity relative to a baseline by comparing ΔPN values for known insect/disease disturbances and nearby reference locations. All three metrics showed promise for detecting poor tree health in the year during disturbance, but the metric based on the difference from the long-term (2016-2024) median ( Δ Med PN ) was preferred due to its responsiveness to change in the years during and after disturbance, resilience to interannual variation, and ease of interpretation as being above or below normal. Comparison of Δ Med PN grouped by relative severity of disturbance indicated it was not sensitive enough to detect “low” severity disturbances, as mapped by USGS’s LANDFIRE program, but could distinguish “moderate” and “high” severity disturbances from reference locations. These findings informed selection of a threshold for Δ Med PN , which was combined with areas exhibiting negative NDVI to map potential areas of concern. Visual inspection of before/after high-resolution imagery and NDVI time series showed that many areas of concern aligned with visible signs of defoliation and die-off as well as other types of disturbance (e.g., landslides, logging, road grading, flooding). Some areas of concern are thought to be false detections caused by persistent shadow, and some could not be explained with visual inspection due to spatiotemporal limitations of before/after imagery. In summary, our approach shows promise for large-scale monitoring of tree health adjacent to BPA transmission lines, but additional work is recommended to improve model sophistication and remove noise.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Implementation of INCL Nuclear Model in GENIE Generator

The Li ge Intranuclear Cascade (INCL) model is a nuclear-physics model that simulates hadron (baryon, anti-baryon and meson) reactions on nuclei, for incident energies ranging from a few tens of MeV to 10-20 GeV. The INCL model has been well validated by hadron scattering data. In my work, I implement an interface in GENIE to use the INCL nuclear model in the simulations of both the initial state of the target nucleus and the Final State Interaction in neutrino-nucleus interaction. It has a consistent treatment of nuclear models in both neutrino interaction and hadron rescattering. A full event record including neutrino vertex and each vertex of hadron rescattering has been accomplished. Several processes, e.g. cluster production, Delta transportation and de-excitation will also be included as benefits of the implementation of the INCL model in GENIE. I will show some initial simulation results showcasing the new GENIE features and discuss plans for making them available for use in experimental analyses.

Liu, Liang [Fermilab]↗
DOE OSTI2025

Experimental Characterization of High-Surface Area Thermal Energy Storage

There is growing interest in energy storage technologies due to the expansion of renewable energy sources that are inherently intermittent and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events that disturb the power grid. Power consumption in buildings makes up approximately 76% of all electricity usage on the grid and is primarily used for thermal applications such as space conditioning, hot water, and cooking. This makes thermal energy storage (TES) an ideal solution for many of these applications. Many TES technologies rely on latent energy storage, which utilizes the melting/solidification of phase change materials (PCM) to store energy. Typically, TES designs suffer from low power density due to their low inherent thermal conductivity. This limitation makes the deployment of TES in active applications difficult as the ease of access to energy is essential for effective use. Common routes for improving power density include high thermal conductivity additives or extended features such as fins that increase cost. This study presents an alternative approach to improving performance through increasing the overall surface area to volume ratio of the device, to increase the available area for convection to occur between the working fluid and PCM. In the study a commercial PCM was selected with a transition temperature ideal for space heating applications. The heat exchanger design utilizes a unique application of triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS) for macro-encapsulation of the PCM. The use of TPMS for heat exchangers has been growing in interest due to their high-surface area to volume ratios, which were previously unmanufacturable until the development of additive manufacturing. A modular system was designed and manufactured with a stereolithography resin printing system that is then backfilled with PCM. An experiment test set-up is designed to test the charge and discharge performance of the thermal storage using a conditioned air stream. The pressure drop of the design is tested across a variety of flow rates. When compared to existing experimental data within literature, there is excellent agreement based on the Reynolds number at similar hydraulic diameters. Several inlet temperatures are tested at consistent temperature differences from the phase change temperature for both charging and discharging. Additionally, the volumetric flow rate is varied for each temperature set point. It was found that increasing flow rate had diminishing returns in reducing the overall charge time of the TES. The temperature delta from the melting temperature was the primary contributor to the change in average heat flux with limited variation in average heat transfer rate between charging and discharging at similar inlet temperatures and flow rates. The TPMS heat exchanger design has a high air-side pressure drop but it provides high heat transfer rates. This helps maintain a high outlet temperature during discharge, which is important to thermal comfort applications. The design, manufacturing, and experimental characterization of the TES device will be presented as part of this study.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2025

AI-Assisted Conceptual Development of a Pre-Geometric Cosmological Model - An Exercise in AI-Assisted Conceptual Framework Generation, Paper I: Foundations and Replication Dynamics

We develop a pre-geometric cosmological framework in which existence is identified with a finite amount of unstructured energy possessing vibration as its only intrinsic property. This vibrational substrate occupies an open, bounded spectral interval $(\omega_{\min},\omega_{\max})$, ensuring finiteness of total energy and excluding infinitely stable configurations. The substrate evolves under two fundamental and competing tendencies---excitation, which amplifies coherence, and randomization, which scrambles it. Their balance produces a metastable unstructured regime in which rare fluctuations may form long-lived self-consistent spectral configurations. Because the substrate is finite and subject to competing order--disorder dynamics, no coherent configuration can be perpetually stable. We show that the only mechanism capable of sustaining long-lived organization is a replication instability: a coherent unit may reproduce into multiple offspring according to a general $1\!\to n$ rule. Replication consumes energy from the finite substrate, breaks the metastable symmetry, and induces a discrete notion of event time through the replication tick $\Delta\tau$. Temporal succession is defined through correlation ordering of spectral microstates, producing an intrinsic pre-causal structure. The compactness of the spectral domain imposes minimal and maximal timescales, bounds the internal coherence of emergent units, and limits their proliferation. These spectral constraints serve as precursors for the emergence of geometry, adjacency, and a limiting propagation speed, developed in subsequent papers of this series. Paper I provides the foundational axioms (PG1--PG9) governing the spectral substrate, its metastable dynamics, the formation of coherent units, and the necessity of replication, establishing a fully pre-geometric stage from which causal and geometric structure naturally emerge.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Implementation of INCL nuclear model in GENIE Generator

The Liège Intranuclear Cascade (INCL) model is a nuclear-physics model that simulates hadron (baryon, anti-baryon and meson) reactions on nuclei, for incident energies ranging from a few tens of MeV to 10-20 GeV. The INCL model has been well validated by hadron scattering data. In my work, I implement an interface in GENIE to use the INCL nuclear model in the simulations of both the initial state of the target nucleus and the Final State Interaction in neutrino-nucleus interaction. It has a consistent treatment of nuclear models in both neutrino interaction and hadron rescattering. A full event record including neutrino vertex and each vertex of hadron rescattering has been accomplished. Several processes, e.g. cluster production, Delta transportation and de-excitation will also be included as benefits of the implementation of the INCL model in GENIE. I will show some initial simulation results showcasing the new GENIE features and discuss plans for making them available for use in experimental analyses.

Liu, Liang [Fermilab] (ORCID:000000026753925X)↗
DOE OSTI2025

NOvA in 10 Minutes

NOvA is a long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment based at Fermilab, IL, USA, that observes $\nu_\mu \ (\bar{\nu}_\mu) \to \nu_\mu\ (\bar{\nu}_\mu)$ disappearance and $\nu_\mu \ (\bar{\nu}_\mu) \to \nu_e \ (\bar{\nu}_e)$ appearance oscillations from a beam of muon neutrinos (anti-neutrinos) provided by the Fermilab's NuMI beamline. The experiment consists of two functionally identical active liquid scintillattor tracking calorimeters, both situated 14.6 mrad off-axis to the beam direction. The detectors are made out of extruded PVC cells arranged in alternating horizontal and vertical planes for 3-dimensional reconstruction of neutrino events. The NOvA experiment has a wide-ranging scientific program that includes studying standard 3-flavor neutrino oscillations, resolution of neutrino mass orderings, measuring the CP-violating phase, $\delta_{CP}$, beyond standard model (BSM) phenomenon such as non-standard interactions (NSI) and sterile neutrino searches, neutrino-nucleus cross-section measurements, exotics, astrophysics and more. The NOvA experiment leverages its identical detector technology to mitigate systematic uncertainties for its neutrino oscillation analysis. This talk will provide an overview of the experiment's detector design and the data-driven techniques used by the experiment in its neutrino oscillation analysis.

Choudhary, Brajesh [Delhi U.]↗
DOE OSTI2025

Improving ICARUS Track Reconstruction Algorithms

The ICARUS experiment is part of the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program at Fermilab. The main goal of the experiment is to investigate the possibility of sterile neutrinos in the O(1 eV) mass region and provide clarification of the anomaly detected from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) and MiniBooNE experiments. The ICARUS-T600 detector is a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LAr-TPC), that can provide excellent 3D imaging and calorimetric reconstruction of any ionizing particles. This detection technique allows a detailed study of neutrino interactions, spanning a wide energy spectrum (from a few keV to several hundreds of GeV). The detector consists of two identical adjacent modules, filled with a total of 760 tons of ultra-pure liquid argon. Each module houses two LAr-TPCs separated by a common cathode with a maximum drift distance of 1.5 m, equivalent to about 1 ms drift time for the nominal $500$ V/m electric drift field. The anode is made of three parallel wire planes positioned 3 mm apart, where the stainless-steel wires are oriented on each plane at a different angle with respect to the horizontal direction ($+60^\degree$,$-60^\degree$,$0^\degree$). The first two planes (Induction 1 and Induction 2) provide a non-destructive charge measurement, whereas the ionization charge is fully collected by the last collection plane. In total, 53248 wires with a 3 mm pitch and length up to 9 m are installed in the detector. In the first stage of the reconstruction, segments of waveforms corresponding to physical signals (hits) are searched for in the deconvolved wire waveform with a threshold-based hit-finding algorithm. Each hit is then fitted with a Gaussian, whose area is proportional to the number of drift electrons generating the signal. In the second stage of the reconstruction, hits are passed as input to Pandora, a framework software composed of different pattern recognition algorithms, that performs a 3D reconstruction of the full image recorded in the collected event, including the identification of interaction vertices and tracks and showers inside the TPC. These are organized into a hierarchical structure (called slice) of particles generated starting from a primary interaction vertex. In some cases, related to the inefficiencies in the hit detection or excessive deflection of the particle trajectory, Pandora breaks the particle's track into two or more smaller pieces and considers each piece as an independent track. We studied this phenomenon focusing on primary muons from ν_μ CC interactions contained in a single module with a track at least 20 cm long, to exclude delta rays. The study determined that about $7-8\%$ of the muon tracks are broken. Approximately $80\%$ of the times, Pandora assigns all segments of the track to the same slice (intra-slice track split), while in the remaining $20\%$ of the cases, one of the segments is associated with another slice (extra-slice track split). To mitigate this phenomenon, we designed an algorithm that detects and stitches the tracks broken by Pandora for the intra-slice split. In Monte Carlo simulations, the algorithm showed an efficiency exceeding $80\%$ and a purity exceeding $93\%$.

Ricci, Alessandro Maria [Pisa U.; INFN, Pisa] (ORC↗
DOE OSTI2026

Development of PNNL’s Plutonium Metallography Capability

The goal of this project was to develop plutonium metallography capabilities and establish workflows for characterization at PNNL’s Radiological Processing Facility (RPL). Developing and expanding on this capability opens more opportunities for PNNL to better support science through collaborations with other labs, plants, and sites withing the Department of Energy Complex and through programs within the National Nuclear Security Administration. This project established metallography equipment in an air glovebox, polishing protocols, as well as radiological and facility controls and procedures so that gram quantities of plutonium metal could be analyzed on multiple characterization tools. Data was collected and analyzed on two different delta phase plutonium - Gallium samples and a calciothermically reduced alpha plutonium metal using a combination of optical and electron microscopy, powder X-ray diffraction, and atom probe tomography. This report highlights the metallography capabilities, some preliminary data collections, and plans at PNNL to support plutonium material science.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗