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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 811 records · Page 45
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Spatial Heterogeneity in Cloud Condensation Nuclei (SHINE) Field Campaign Report

Multiple land-atmosphere coupling processes influence the spatial distribution of boundary-layer energy, moisture, aerosol, or cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) properties. Accurately quantifying the spatial and temporal distributions of CCN concentrations is essential for investigating aerosol-cloud interactions and reducing uncertainties in aerosol radiative forcing estimates of Earth's system.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Improving unfolding and systematic uncertainty estimation using generative diffusion networks (Final Technical Report)

This final technical report summarizes the key accomplishments on the unfolding using diffusion model project, a DOE award received by PI Pierre-Hugues Beauchemin at Tufts University. This project main goal was to investigate the potential of diffusion models for unfolding experimental High Energy Physics data from detector effects while controlling systematics uncertainties. The project accomplished its goals by completing the following objectives: 1) Performing an object-by-object, event-by-event unfolding of various kinematic distributions reconstructed from detector data in HEP in a way that keeps correlations between unfolded observables while demonstrating competitive performance compared to standard algorithms used in the field; 2) Address the generalization problem by developing an unfolding algorithm capable to correctly infer the underlying distributions of observables and processes never seen before, while controlling the dominant theoretical uncertainties affecting the process, therefore increasing the effectiveness, the precision, and the applicability of the developed algorithm; 3) Understand the theoretical foundations between the developed algorithm so to extend it to applications beyond experimental HEP, for broader benefits to the society. This report provides an overview of the accomplishments related to each of these key objectives.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Superresolution Full-polarimetric Imaging for Radio Interferometry with Sparse Modeling

We propose a new technique for radio interferometry to obtain superresolution full-polarization images in all four Stokes parameters using sparse modeling. The proposed technique reconstructs the image in each Stokes parameter from the corresponding full-complex Stokes visibilities by utilizing two regularization functions: the ℓ {sub 1} norm and the total variation (TV) of the brightness distribution. As an application of this technique, we present simulated linear polarization observations of two physically motivated models of M87 with the Event Horizon Telescope. We confirm that ℓ {sub 1}+TV regularization can achieve an optimal resolution of ~25%–30% of the diffraction limit λ/D{sub max}, which is the nominal spatial resolution of a radio interferometer for both the total intensity (i.e., Stokes I) and linear polarizations (i.e., Stokes Q and U). This optimal resolution is better than that obtained from the widely used Cotton–Schwab CLEAN algorithm or from using ℓ {sub 1} or TV regularizations alone. Furthermore, we find that ℓ {sub 1}+TV regularization can achieve much better image fidelity in linear polarization than other techniques over a wide range of spatial scales, not only in the superresolution regime, but also on scales larger than the diffraction limit. Our results clearly demonstrate that sparse reconstruction is a useful choice for high-fidelity full-polarimetric interferometric imaging.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2017

Quantifying Supernovae-driven Multiphase Galactic Outflows

Galactic outflows are observed everywhere in star-forming disk galaxies and are critical for galaxy formation. Supernovae (SNe) play the key role in driving the outflows, but there is no consensus as to how much energy, mass, and metal they can launch out of the disk. We perform 3D, high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations to study SNe-driven outflows from stratified media. Assuming the SN rate scales with gas surface density Σ{sub gas} as in the Kennicutt–Schmidt relation, we find that the mass loading factor, η {sub m}, defined as the mass outflow flux divided by the star formation surface density, decreases with increasing Σ{sub gas} as η{sub m}∝Σ{sub gas}{sup −0.61}. Approximately Σ{sub gas} ≲ 50 M {sub ⊙} pc{sup −2} marks when η {sub m} ≳ 1. About 10%–50% of the energy and 40%–80% of the metals produced by SNe end up in the outflows. The tenuous hot phase (T > 3 × 10{sup 5} K), which fills 60%–80% of the volume at the midplane, carries the majority of the energy and metals in the outflows. We discuss how various physical processes, including the vertical distribution of SNe, photoelectric heating, external gravitational field, and SN rate, affect the loading efficiencies. The relative scale height of gas and SNe is a very important factor in determining the loading efficiencies.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Particle Acceleration and Pitch-angle Evolution in Relativistic Turbulence

Synchrotron radiation detected from relativistic astrophysical objects such as pulsar-wind nebulae and jets from active galactic nuclei depends on the magnetic fields and the distribution functions of energetic electrons in these systems. Relativistic magnetically dominated turbulence has been recognized as an efficient mechanism for structure formation and nonthermal particle acceleration in these environments. Recent numerical simulations of relativistic turbulence have provided insights into the energy distribution functions of accelerated electrons. Much less is currently understood about their pitch angle distributions, which are crucial for accurately interpreting the spectra of synchrotron radiation. We perform a detailed case study of the pitch angle distributions formed during the process of turbulent acceleration for B 0 /δB 0 = 10 and $\tilde{σ}$ 0 ~40, where B0 is the uniform component of the magnetic field, δB0 is the fluctuating component, and $\tilde{σ}$ 0 is the plasma magnetization based on the magnetic fluctuations. We find that even minimal numerical noise can cause substantial pitch angle scattering, but we demonstrate techniques for overcoming the numerical challenges associated with the evolution of very small pitch angles. Our numerical results are consistent with the phenomenological considerations found in C. Vega et al. (2024a, 2025).

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2010

Finding Tropical Cyclones on a Cloud Computing Cluster: Using Parallel Virtualization for Large-Scale Climate Simulation Analysis

Extensive computing power has been used to tackle issues such as climate changes, fusion energy, and other pressing scientific challenges. These computations produce a tremendous amount of data; however, many of the data analysis programs currently only run a single processor. In this work, we explore the possibility of using the emerging cloud computing platform to parallelize such sequential data analysis tasks. As a proof of concept, we wrap a program for analyzing trends of tropical cyclones in a set of virtual machines (VMs). This approach allows the user to keep their familiar data analysis environment in the VMs, while we provide the coordination and data transfer services to ensure the necessary input and output are directed to the desired locations. This work extensively exercises the networking capability of the cloud computing systems and has revealed a number of weaknesses in the current cloud system software. In our tests, we are able to scale the parallel data analysis job to a modest number of VMs and achieve a speedup that is comparable to running the same analysis task using MPI. However, compared to MPI based parallelization, the cloud-based approach has a number of advantages. The cloud-based approach is more flexible because the VMs can capture arbitrary software dependencies without requiring the user to rewrite their programs. The cloud-based approach is also more resilient to failure; as long as a single VM is running, it can make progress while as soon as one MPI node fails the whole analysis job fails. In short, this initial work demonstrates that a cloud computing system is a viable platform for distributed scientific data analyses traditionally conducted on dedicated supercomputing systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2010

A colalborative environment for information driven safeguards

For two decades, the IAEA has recognized the need for a comprehensive and strongly integrated Knowledge Management system to support its Information Driven Safeguards activities. In the past, plans for the development of such a system have progressed slowly due to concerns over costs and feasibility. In recent years, Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a knowledge management system that could serve as the basis for an IAEA Collaborative Environment (ICE). The ICE derivative knowledge management system described in this paper addresses the challenge of living in an era of information overload coupled with certain knowledge shortfalls. The paper describes and defines a system that is flexible, yet ensures coordinated and focused collaboration, broad data evaluation capabilities, architected and organized work flows, and improved communications. The paper and demonstration of ICE will utilize a hypothetical scenario to highlight the functional features that facilitate collaboration amongst and between information analysts and inspectors. The scenario will place these two groups into a simulated planning exercise for a safeguards inspection drawing upon past data acquisitions, inspection reports, analyst conclusions, and a coordinated walk-through of a 3-D model of the facility. Subsequent to the conduct of the simulated facility inspection, the detection of an anomaly and pursuit of follow up activities will illustrate the event notification, information sharing, and collaborative capabilities of the system. The use of a collaborative environment such as ICE to fulfill the complicated knowledge management demands of the Agency and facilitate the completion of annual State Evaluation Reports will also be addressed.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2012

Distributed Storage Systems for Data Intensive Computing

In this chapter, the authors present an overview of the utility of distributed storage systems in supporting modern applications that are increasingly becoming data intensive. Their coverage of distributed storage systems is based on the requirements imposed by data intensive computing and not a mere summary of storage systems. To this end, they delve into several aspects of supporting data-intensive analysis, such as data staging, offloading, checkpointing, and end-user access to terabytes of data, and illustrate the use of novel techniques and methodologies for realizing distributed storage systems therein. The data deluge from scientific experiments, observations, and simulations is affecting all of the aforementioned day-to-day operations in data-intensive computing. Modern distributed storage systems employ techniques that can help improve application performance, alleviate I/O bandwidth bottleneck, mask failures, and improve data availability. They present key guiding principles involved in the construction of such storage systems, associated tradeoffs, design, and architecture, all with an eye toward addressing challenges of data-intensive scientific applications. They highlight the concepts involved using several case studies of state-of-the-art storage systems that are currently available in the data-intensive computing landscape.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2012

File I/O for MPI Applications in Redundant Execution Scenarios

As multi-petascale and exa-scale high-performance computing (HPC) systems inevitably have to deal with a number of resilience challenges, such as a significant growth in component count and smaller circuit sizes with lower circuit voltages, redundancy may offer an acceptable level of resilience that traditional fault tolerance techniques, such as checkpoint/restart, do not. Although redundancy in HPC is quite controversial due to the associated cost for redundant components, the constantly increasing number of cores-per-processor is tilting this cost calculation toward a system design where computation, such as for redundancy, is much cheaper and communication, needed for checkpoint/restart, is much more expensive. Recent research and development activities in redundancy for Message Passing Interface (MPI) applications focused on availability/reliability models and replication algorithms. This paper takes a first step toward solving an open research problem associated with running a parallel application redundantly, which is file I/O under redundancy. The approach intercepts file I/O calls made by a redundant application to employ coordination protocols that execute file I/O operations in a redundancy-oblivious fashion when accessing a node-local file system, or in a redundancy-aware fashion when accessing a shared networked file system. A proof-of concept prototype is presented and a number of coordination protocols are described and evaluated. The results show the performance impact for redundantly accessing a shared networked file system, but also demonstrate the capability to regain performance by utilizing MPI communication between replicas and parallel file I/O.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2010

SWAMP+: multiple subsequence alignment using associative massive parallelism

A new parallel algorithm SWAMP+ incorporates the Smith-Waterman sequence alignment on an associative parallel model known as ASC. It is a highly sensitive parallel approach that expands traditional pairwise sequence alignment. This is the first parallel algorithm to provide multiple non-overlapping, non-intersecting subsequence alignments with the accuracy of Smith-Waterman. The efficient algorithm provides multiple alignments similar to BLAST while creating a better workflow for the end users. The parallel portions of the code run in O(m+n) time using m processors. When m = n, the algorithmic analysis becomes O(n) with a coefficient of two, yielding a linear speedup. Implementation of the algorithm on the SIMD ClearSpeed CSX620 confirms this theoretical linear speedup with real timings.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2011

Coherent x-ray diffraction imaging of paint pigmentparticles by scanning a phase plate modulator

We have implemented a coherent x-ray diffraction imaging technique that scans a phase plate to modulate wave-fronts of the x-ray beam transmitted by samples. The method was applied to measure a decorative alkyd paint containing iron oxide red pigment particles. By employing an iterative algorithm for wave-front modulation phase retrieval, we obtained an image of the paint sample that shows the distribution of the pigment particles and is consistent with the result obtained from a transmission x-ray microscope. The technique has been experimentally proven to be a feasible coherent x-ray imaging method with about 120 nm spatial resolution and was shown to work well with industrially relevant specimens.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2012

Single- and Two-Photon-Induced Processes at the B Factories

We discuss single- and two-photon-induced processes in e{sup +}e{sup -} annihilations with center-of-mass energy near 10.58 GeV from the BaBar and Belle experiments. In particular, we present experimental results from two-photon physics of {gamma}{gamma} {yields} {pi}{sup 0}{pi}{sup 0} and {gamma}{gamma}* {yields} {pi}{sup 0}. We also review the observation of the Two-Virtual-Photon-Annihilation process (e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {rho}{sup 0}{rho}{sup 0} and e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {phi}{rho}{sup 0}) and the observation of e{sup +}e{sup -} {yields} {rho}{sup +}{rho}{sup -}, which should be primarily a one virtual photon process, but whose angular distributions may imply potential interference effects.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2012

A Comparison of Techniques for Detecting Abnormal Change in Blogs

Distributed collections are made of metadata entries that contain references to artifacts not controlled by the collection curators. These collections often have limited forms of change; for digital distributed collections, primarily creation and deletion of additional resources. However, there exists a class of digital collection that undergoes additional kinds of change. These collections consist of resources that are distributed across the Internet and brought together via hyperlinking. Resources in these collections can be expected to change as time goes on. Part of the difficulty in maintaining these collections is determining if a changed page is still a valid member of the collection. Others have tried to address this by defining a maximum allowed threshold of change, however, these methods treat change as a potential problem and treat web content as static despite its intrinsic dynamicism. Instead we acknowledge change on the web as a normal part of a web document and determine the difference between what a maintainer expects a page to do and what it actually does. In this work we evaluate options for extractors and analyzers from a suite of techniques against a human-generated ground-truth set of blog changes. The results of this work show a statistically significant improvement over traditional threshold techniques for our collection.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2013

Rehabilitation of notch damaged steel beam using a carbon fiber reinforced multiphase-matrix composite

The retrofit of notch damaged steel beams is investigated via the experimental testing of nine wide-flange steel beam specimens and finite element simulation. Three notch configurations representing various damage levels were identified, and the beam specimens were retrofitted using CFRP laminates and a recently developed polymeric matrix composite - CarbonFlex - that exhibits superior energy dissipation and ductility properties, where the peak-load deflections were between 49.4% and 65.2% higher using the CarbonFlex-retrofitted beams. The results are attributed to the substantially higher damage tolerance capability of CarbonFlex than conventional CFRP. Finite element models were developed to investigate the damage processes and strain/ stress distributions near the notch tips. The numerical results match closely with the experimentally determined load-deflection curves and the strain fields obtained by the digital imaging correlations (DIC) system. Both experimental and numerical results clearly indicate the effectiveness of CarbonFlex, as a candidate retrofitting material, to retrofit damaged steel structures. Lastly, the micro-mechanisms by which CarbonFlex could sufficiently sustain a significant amount of the peak strength at large displacement ductility values are discussed with the aid of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) pictures.

Zhou, HongYu↗
DOE OSTI2013

Real-time Process Monitoring and Temperature Mapping of the 3D Polymer Printing Process

An extended range IR camera was used to make temperature measurements of samples as they are being manufactured. The objective is to quantify the temperature variation inside the system as parts are being fabricated, as well as quantify the temperature of a part during fabrication. The IR camera was used to map the temperature within the build volume of the oven and surface temperature measurement of a part as it was being manufactured. The development of the temperature map of the oven provides insight into the global temperature variation within the oven that may lead to understanding variations in the properties of parts as a function of location. The observation of the temperature variation of a part that fails during construction provides insight into how the deposition process itself impacts temperature distribution within a single part leading to failure.

3D Printing↗
DOE OSTI2013

Alternate Endpoints for Deep Vadose Zone Environments: Challenges, Opportunities, and Progress

Current requirements for site remediation and closure are standards-based and are often overly conservative, costly, and in some cases, technically impractical to achieve. Use of risk-informed alternate endpoints provide a means to achieve remediation goals that are permitted by regulations and are protective of human health and the environment. Alternate endpoints enable establishing a path for cleanup that may include intermediate remedial milestones and transition points and/or regulatory alternatives to standards-based remediation. A framework is presented that is centered around developing and refining conceptual models in conjunction with assessing risks and potential endpoints as part of a system-based assessment that integrates site data with scientific understanding of processes that control the distribution and transport of contaminants in the subsurface and pathways to receptors. This system based assessment and subsequent implementation of the remediation strategy with appropriate monitoring are targeted at providing a holistic approach to addressing risks to human health and the environment. This holistic approach also enables effective predictive analysis of contaminant behavior to provide defensible criteria and data for making long-term decisions. Developing and implementing an alternate endpoint-based approach for remediation and waste site closure presents a number of challenges and opportunities. Categories of these challenges include scientific and technical, regulatory, institutional, and budget and resource allocation issues. Opportunities exist for developing and implementing systems-based approaches with respect to supportive characterization, monitoring, predictive modeling, and remediation approaches.

endpoints↗
DOE OSTI2017

Modular space vehicle boards, control software, reprogramming, and failure recovery

A space vehicle may have a modular board configuration that commonly uses some or all components and a common operating system for at least some of the boards. Each modular board may have its own dedicated processing, and processing loads may be distributed. The space vehicle may be reprogrammable, and may be launched without code that enables all functionality and/or components. Code errors may be detected and the space vehicle may be reset to a working code version to prevent system failure.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2017

The SeaQuest Spectrometer at Fermilab

The SeaQuest spectrometer at Fermilab was designed to detect oppositely-charged pairs of muons (dimuons) produced by interactions between a 120 GeV proton beam and liquid hydrogen, liquid deuterium and solid nuclear targets. The primary physics program uses the Drell-Yan process to probe antiquark distributions in the target nucleon. The spectrometer consists of a target system, two dipole magnets and four detector stations. The upstream magnet is a closed-aperture solid iron magnet which also serves as the beam dump, while the second magnet is an open aperture magnet. Each of the detector stations consists of scintillator hodoscopes and a high-resolution tracking device. The FPGA-based trigger compares the hodoscope signals to a set of pre-programmed roads to determine if the event contains oppositely-signed, high-mass muon pairs.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗