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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 703 records · Page 39
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2017

States of Cybersecurity: Electricity Distribution System Discussions

State and local entities that oversee the reliable, affordable provision of electricity are faced with growing and evolving threats from cybersecurity risks to our nation's electricity distribution system. All-hazards system resilience is a shared responsibility among electric utilities and their regulators or policy-setting boards of directors. Cybersecurity presents new challenges and should be a focus for states, local governments, and Native American tribes that are developing energy-assurance plans to protect critical infrastructure. This research sought to investigate the implementation of governance and policy at the distribution utility level that facilitates cybersecurity preparedness to inform the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis; states; local governments; and other stakeholders on the challenges, gaps, and opportunities that may exist for future analysis. The need is urgent to identify the challenges and inconsistencies in how cybersecurity practices are being applied across the United States to inform the development of best practices, mitigations, and future research and development investments in securing the electricity infrastructure. By examining the current practices and applications of cybersecurity preparedness, this report seeks to identify the challenges and persistent gaps between policy and execution and reflect the underlying motivations of distinct utility structures as they play out at the local level. This study aims to create an initial baseline of cybersecurity preparedness within the distribution electricity sector. The focus of this study is on distribution utilities not bound by the cybersecurity guidelines of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to examine the range of mechanisms taken by state regulators, city councils that own municipal utilities, and boards of directors of rural cooperatives.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2019

Finance for Power Sector Resilience

Many countries and cities are considering and planning for power sector resilience through undertaking vulnerability assessments and developing resilience action plans. However, to ensure these plans have an impact, there is a critical need to identify and scale up financing for power sector resilience actions. These investments go beyond the basic needs for power generation and support a secure, reliable, and resilient power system in the face of natural, technological, and man-made threats.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2019

Modeling and Simulation Tool to Improve Urban Search Planning (NA22 Final Report)

The venture project Tool to Improve Urban Search Planning (LL14-V-Urban Search Planning ToolPD3RS) supported two major types of effort: 1) development of a software prototype search planning tool, with the goal of transitioning the tool to operational users for evaluation and possible adoption; 2) enabling research to better understand the radiation characteristics of an urban environment, with implications for deployment of radiation detection systems in that environment. The first effort has resulted in prototype software, Optimization Planning Tool for Urban Search (OPTUS), that has been distributed to a limited set of potential users, including users within the NNSA emergency response community. The second effort supported various research topics including high fidelity radiation transport modeling in urban environments, measurement campaigns for model validation, development of vehicle-based high purity germanium (HPGe) detector systems and supporting data analysis, and computational capabilities for archiving and managing large data sets. While some of these related efforts have informed the models and software design of the OPTUS tool, in large part they pursued more basic research, some of which has evolved into separate DNN R&D projects. Project performers included Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSL), in addition to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL), the project lead. The project also supported university research, including several internships at the laboratories.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
NASA NTRS1999

An Initial Strategy for Commercial Industry Awareness of the International Space Station

While plans are being developed to utilize the ISS for scientific research, and human and microgravity experiments, it is time to consider the future of the ISS as a world-wide commercial marketplace developed from a government owned, operated and controlled facility. Commercial industry will be able to seize this opportunity to utilize the ISS as a unique manufacturing platform and engineering testbed for advanced technology. NASA has begun the strategic planning of the evolution and commercialization of the ISS. The Pre-Planned Program Improvement (P3I) Working Group at NASA is assessing the future ISS needs and technology plans to enhance ISS performance. Some of these enhancements will allow the accommodation of commercial applications and the Human Exploration and Development of Space mission support. As this information develops, it is essential to disseminate this information to commercial industry, targeting not only the private and public space sector but also the non-aerospace commercial industries. An approach is presented for early distribution of this information via the ISS Evolution Data book that includes ISS baseline system information, baseline utilization and operations plans, advanced technologies, future utilization opportunities, ISS evolution and Design Reference Missions (DRM). This information source and tool can be used as catalyst in the commercial world for the generation of ideas and options to enhance the current capabilities of the ISS.

Jorgensen, Catherine A.↗
NASA NTRS1996

Distribution of a Generic Mission Planning and Scheduling Toolkit for Astronomical Spacecraft

Work is progressing as outlined in the proposal for this contract. A working planning and scheduling system has been documented and packaged and made available to the WIRE Small Explorer group at JPL, the FUSE group at JHU, the NASA/GSFC Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics and the Advanced Planning and Scheduling Branch at STScI. The package is running successfully on the WIRE computer system. It is expected that the WIRE will reuse significant portions of the SWAS code in its system. This scheduling system itself was tested successfully against the spacecraft hardware in December 1995. A fully automatic scheduling module has been developed and is being added to the toolkit. In order to maximize reuse, the code is being reorganized during the current build into object-oriented class libraries. A paper describing the toolkit has been written and is included in the software distribution. We have experienced interference between the export and production versions of the toolkit. We will be requesting permission to reprogram funds in order to purchase a standalone PC onto which to offload the export version.

Kleiner, Steven C.↗
DOE OSTI2018

Oncentra brachytherapy planning system

In modern cancer management, treatment planning has progressed as a contemporary tool with all the advances in computing power in recent years. One of the advanced planning tools uses 3-dimensional (3D) data sets for accurate dose distributions in patient prescription. Among these planning processes, brachytherapy has been a very important part of a successful cancer management program, offering clinical benefits with specific or combined treatments with external beam therapy. In this chapter, we mainly discussed the Elekta Oncentra planning system, which is the main treatment planning tool for high-dose rate (HDR) modality in our facility and in many other facilities in the United States. HDR is a technically advanced form of brachytherapy; a high-intensity radiation source (3.6 mm in length) is delivered with step motor in submillimeter precision under computer guidance directly into the tumor areas while minimizing injury to surrounding normal healthy tissue. Oncentra planning is the key component to generate a deliverable brachytherapy procedure, which is executed on the microSelectron V3 remote afterloader treatment system. Creating a highly conformal plan can be a time-consuming task. The development of Oncentra software (version 4.5.3) offers a variety of useful tools that facilitate many of the clinical challenging tasks for planning, such as contouring and image reconstruction, as well as rapid planning calculations with dose and dose volume histogram analysis. Oncentra Brachy module creates workflow and optimizes the planning accuracy for wide varieties of clinical HDR treatments, such as skin, gynecologic (GYN), breast, prostate, and many other applications. The treatment file can also be transferred to the afterloader control station for speedy delivery. The design concept, calculation algorithms, and optimization modules presented some key characteristics to plan and treat the patients effectively and accurately. The dose distribution and accuracy of several clinical sample cases were discussed to illustrate the effectiveness and clinical efficacy. The American Association of Physicists in Medicine brachytherapy reports of TG-43 and TG-186 were also described and compared in evaluations of fundamental calculation methodologies.

62 RADIOLOGY AND NUCLEAR MEDICINE↗
DOE OSTI2022

ARIES: NREL Off-Road Decarbonization and Energy Systems Integration Workshop - Challenges and Opportunities

This presentation about ARIES was given at the NREL Off-Road Decarbonization and Energy Systems Integration Workshop - Challenges and Opportunities. ARIES was designed to fill a significant gap: there is no research platform that can support the nation's transition to a decarbonized energy system. ARIES will demonstrate and de-risk a future energy system with more than 50% renewable generation by 2030, that is just, affordable, flexible, clean, secure, resilient, and reliable, even in the off-road transportation sector.

ARIES↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Path to 100 Percent Renewable Energy: Grid-Forming Inverters will Give Us the Grid We Need Now

This is a more urgent problem than it might sound. The westernmost Hawaiian island of significant size, Kauai is home to around 70,000 residents and 30,000 tourists at any given time. Renewable energy accounts for 70 percent of the energy produced in a typical year - a proportion that's among the highest in the world and that can be hard to sustain for such a small and isolated grid. During the day, the local system operator, the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, sometimes reaches levels of 90 percent from solar alone. But on 2 April, the 26-MW generator was running near its peak output, to compensate for the drop in solar output as the sun set. At the moment when it failed, that single generator had been supplying 60 percent of the load for the entire island, with the rest being met by a mix of smaller generators and several utility-scale solar-and-battery systems.

battery management systems↗
DOE OSTI2024

Current Practices in Distribution Utility Resilience Planning for Winter Storms

This report is part of a series of hazard-focused case studies examining common practices in electric utility resilience planning. We use standard terminology defining resilience as the ability to anticipate, withstand, absorb, and recover from hazards that cause long duration outages. We distinguish between reliability and resilience using Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1366-2022, which defines major events as an event that exceeds reasonable design and/or operational limits of the electric power system. Resilience planning is focused on major event days and reliability planning is focused on nonmajor event days. Utility resilience plans are assessed according to common resilience components identified in existing resilience frameworks. The focus of this report is on winter storms in which the primary hazards are heavy snowfall, freezing rain, ice, extreme cold, severe wind, and flooding. These hazards can also contribute to generation shortages, resulting in bulk power system impacts that have consequences for the distribution system, such as load shedding. Stand-alone reports focusing on wildfires and nonwinter storms have been published in parallel with this report. This report can be used as a starting point for understanding potential investment prioritization processes and investment options. This report is intended to improve utility resilience planning by supporting constructive dialogue among utilities, regulators, and other stakeholders.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2018

Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) Transmission Planning Process

A REZ is a geographical area that enables the development of profitable, cost-effective, grid-connected renewable energy (RE). The REZ Transmission Planning Process is a proactive approach to plan, approve, and build transmission infrastructure connecting REZs to the power system which helps to increase the share of solar, wind and other RE resources in the power system while maintaining reliability and economics, and focuses on large-scale wind and solar resources that can be developed in sufficient quantities to warrant transmission system expansion and upgrades.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Optimizing Distributed Energy Storage Sizing in Puerto Rico: Leveraging Increased Distributed Generation for Enhanced Resilience

Distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage systems (BESS) adoption has increased rapidly in Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria in 2017 as customers seek local resilient energy solutions. To investigate how to best leverage these many distributed PV and BESS systems, in this paper, we introduce a modeling framework that can be used by entities planning resilience investments to provide insights about the sizing and operational needs to achieve desired resilience benefits.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

ASEAN Technical Exchange Workshop for System Operators, Regulators, and Policymakers

This presentation provides an in-depth exploration of power system planning, cross-border electricity trading, and battery energy storage systems (BESS), offering actionable insights for system operators, regulators, and policymakers. The first section delves into power system planning and analysis, focusing on capacity expansion models and resource adequacy studies, including their role in optimizing system efficiency, managing emissions, and addressing system reliability risks. Key considerations, such as integration of transmission into generation planning and the forecasting versus optimization of customer distributed energy resources (DER) technologies, are explored. The session highlights critical trade-offs in spatial granularity and model runtimes, as well as the feasibility of aligning distribution investments with capacity expansion efforts. The second section examines cross-border electricity trading, with an emphasis on resource adequacy concepts such as reliability targets, loss of load expectation (LOLE), and planning reserve margins (PRM). Case studies on reserve market design and coordination across US regions provide insights into improving reserve deliverability and managing interregional power balance and congestion. This section also addresses market-to-market congestion management, including advanced strategies for high-voltage direct current (HVDC) optimization and ancillary service delivery. Finally, the presentation covers the rapid evolution of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), highlighting their operational growth, regulatory frameworks, and use cases in grid flexibility, energy storage, and reliability. The discussion focuses on the benefits of BESS for system stability, resilience, and integration of renewable energy, offering insights into its role as a vital component in the transition toward a more sustainable and flexible grid. Key performance parameters, such as throughput, round-trip efficiency, and state of charge, are also examined.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2014

Strategy for Migration of Traditional to Hybrid Control Boards in a Nuclear Power Plant

This strategy document describes the NUREG-0711 based human factors engineering (HFE) phases and associated elements required to support design, verification and validation (V&V), and implementation of new digital control room elements in a legacy analog main control room (MCR). Information from previous planning and analysis work serves as the foundation for creating a human-machine interface (HMI) specification for distributed control systems (DCSs) to be implemented as part of nuclear power plant (NPP) modernization. This document reviews ways to take the HMSI specification and use it when migrating legacy displays or designing displays with new functionality. These displays undergo iterative usability testing during the design phase and then an integrated system validation (ISV) in the full-scope control room training simulator. Following successful demonstration of operator performance using the systems during the ISV, the new DCS is implemented at the plant, first in the training simulator and then in the MCR. This document concludes with a sample project plan, including a 15-month timeline from DCS design through implementation. Included is a discussion of how the U.S. Department of Energy’s Human System Simulation Laboratory (HSSL) can be used to support design and V&V activities. This report completes a Level 4 (M4) milestone under the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Enhancing Local Grid Resilience with Small Hydropower Hybrids: Proving the concept through demonstration, simulation, and analysis with Idaho Falls Power

Large hydropower, connected to the transmission system and typically possessing significant ability to balance grid frequency, has long been central to black start plans in regions where it is present. Small hydropower possesses most of the attributes required for black start but is often connected to distribution or sub-transmission systems and has less ability to balance grid frequency. Integrating energy storage such as batteries or ultracapacitors increases the combined asset’s ability to balance frequency. This asset integration enables a bottom-up grid restoration paradigm in which critical electric loads on the local distribution system can be powered even when the regional transmission system is down. This report presents a field demonstration conducted with Idaho Falls Power that proved this concept. The contribution of energy storage in restoring the small hydro-dominated distribution grid and its operational sensitivity across different control settings are further analyzed using high-fidelity simulations. Readers will learn about technical details on the field demonstration setup, energy storage contribution to black start, detailed simulation steps of islanded distribution grid restoration, and usage of field demonstration measurements for transient model refinements. Collectively this report points to a great opportunity for small hydropower to enhance resilience of local electric grids.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
NASA NTRS2019

NASA Platform for Autonomous Systems (NPAS)

NASA Platform for Autonomous Systems (NPAS) is a disruptive software platform and processes being developed by the NASA Stennis Space Center (SSC) Autonomous Systems Laboratory (ASL). Autonomous operations are critical for the success, safety and crew survival of NASA deep space missions beyond low Earth orbit, including the Gateway, and for the future of cost-effective ground mission operations. NPAS represents the embodiment of an innovative paradigm for “thinking” autonomy in contrast to brute-force autonomy. NPAS uniquely addresses the requirements and integrates the primary functionalities for autonomous operations, in one platform that includes: (1) Integrated System Health Management (ISHM); (2) autonomy strategies, guided by system health and concepts of operations; (3) domain objects (system elements) and infrastructure to create complete application domain knowledge models (4) infrastructure to create, schedule, and execute mission plans; (5) infrastructure to develop user interfaces for comprehensive awareness; and (6) infrastructure to integrate distributed autonomous applications across networks. NPAS is a single platform that can be used to make any system operate with any desirable degree of autonomy, as well as provide comprehensive system awareness to operators and users.

Figueroa, Fernando↗
DOE OSTI2024

Transmission Interface Limits for High-Spatial Resolution Capacity Expansion Modeling

Large-scale capacity expansion models typically rely on estimates of the power transfer limits between modeled zones. Accurate estimation of these interface transfer limits (ITLs) requires modeling the underlying transmission network. Here we expand on a maximum flow optimization method that uses linearized power flow to estimate transfer limits. We apply this method to a data set of the U.S. transmission network to estimate ITLs between U.S. counties. By calculating ITLs using different subsets of the network, we evaluate how the size of the network used in the estimation affects the results. The results show diminishing returns to ITL accuracy after six hops, suggesting that a network subset can reasonably be used to approximate ITLs. The county-level estimates produced in this study will support more spatially resolved capacity expansion modeling and will help inform policy making at local and national levels.

capacity planning↗
DOE OSTI2024

Optimal Managed Fast-Charging Model for Electric Vehicle Fleets with High Utilization and Multiple Charge-Acceptance Curves

A predictive control/scheduling optimization model is proposed for managed charging of an electric vehicle (EV) fleet - under time-of-use energy and demand prices, high vehicle utilization frequency (short dwell times), multiple charge- acceptance curves (configurable charging rates), and flexible vehicle demand. This context is particularly relevant for flight schools (small electric aircraft) or other commercial facilities where an EV fleet performs multiple operating and fast-charging sessions on the same day. The proposed model performs both the operational and charging scheduling of the vehicles, which is not typically done for residential managed charging and significantly increases problem complexity. The problem is formulated as a MILP model and a case study of a small fast-charging station is presented. Results demonstrate a significant reduction in operating cost, mainly from peak shaving during high demand price periods, achieved by coordinating the operation of different vehicles, chargers and charging rates.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗