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At least 721 records · Page 40

Digital Twin for Optimizing Real-time Economy of the Integrated Energy Systems

Economic and safe operation of integrated energy systems (IES) requires real-time optimization (RTO) of the control and actions conducted on each system component. In this regard, digital twins (DTs), which consist of a physical system, a virtual system, and the data communication that occurs between the two, are essential for effective RTO. Through the data warehouse, the virtual system is constantly updated with real-time data from the physical system, and functions as the model in the optimization framework. The reduced-order model of the dynamic process model in the virtual system is used in the optimization framework. The optimization results are then returned, via the data warehouse, as control actions to the physical system. This work demonstrates the software capabilities of DT assets for an IES in the context of preparing a DT for an experimental system comprised of Idaho National Laboratory (INL)’s Thermal Energy Delivery System and battery system. For the virtual demonstration, the DTs encompass (1) a physical system, including the Modelica models of the Thermal Energy Delivery System and the battery system; (2) virtual optimization via the Optimization of Real-Time Capacity Allocation (ORCA) platform; and (3) the open-source data warehouse software DeepLynx. This work assesses the performance of ORCA, which utilizes a reduced-order model built using the Risk Analysis Virtual Environment (RAVEN) and trained on the Modelica models and real-time data pipeline through the graph database hosted in DeepLynx. The proposed optimization workflow will be an RTO model based on DTs and the data they generate.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Software Quality Assurance, Software Requirements and Gap Analysis for the MOOSE-Based Open-Source Multiphysics Code Cardinal

Cardinal continuous development and improvement efforts have led to the software being considered as a high-fidelity design and licensing tool for key areas of nuclear reactor relevant physics, including neutron transport, fluid flow, heat transfer, and mechanical processes. The fast development and expansion of the software from a pure R&D framework towards its application in the nuclear industry and regulation require a focus on maintaining and enhancing Cardinal’s software quality through strict adherence to a Software Quality Assurance (SQA) framework. To facilitate compliance with SQA standards, the Cardinal SQA Program has been initiated during Fiscal Year 2023 (FY23).

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

The QICK (Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit): Readout and control for qubits and detectors

We introduce a Xilinx RF System-on-Chip (RFSoC)-based qubit controller (called the Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit, or QICK for short), which supports the direct synthesis of control pulses with carrier frequencies of up to 6 GHz. The QICK can control multiple qubits or other quantum devices. The QICK consists of a digital board hosting an RFSoC field-programmable gate array, custom firmware, and software and an optional companion custom-designed analog front-end board. We characterize the analog performance of the system as well as its digital latency, important for quantum error correction and feedback protocols. We benchmark the controller by performing standard characterizations of a transmon qubit. We achieve an average gate fidelity of ℱ avg =99.93%. All of the schematics, firmware, and software are open-source.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Advances and challenges in computational fluid dynamics of atmospheric pressure plasmas

Atmospheric pressure plasmas (APPs) are at the core of diverse technological applications in materials processing, chemical synthesis, resource recovery, water treatment, and medicine, among others. APPs span a wide range of power density, from low-power non-thermal to high-power thermal discharges, and typically involve interactions with a stream of working gas, processing material, or gas environment. The article provides an overview of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approaches, from mathematical models to software strategies, for the analysis of APP flows. Its focus is flows with large variations in ionization degree and significant fluid dynamic-thermal-electromagnetic coupling, as particularly found in mid- to high-power discharges. The advances achieved and challenges faced by CFD of APP flows have been driven by established and emerging applications, and can be broadly characterized in terms of model fidelity and numerical accuracy. Fidelity refers to the degree of underlying phenomena captured by the model, whereas accuracy to the precision of the numerical solution of the model. Two distinct numerical accuracy challenges are addressed: the capture of instability and pattern formation phenomena, and of plasma-gas interaction and turbulence; as well as two representative fidelity challenges: radiative transport under nonequilibrium conditions, and nonequilibrium electron and particle kinetics. The purpose of this article is to offer guidance to researchers, from modelers and code developers to open-source and commercial software users, working on CFD analyses of APP flows within technological contexts.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Quantum-Accurate Multiscale Modeling of Shock Hugoniots, Ramp Compression Paths, Structural and Magnetic Phase Transitions, and Transport Properties in Highly Compressed Metals

Fully characterizing high energy density (HED) phenomena using pulsed power facilities (Z machine) and coherent light sources is possible only with complementary numerical modeling for design, diagnostic development, and data interpretation. The exercise of creating numerical tests, that match experimental conditions, builds critical insight that is crucial for the development of a strong fundamental understanding of the physics behind HED phenomena and for the design of next generation pulsed power facilities. The persistence of electron correlation in HED materials arising from Coulomb interactions and the Pauli exclusion principle is one of the greatest challenges for accurate numerical modeling and has hitherto impeded our ability to model HED phenomena across multiple length and time scales at sufficient accuracy. An exemplar is a ferromagnetic material like iron, while familiar and widely used, we lack a simulation capability to characterize the interplay of structure and magnetic effects that govern material strength, kinetics of phase transitions and other transport properties. Herein we construct and demonstrate the Molecular-Spin Dynamics (MSD) simulation capability for iron from ambient to earth core conditions, all software advances are open source and presently available for broad usage. These methods are multi-scale in nature, direct comparisons between high fidelity density functional theory (DFT) and linear-scaling MSD simulations is done throughout this work, with advancements made to MSD allowing for electronic structure changes being reflected in classical dynamics. Main takeaways for the project include insight into the role of magnetic spins on mechanical properties and thermal conductivity, development of accurate interatomic potentials paired with spin Hamiltonians, and characterization of the high pressure melt boundary that is of critical importance to planetary modeling efforts.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Mesoscale Numerical Characterization of Kevlar and Carbon–Kevlar Hybrid Plain-Woven Fabric Compression Behavior

A mesoscale finite element model (FEM) of the plain-woven fabric representative elementary volume (REV/unit cell) is developed. The developed FEM is used to predict the nonlinear compaction behavior of monolithic and intraply hybrid fabric made of high-strength carbon and Kevlar fibers. For geometrical modeling of the fabric REV, TexGen, an open-source geometrical modeling software (developed at Nottingham University), is utilized, and for mechanical characterization, FE simulation tool Abaqus{sup ®} is used. Geometrical nonlinearity of the fabric, including periodic boundary conditions and yarn interactions, is incorporated in the REV FE model. Material nonlinearity caused by transversely isotropic behavior of fibrous yarns is implemented through the user material subroutine form in FE simulation along with local orientation assigned to each yarn in the REV. Material properties of fibers are extracted from the literature and supplier data. The compression behavior of monolithic Kevlar and hybrid carbon–Kevlar (carbon warp and Kevlar weft yarns, C–K) fabric is predicted using the proposed FE model. FEM-predicted results were found to have good agreement with the experimentally obtained ones. Results depict that C–K hybrid fabrics have improved compression strength. Hybridization effect is governed by yarns mutual interaction, yarn area at crossovers, and transverse in-plane properties of the interyarn hybridized fabric. The proposed FE model can be used to predict the mechanical behavior of woven fabrics with different weaving patterns, unit cell geometry, material properties, and loading conditions.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A Python Multiscale Thermochemistry Toolbox (pMuTT) for thermochemical and kinetic parameter estimation

Estimating the thermochemical properties of systems is important in many fields such as material science and catalysis. The Python multiscale thermochemistry toolbox (pMuTT) is a Python software library developed to streamline the conversion of ab-initio data to thermochemical properties using statistical mechanics, to perform thermodynamic analysis, and to create input files for kinetic modeling software. Its open-source implementation in Python leverages existing scientific codes, encourages users to write scripts for their needs, and allows the code to be expanded easily. The core classes developed include a statistical mechanical model in which energy modes can be included or excluded to suit the application, empirical models for rapid thermodynamic property estimation, and a reaction model to calculate kinetic parameters or changes in thermodynamic properties. In addition, pMuTT supports other features, such as Brønsted–Evans–Polanyi (BEP) relationships, coverage effects, and ab-initio phase diagrams.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

An empirical model for refrigerant flammability based on molecular structure and thermodynamics; Modélisation empirique de l’inflammabilité des frigorigènes basée sur la structure moléculaire et la thermodynamique

Screening methods for refrigerant blend flammability using metrics that can be easily calculated are of great interest to the refrigerant industry. Existing flammability metrics such as heat of combustion are not adequate for hydrofluorocarbon blends. Alternative metrics are needed that can be used to assess the flammability of refrigerant blends without requiring time-consuming experimental measurements. Here in this work, we study the combination of the maximum adiabatic flame temperature and the fluorine-substitution ratio as metrics for characterizing the flammability of refrigerant blends. The combination of these metrics yields an estimate of the flammability class of refrigerants (both blends and pure fluids) containing hydrofluorocarbon and hydrocarbon components. The calculations of adiabatic flame temperature are carried out with the open-source chemical kinetics software package Cantera using a mechanism available in the literature.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Renewable energy analysis in indigenous communities using bottom-up demand prediction

This paper provides a methodology for the holistic analysis of hybrid renewable energy systems in rural communities. Electric demand is an important component for modeling and analysis of renewable energy systems. Typically, electric demand data is not available due to the internal privacy policies of utility providers. Therefore, this study proposes the use of bottom-up approaches for the development of the electric demand profile, considering the general homogeneity of residential and commercial buildings in rural communities. As a test case, this study develops the electric demand profile and investigates the technical and environmental feasibility of a hybrid renewable energy system for the New Town community on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation (FBIR) in North Dakota. This study conducts the hybrid renewable energy system’s analysis by developing scripts in the LK scripting language and integrating System Advisor Model software’s open-source modules for modeling of renewable energy systems. Here, the results for the validation testbed of this study show that hybrid renewable resources have higher ratios of energy used for self-consumption to the total energy generated compared to stand-alone wind and PV farms.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

A Proxy Method to Bridge LCA Data Gaps Using Automated Material Classification and Probabilistic Under-Specification

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) are essential for understanding the environmental impacts of material production. However, gaps in life cycle inventory (LCI) data for material and chemical inputs present a key challenge for LCA practitioners, especially in the early design stages. Strategies for filling in these gaps require additional time and expertise, which can hinder the LCA’s completion. This study combined automatic material classification and probabilistic under-specification to create a time-efficient method to fill material LCI data gaps. To illustrate the proposed method, proxy environmental impact distributions were generated using publicly available material LCI data classified into the ChemOnt chemical taxonomy using the open-source chemical classification software ClassyFire. Input materials with data gaps were then classified into the same taxonomy, where proxy environmental impact values could be selected from the available distributions to quickly fill in any data gaps. Although these methods were applied to classify material production processes available in the Federal LCA Commons and Ecoinvent databases, they can be applied to any LCA database. This study shows that classifying materials by their chemical structure produces taxonomies with increased granularity relative to industrial classification, improving the ability of under-specified proxy data to be used for differentiating the environmental impacts of competing designs.

biological databases↗

The International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) System: Design, Theory, and Implementation

Abstract The increasing complexity of Earth system models has inspired efforts to quantitatively assess model fidelity through rigorous comparison with best available measurements and observational data products. Earth system models exhibit a high degree of spread in predictions of land biogeochemistry, biogeophysics, and hydrology, which are sensitive to forcing from other model components. Based on insights from prior land model evaluation studies and community workshops, the authors developed an open source model benchmarking software package that generates graphical diagnostics and scores model performance in support of the International Land Model Benchmarking (ILAMB) project. Employing a suite of in situ, remote sensing, and reanalysis data sets, the ILAMB package performs comprehensive model assessment across a wide range of land variables and generates a hierarchical set of web pages containing statistical analyses and figures designed to provide the user insights into strengths and weaknesses of multiple models or model versions. Described here is the benchmarking philosophy and mathematical methodology embodied in the most recent implementation of the ILAMB package. Comparison methods unique to a few specific data sets are presented, and guidelines for configuring an ILAMB analysis and interpreting resulting model performance scores are discussed. ILAMB is being adopted by modeling teams and centers during model development and for model intercomparison projects, and community engagement is sought for extending evaluation metrics and adding new observational data sets to the benchmarking framework.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Resonant ultrasound spectroscopy: The essential toolbox

Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy (RUS) is an ultrasound-based minimal-effort high-accuracy elastic modulus measurement technique. RUS as described here uses the mechanical resonances (normal modes of vibration or just modes) of rectangular parallelepiped or cylindrical specimens with a dimension of from a fraction of a millimeter to as large as will fit into the apparatus. Provided here is all that is needed so that the reader can construct and use a state-of-the-art RUS system. Included are links to open-source circuit diagrams, links to download Los Alamos National Laboratory open-source data acquisition software, links to request free analysis software, procedures for acquiring measurements, considerations on building transducers, 3-D printed stage designs, and a full mathematical explanation of how the analysis software extracts elastic moduli from resonances.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Guest Editorial

The design of X-ray optical systems is very different from that of conventional optical systems, whether it be for the peculiarities of synchrotron radiation or the grazing incidence operation of most X-ray optical components. Further, specific simulation tools are thus required to ensure that designs work as expected, and there is now a vibrant landscape of open-source, freely available software that can be used to that end, and explore new design concepts.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

BRAINformat: A Data Standardization Framework for Neuroscience Data

Neuroscience is entering the era of `extreme data` with little experience and few plans for the associated volume, velocity, variety, and veracity challenges. This is a serious impediment for both the sharing of data across labs, as well as the utilization of modern and high-performance computing capabilities to enable data driven discovery. Here, we introduce BRAINformat, a novel file format and model for management and storage of neuroscience data. The BRAINformat library defines application-independent design concepts and modules that together create a general framework for standardization of scientific data. We describe the formal specification of scientific data standards, which facilitates sharing and verification of data and formats. We introduce the concept of Managed Objects, enabling semantic components of data formats to be specified as self-contained units, supporting modular and reusable design of data format components and file storage. The BRAINformat is built off of HDF5, enabling portable, scalable, and self-describing data storage. We introduce the novel concept of Relationship Attributes for modeling and use of semantic relationships between data objects, and discuss the annotation of data using dedicated data annotation modules provided by the BRAINformat library. Based on these concepts we implement dedicated, application-oriented modules and design a data standard for neuroscience data.The BRAINformat software library is open source, easy-to-use, and provides detailed user and developer documentation and is freely available at: https://bitbucket.org/oruebel/brainformat.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Reduced-Order Modeling of Aggregated Thermostatic Loads With Demand Response

Demand Response is playing an increasingly important role in smart grid control strategies. Modeling the behavior of populations of appliances under demand response is especially important to evaluate the effectiveness of these demand response programs. In this paper, an aggregated model is proposed for a class of Thermostatically Controlled Loads (TCLs). The model efficiently includes statistical information of the population, systematically deals with heterogeneity, and accounts for a second-order effect necessary to accurately capture the transient dynamics in the collective response. However, an accurate characterization of the collective dynamics however requires the aggregate model to have a high state space dimension. Most of the existing model reduction techniques require the stability of the underlying system which does not hold for the proposed aggregated model. In this work, a novel model reduction approach is developed for the proposed aggregated model, which can significantly reduce its complexity with small performance loss. The original and the reducedorder aggregated models are validated against simulations of thousands of detailed building models using GridLAB-D, which is a realistic open source distribution simulation software. Index Terms – demand response, aggregated model, ancillary

Zhang, Wei↗

ROAM: A Remotely Operated Accelerator Monitor

Monitoring accelerators in operation is a well known challenge due to the radiation environment. However, there are significant benefits in being able to deploy particular sensors in specific locations of accelerator enclosures for monitoring or troubleshooting purposes. Learning from experience at other labs, we used Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components and an open source robot control software framework (ROS) to build a remotely controlled robot platform including a standard suite of instruments such as cameras, LIDAR, and ultrasound, with the ability to incorporate other ad-hoc sensors for specific measurements, such as a Gamma radiation monitor. Special attention was given to the robot's ability to maintain safety in the high risk environment of an accelerator, with multiple failure contingencies in place to ensure collision free operation. Testing was performed to prove the platform's viability and showcase its capability for accelerator monitoring.

Thayer, Thomas C.↗

Aggregate Model for Heterogeneous Thermostatically Controlled Loads with Demand Response

Due to the potentially large number of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) – demand response, distributed generation, distributed storage - that are expected to be deployed, it is impractical to use detailed models of these resources when integrated with the transmission system. Being able to accurately estimate the fast transients caused by demand response is especially important to analyze the stability of the system under different demand response strategies. On the other hand, a less complex model is more amenable to design feedback control strategies for the population of devices to provide ancillary services. The main contribution of this paper is to develop aggregated models for a heterogeneous population of Thermostatic Controlled Loads (TCLs) to accurately capture their collective behavior under demand response and other time varying effects of the system. The aggregated model efficiently includes statistical information of the population and accounts for a second order effect necessary to accurately capture the collective dynamic behavior. The developed aggregated models are validated against simulations of thousands of detailed building models using GridLAB-D (an open source distribution simulation software) under both steady state and severe dynamic conditions caused due to temperature set point changes.

Zhang, Wei↗

Development of ROACH firmware for microwave multiplexed X-ray TES microcalorimeters

We are developing room temperature electronics based upon the ROACH platform for reading out microwave multiplexed X-ray TES. ROACH is an open-source hardware and software platform featuring a large Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Power PC processor, several 10GB Ethernet SFP+ interfaces, and a collection of daughter boards for analog signal generation and acquisition. The combination of a ROACH board, ADC/DAC conversion daughter boards, and hardware for RF mixing allows for the generation and capture of multiple RF tones for reading out microwave multiplexed x-ray TES microcalorimeters. The FPGA is used to generate multiple tones in base band, from 10MHz to 250MHz, which are subsequently mixed to RF in the multiple GHz range and sent through the microwave multiplexer. The tones are generated in the FPGA by storing a large lookup table in Quad Data Rate (QDR) SRAM modules and playing out the waveform to a DAC board. Once the signal has been modulated to RF, passed through the microwave multiplexer, and has been modulated back to base band, the signal is digitized by an ADC board. The tones are modulated to 0Hz by using a FPGA circuit consisting of a polyphase filter bank, several Xilinx FFT blocks, Xilinx CORDIC blocks (for converting to magnitude and phase), and special phase accumulator circuit for mixing to exactly 0Hz. Upwards of 256 channels can be simultaneously captured and written into a bank of 256 First-In-First-Out (FIFO) memories, with each FIFO corresponding to a channel. Individual channel data can be further processed in the FPGA before being streamed through a 10GB Ethernet fiber-optic interface to a Linux system. The Linux system runs software written in Python and QT C++ for controlling the ROACH system, capturing data, and processing data.

Firmware↗