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At least 739 records · Page 41

Automated extraction of interfacial dislocations and disconnections from atomistic data

Here we introduce Interfacial Line Defect Analysis (ILDA), a method for identifying and extracting interfacial dislocations and disconnections with little-to-no input from the user on the nature of the interface. By simply providing the orientations and coherency strains for the crystals in a coherent reference state of the interface, ILDA provides exact Burgers vectors. Alternatively, these orientations and strains can be estimated using local atomic deformation gradients, making ILDA fully automated and providing estimated Burgers vectors. ILDA also determines the step height associated with each defect line segment, in case the associated defect is a disconnection. The heart of the method is the identification of atoms residing at co-incidence sites between the two crystals and the construction of a surface mesh connecting these sites that is used to compose Burgers circuits and insert defect line segments. We demonstrate the performance of ILDA in two test cases: a twist grain boundary and a phase boundary.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

helios: An R package to process heating and cooling degrees for GCAM

helios is an open-source R package that estimates population-weighted heating and cooling degree-hours (HDH and CDH) and degree-days (HDD and CDD) at various temporal (e.g., energy dispatch segments, monthly, yearly) and spatial scales (e.g., U.S. states, global political regions, countries). The degree hour and degree day outputs from helios are used to inform electricity demand load in the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) as well as in GCAM-USA (which is the version of GCAM with U.S. state-level details). helios uses a workflow with four steps: processing raw data; calculating heating and cooling degrees; visualizing performance diagnostics; and outputing results in various formats. There are two sources of widely-used climate data compatible with helios: (1) hourly climate data with 12-km resolution that are dynamically downscaled with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and projected using a thermal global warming (TGW) approach; and (2) daily climate data with 0.5-degree resolution from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) that is bias-adjusted and statistical downscaled by the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP). In summary, helios is a model that standardizes methodology of heating and cooling degrees-hours and degree-days using publicly available data and advance the understanding of the impact of spatial and temporal temperature variability on building energy services.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A VXS [VITA41] Trigger Processor for the 12GEV Experimental Programs at Jefferson Lab

The VXS_Trigger_Processor [VTP] was developed and commissioned for CLAS12 in the fall of 2016. This board is a VITA41 switch card and it collects data from a variety of front-end TDC and Flash ADC modules. The VTP has since been used in several experiments at Jefferson Lab serving as the L1 trigger module for a variety of detector types, such as stacked calorimeters, strip calorimeters, time-of-flight, Cerenkov, hodoscopes, drift chambers, and silicon strips. Trigger algorithms implemented include cluster finding (1D, 2D), drift chamber segment and road finding, geometry matching between various detectors, particle counting, and general global trigger bit processing. The VTP is also capable of reading out each front-end crate with up to 40Gbps Ethernet which is an enormous increase compared to the currently used 200MB/s VME bus. Recent progress has been made to show that a firmware and software upgrade can enable existing Jefferson Lab front-end crates to operate in a streaming DAQ mode. In February 2020, tests will be performed on a full calorimeter and matched hodoscope which are components of the CLAS12 Forward Tagger detector system with beam in Hall B. This paper details the hardware performance, triggered, and streaming applications that have been implemented using the VTP for several experiments at Jefferson Lab.

ABBOTT, David↗

Catalyzing the Mass Adoption of High Efficiency Technologies in the Multifamily Housing Market

ICAST’s objective was to catalyze the adoption of very-high-efficiency (VHE) heat pump HVAC (mini-splits) and water heaters (HPWH) in multifamily (MF), especially affordable housing (MFAH). Nationally, the market penetration of ENERGY STAR-certified ASHPs is estimated at 43%, and for HPWHs it’s 3% (ENERGY STAR, 2022). Note that mini-splits are a much more practical choice for MF units than ducted systems and their adoption is only a portion of the number provided above, but isolating the market penetration data for mini-split systems is difficult. Both the heat pump-based HVAC and water heater systems can be approx. three times more efficient than their conventional counterparts for space and water heating. While awareness and adoption of VHE heat pumps has been growing nationally, and electric heat pump systems have outsold gas furnaces for two years in a row, the MF segment continues to lag behind single-family. MF constitutes almost a third of the housing in the U.S., so scaling up VHE adoption in this segment can assist in achieving critical climate change goals, while preserving housing affordability for the low-to-moderate income (LMI) population (historically, 85% of residents of MF are LMI).

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

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↗

Neural network-based single material beam-hardening correction for X-ray CT in Additive Manufacturing

Beam-hardening (BH) artifacts are ubiquitous in X-ray CT scans of dense metal additively manufactured (AM) parts. While linearization approaches are useful for correcting beam-hardened data from single material objects, they either require a calibration scan or detailed system and material composition information. In this paper, we introduce a neural network-based, material-agnostic method to correct beam-hardening artifacts. We train a neural network to map the acquired beam-hardened projection values and the corresponding estimated thickness of the part based on an initial segmentation to beam-hardening related parameters, which can be used to compute the coefficients of a linearizing correction polynomial. A key strength of our approach is that, once the network is trained, it can be used for correcting beam hardening from a variety of materials without any calibration scans or detailed system and material composition information. Furthermore, our method is robust to errors in the estimated thickness due to the typical challenge of obtaining an accurate initial segmentation from reconstructions impacted by BH artifacts. We demonstrate the utility of our method to obtain high-quality CT reconstructions from a collection of AM parts -- suppressing cupping and streaking artifacts

Rahman, Obaid↗

Managing Increased Electric Vehicle Shares on Decarbonized Bulk Power Systems

Transportation electrification and power sector decarbonization - the convergence of these two trends present a complex planning problem requiring realistic, region-specific modeling and analysis to ensure that both can happen rapidly and cost effectively. This project, funded through the U.S. Department of Energy's Vehicle Technologies Office, models the evolution of the U.S. bulk power system (through 2050) in response to large-scale EV charging across all on-road vehicle segments. We will assess the opportunity and value of demand-side flexibility (i.e., "smart" charging) for reducing energy costs, increasing renewable generation shares, and managing future EV loads on the bulk power system. Overall, this study aims to provide an improved understanding of least-cost solutions for managing EV load growth on the grid and will make high-resolution EV load data sets publicly available for further analysis.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗

A Real2Sim Digital Twin Pipeline for Photorealistic Robot Simulation: Evaluating VLA Policy Deployment on a Bimanual Mobile Robot

Digital twins that are automatically constructed from robot sensor data offer a promising pathway for scalable Real2Sim and Sim2Real transfer. However, it remains an open question whether photorealistic reconstruction alone is sufficient to support reliable deployment of vision-language-action (VLA) policies. We present a generative-AI-assisted Real2Sim pipeline that generates simulation-ready digital twins from real-world RGB observations with minimal manual intervention. The pipeline uses prompted segmentation to isolate scene components and a generative 3D model to directly produce simulation assets, eliminating the need for traditional multi-view reconstruction or manual 3D modeling.\r\nTo evaluate simulation fidelity, we deploy and compare policies from two VLA models in both the real robot and the reconstructed\r\nsimulation under identical tasks and initial conditions. We compare joint-level action trajectories and analyze how divergence evolves over time in closed-loop execution. Although the reconstructed environments are visually accurate, we observe increasing trajectory divergence during closedloop operation. These results indicate that photorealistic reconstruction alone is insufficient to preserve closed-loop control behavior\r\nin VLA policies, particularly in contact-rich manipulation settings where small perceptual errors compound over time.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Unsupervised Azimuth Estimation of Solar Arrays in Low-Resolution Satellite Imagery through Semantic Segmentation and Hough Transform

This paper explains the use of a convolutional neural network (CNN) to segment solar panels in a satellite image containing solar arrays, and extract associated metadata from the arrays. A novel unsupervised technique is introduced to estimate the azimuth of each individual solar panel from the predicted mask of the convolutional neural network. This pipeline was developed with the aim of extracting necessary metadata for a solar installation, using only a set of latitude–longitude coordinates. Azimuth prediction results for 669 individual solar installations associated with 387 sites located across the United States are provided. A mean average error and median average error of 21.65 degrees and 1.0 degrees were obtained, respectively, when predicting the azimuth of the solar fleet data set, with about 80% of the results within an error of zero degrees of the ground truth azimuth value and about 85% within an error of 25 degrees. The predicted azimuth was then used to estimate the energy conversion of the solar arrays. Results show a 90.9 and 90.6 R-squared value for estimating alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) energy, respectively, and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 1.70% in estimating the alternating current (AC) energy using the fully automated algorithm.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

XRIPL

XRIPL is a library of tools for processing x-ray radiographs and extracting contours of interest within the image using computer vision techniques. Features include spatial calibration, denoising, background and attenuation correction through pseudo-flatfielding, watershed segmentation, contour processing, and visualization. The details of the XRIPL analysis pipeline are published in the Proceedings of the 23rd Topical Conference on High-Temperature Plasma Diagnostics Proceedings (LA-UR-20-30133) [1]. [1] P. M. Kozlowski, Y. Kim, B. M. Haines, H. F. Robey, T. J. Murphy, H. M. Johns, and T. S. Perry. Use of Computer Vision for analysis of image data sets from high temperature plasma experiments. Review of Scientific Instruments 92, 033532 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0040285

Kozlowski, Pawel↗

The CMS Outer Tracker for the High Luminosity LHC

The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is expected to deliver an integrated luminosity of 3000 - 4000 fb -1 in its lifetime with peak instantaneous luminosities reaching about 5 - 7.5×10 34 cm -2 s -1 . During the Long Shutdown 3 period, several components of the CMS detector will undergo major changes, called Phase-2 upgrades, to be able to operate in the challenging environment of the HL-LHC, including the replacement of the entire silicon tracker. The Phase-2 Outer Tracker (OT) will have high radiation tolerance, higher granularity, and the capability to handle higher data rates. Another key feature of the OT will be to provide tracking information to the Level-1 trigger, allowing trigger rates to be kept at a sustainable level without sacrificing physics potential. For this, the OT will be made of modules that have two closely spaced sensors read out by the same electronics, which can correlate hits in the two sensors creating short track segments called ”stubs”. The stubs will be used for tracking at 40 MHz. In this contribution, the design of the CMS Phase-2 OT, the technological choices, and highlights of research and development activities are reported.

Ravera, Fabio↗

In-route inductive versus stationary conductive charging for shared automated electric vehicles: A university shuttle service

In-route inductive charging technology, as applied to automated electric vehicles, can help realize a fully automated system of both vehicles and chargers. This study presents a planning optimization analysis for fixed-route automated shuttles supported by in-route inductive charging technology. A techno-economic feasibility of inductive charging was assessed in comparison with stationary charging, including Level 2 AC chargers, and DC fast chargers (DCFCs). This analysis considered both present-day and future vehicle operations and overall system costs. A real project with two circulator Navya Arma shared automated electric vehicles (SAEVs) at the University of Michigan was investigated using real-world collected energy and travel data. The outcomes show that the proper design of quasi-dynamic inductive chargers at designated stops allows SAEVs to realize unlimited driving range and be cost-competitive to DCFC technology. Considering present-day costs and vehicles, low-speed SAEVs can realize charge-sustaining operation at a minimum cost either by implementing a 50-kW inductive charger at two stops with one segment per position and a 29-kWh onboard battery, or by installing a 100-kW inductive charger at one stop with one segment per position and a 28-kWh onboard battery. Overall, considering future costs and vehicles, either a 40-kW charger at one stop with a 29-kWh battery or a 50-kW charger at the north stop with a 14-kWh battery would enable charge-sustaining operation. In addition, quasi-dynamic inductive solution can reduce the onboard battery by about 15% while providing unlimited driving range, but stationary scenarios require about 112% additional battery capacity to support a 12-h driving range.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Automated segmentation of soft X-ray tomography: Native cellular structure with submicron resolution at high-throughput for whole-cell quantitative imaging in yeast

Soft X-ray tomography (SXT) is an invaluable tool for quantitatively analyzing cellular structures at suboptical isotropic resolution. However, it has traditionally depended on manual segmentation, limiting its scalability for large datasets. Here, we leverage a deep learning-based autosegmentation pipeline to segment and label cellular structures in hundreds of cells across three Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains. This task-based pipeline uses manual iterative refinement to improve segmentation accuracy for key structures, including the cell body, nucleus, vacuole, and lipid droplets, enabling high-throughput and precise phenotypic analysis. Using this approach, we quantitatively compared the three-dimensional (3D) whole-cell morphometric characteristics of wild-type, VPH1-GFP, and vac14 strains, uncovering detailed strain-specific cell and organelle size and shape variations. We show the utility of SXT data for precise 3D curvature analysis of entire organelles and cells and detection of fine morphological features using surface meshes. Our approach facilitates comparative analyses with high spatial precision and statistical throughput, uncovering subtle morphological features at the single-cell and population level. This workflow significantly enhances our ability to characterize cell anatomy and supports scalable studies on the mesoscale, with applications in investigating cellular architecture, organelle biology, and genetic research across diverse biological contexts.

Chen, Jianhua [Lawrence Berkeley National Laborato↗

Counting Calories: Light Yield Studies with ADRIANO2 Calorimeter Prototype

Precision in measuring particle energies is crucial to understand the intricacies of high-energy physics beyond the standard model. For the REDTOP experiment to detect η/η´ mesons potentially decaying into dark-matter particles not yetdiscovered, it is essential to have accurate measurements through sophisticated and innovative detector technology built with special properties. The ADRIANO2 (A Dual Readout Integrally Active Non-segmented Option) Calorimeter Prototype plays a pivotal role in advancing detection capabilities, offering the potential to enhance the particle identification procedure. This study delves into the characterization of the ADRIANO2 prototype’s light yield with the ultimate goal of contributing to broader high-energy physics objectives. To estimate the light yield for the ADRIANO2 prototype, we must calibrate the light sensors as well as collect data from beams of known properties. Several prototypes of the ADRIANO2 detector have been tested at the Mtest Facility at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the last few years. This paper attempts to summarize the calibration of one such ADRIANO2 prototype to estimate its experimental performance.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

PHASE: Personalized Head-based Automatic Simulation for Electromagnetic properties in 7T MRI

Accurate and individualized human head models are becoming increasingly important for electromagnetic (EM) simulations. These simulations depend on precise anatomical representations to realistically model electric and magnetic field distributions, particularly when evaluating Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) within safety guidelines. State of the art simulations use the Virtual Population due to limited public resources and the impracticality of manually annotating patient data at scale. Here, this paper introduces Personalized Head-based Automatic Simulation for EM properties (PHASE), an automated open-source toolbox that generates high-resolution, patient-specific head models for EM simulations using paired T1-weighted (T1w) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans with 14 tissue labels. To evaluate the performance of PHASE models, we conduct semi-automated segmentation and EM simulations on 15 real human patients, serving as the gold standard reference. The PHASE model achieved comparable global SAR and localized SAR averaged over 10 grams of tissue (SAR-10g), demonstrating its potential as a promising tool for generating large-scale human model datasets in the future. The code and models of PHASE toolbox have been made publicly available: https://github.com/hrlblab/PHASE.

Deep learning↗

Design and construction of the CMS Outer Tracker for the Phase-2 Upgrade

The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is expected to deliver an integrated luminosity of $3000-4000\;$fb$^{-1}$ after 10 years of operation with peak instantaneous luminosity reaching about $5-7.5\times10^{34}$cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$. During Long Shutdown 3, several components of the CMS detector will undergo major changes, called Phase-2 upgrades, to be able to operate in the challenging environment of the HL-LHC. The current CMS silicon strip tracker has to be replaced with a new detector. The Phase-2 Outer Tracker (OT) will have high radiation tolerance, higher granularity and the capability to handle higher data rates. Another key feature of the OT will be to provide tracking information to the Level-1 trigger, allowing trigger rates to be kept at a sustainable level without sacrificing physics potential. For this, the OT will be made out of modules which have two closely spaced sensors read out by front-end ASICs, which can correlate hits in the two sensors creating short track segments, called stubs. The stubs will be used for tracking in the L1 track finder. In this contribution, the design of the CMS Phase-2 OT, the technological choices and first results with prototype devices are reported.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Design and Construction of the CMS Outer Tracker for the Phase-2 Upgrade

The High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) is expected to deliver an integrated luminosity of 3000-4000~fb$^{-1}$ after 10 years of operation with peak instantaneous luminosity reaching about 5-7.5$\times10^{34}$cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$. During Long Shutdown 3, several components of the CMS detector will undergo major changes, called Phase-2 upgrades, to be able to operate in the challenging environment of the HL-LHC. The current CMS tracker will be replaced. The Phase-2 Outer Tracker (OT) will have high radiation tolerance, higher granularity, and the capability to handle higher data rates. Moreover, the OT will provide tracking information to the Level-1 trigger, for the first time at hadron colliders, allowing trigger rates to be kept at a sustainable level without sacrificing physics potential. For this, the OT will be made of modules with two closely spaced silicon sensors read out by front-end ASICs, which can correlate hits in the two sensors creating short track segments (stubs), used for tracking in the L1 track finder. The modules come in two flavors: strip-strip (2S) and pixel-strip (PS), containing different sensor configurations and multiple ASICs. This contribution will present the design of the Phase-2 OT, the first results with pre-production devices, and the quality assurance procedures used to ensure the functionality of the modules: from fulfilling the precision specification of the module assembly procedure to ensuring the proper communication among the module's ASICs.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Population Structure of White Sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) in the Columbia River Inferred from Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms

White sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) are the largest freshwater fish in North America, with reproducing populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin, Fraser, and Columbia River Basins. Of these, the Columbia River is the largest, but it is also highly fragmented by hydroelectric dams, and many segments are characterized by declining abundance and persistent recruitment failure. Efforts to conserve and supplement these fish requires an understanding of their spatial genetic structure. Here, we assembled a large set of samples from throughout the Columbia River Basin, along with representative collections from adjacent basins, and genotyped them using a panel of 325 single-nucleotide markers. Results from individual- and group-based analyses of these data indicate that white sturgeon in the uppermost Columbia River Basin, in the Kootenai and upper Snake Rivers, are the most distinct, while the remaining populations downstream in the basin can be described as a genetic gradient consistent with an isolation-by-distance effect. Notably, the population in the lowest reaches of the Columbia River is more distinct from the middle or upper reaches than from outside basins, and suggests historically a higher or more recent gene exchange through coastal routes than with populations in the interior Columbia Basin. Nonetheless, proximal reaches were generally only marginally or non-significantly divergent, suggesting that transplanting larvae or juveniles from nearby sources poses relatively little risk of outbreeding depression. Indeed, we inferred examples of dispersal between reaches via close-kin mark-recapture and genetic mark-recapture that indicate movement between nearby reaches is not unusual. Samples from the Kootenai and upper Snake Rivers exhibited notably lower genetic diversity than the remaining samples as a result of population bottlenecks, genetic drift, and/or historical divergence. Conservation actions, such as supplementation, are underway to maintain population viability and will require balanced efforts to increase demographic abundance while maintaining genetic diversity.

Willis, Stuart C.↗