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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 919 records · Page 51
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2022

Small Hydropower Interconnections: Analysis of Interconnection Processes

Small hydropower projects have faced the challenge of navigating the process to interconnect their generation source to electricity distribution and transmission grids. Small hydropower developers have found interconnection procedures to be opaque and ultimately result in unexpected cost surprises and long timelines. Noting these challenges, the U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office enlisted Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to investigate the small hydropower interconnection landscape across the United States. After reviewing the status of small hydropower (“Small Hydropower Interconnections: Small Hydropower in the United States”) and the interconnection procedures across the United States (“Small Hydropower Interconnections: State Interconnection Processes”) in the first two white papers of this series, this paper uses recent data from small hydropower interconnection applications to benchmark the efficacy of the process. Using data from interconnection queues hosted by utilities, balancing authorities, independent system operators (ISOs), and regional transmission organizations (RTOs), this paper provides context for the costs, timelines, and types of upgrades required for small hydropower projects. Interconnection applications and study reports for small hydropower projects were analyzed to collect key pieces of information about the interconnection process, timeline, costs, and type of upgrades required for interconnection. Information sourced from the reports was entered into an Interconnection Benchmarking database (IBdb), which may be found in Appendix A.1. Information from this database was used to evaluate the performance and challenges associated with interconnecting small hydropower projects. This white paper presents a description of the sources contained in the interconnection database (Section 2.0), an analysis of the interconnection timeline (Section 3.0), an evaluation the cost of interconnection upgrades (Section 4.0), and a description of the types of infrastructure upgrades (Section 5.0). The final paper in this series (“Small Hydropower Interconnections: Best Practices”) will use the analysis described here to outline best practices for interconnection processes that will help overcome barriers to future small hydropower development.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Industrial Deployment of Computer Aided Manufacturing Software for Hybrid Advanced Manufacturing

GibbsCAM, 3D Systems’ software product, is a full-featured CAM system that provides powerful CNC programming, capabilities, and solutions, delivering high quality parts without sacrificing ease of use. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) collaborated with GibbsCAM to evaluate their toolpath generating software being developed for both blown powder and hybrid CNC/additive manufacturing machinery. The current approach in toolpath solutions for additive manufacturing is to utilize subtractive toolpaths created by existing CAM software and reversing it for additive manufacturing applications. GibbsCAM is working to develop a full solution to mitigate the challenges that arise with this approach and deploy a fully customized solution for producing quality, reliable components for a range of different DED systems. When successful, this will be an automated solution deployed through a future release of GibbsCAM software.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

Large Scale Metal Additive Manufacturing for Stamping Dies

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) worked with Dienamic Tooling Systems (DTS) in a follow-on Phase 2 effort to develop and demonstrate additively manufactured conformal cooling for hot stamping dies, providing a new industry capability that did not previously exist. Current approaches to die cooling are nonoptimal and based on what can be machined with traditional technologies. The printed approach to hot stamping cooling channels allows an analytical needs-based size and placement approach to cooling. Cooling is optimized and parts count is reduced producing a simpler more reliable faster to manufacture stamping tool. An additively manufactured hot stamping die with conformal cooling channels was manufactured and successfully tested in a real-world environment.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

Upgrade of Core Conduction Cooldown Test Facility Control System

The CCCTF was designed and installed at ORNL in the 1990s for high-temperature gas-cooled reactor accident simulation. It is located within a modular hot cell housed in the IFEL facility. In 2008 and 2009, modifications were made to the CCCTF in preparation for AGR safety testing. A new airlock was designed and installed to better support periodic exchange of the fission product deposition cups while maintaining the fuel at safety test temperature, and modifications were made to add routines to the existing user interface software for computer-controlled automation of the He sweep gas flow and liquid nitrogen supply to the 85Kr cold traps. However, the furnace control hardware and software remained essentially unchanged. At the conclusion of the AGR-1 and AGR-2 PIE campaigns, continued use of the CCCTF was in question because of the gradual obsolescence of the hardware and software used to control the furnace and ancillary systems that make up the CCCTF. Therefore, an effort was undertaken to replace all the obsolete components with new hardware and update the software to increase system reliability and ensure this capability’s maintenance for future research and fuel qualification efforts. The modifications included creating a new National Instruments (NI) LabVIEW-based control system with a graphical user interface (GUI).

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Increasing Z-Strength and Testing the Capabilities of Twin Screw Extruders in Large Format Polymer Additive Manufacturing

During the first phase of this project, small and large Strangpresse extruders were assessed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF). This phase resulted in Strangpresse exclusively licensing some of ORNL’s previously developed extruder technology for high-volume thermoplastic additive manufacturing (AM). Phase II of this project will focus on further development and optimization of Strangpresse extruders for increased efficiency and increased throughput. The objective of this project is to develop a new extruder with a higher output and less energy usage than current AM thermoplastic extruders and to develop and evaluate a new tamper mechanism for increasing Z-strength resulting in an advanced and optimized extruder and tamper system.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2022

DOE COVID-19 Data Curation Effort: Overview of Initial Data Collection Coverage (March - June 2020)

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, major case reporting outlets quickly coalesced around two or three primary vendors. Johns Hopkins University and The New York Times were among the more prominent, and all were of great value to the nation, particularly during the uncertain early stages of the pandemic. They primarily focused on three major attributes: number of new cases, deaths, and recovery, but only at the state level. Recognizing that many states were reporting very detailed data sets (e.g., hospital beds) at a count level or finer, the ORNL Pandemic Modeling team embarked on a major data curation effort from March to June 2020 for the purpose of capturing this wealth of detailed data. The challenge of curating this data was daunting. The number of attributes reported by the states grew on almost on a weekly basis. States were routinely shifting their web tool strategies away from easily parsable HTML-based formatting to new Tableau and ArcGIS content. This growth in the sheer number of attributes combined with the unpredictable shifts in data format meant an aggressive and agile combination of automated scripting and manual scraping was required to capture new daily streams. To keep up, the team had to scale up staff and widen its approach for capture and storage. The DOE COVID-19 data collection effort resulted in over 11 million data points being collected, covering over 13,000 unique geographies and over 2,000 unique attributes that spanned predominantly from early March through the end of June 2020.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Printed Strain Gauges for Anthropomorphic Test Dummies for Vehicle Crash Testing

In Phase 1 of the technical collaboration between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Humanetics, additive manufacturing was studied as a method to produce high strain – strain gauges that are embedded in an additively manufactured (AM) anthropomorphic crash test dummy (ATD) to provide high fidelity data to significantly improve vehicle safety. In this study commercially available conductive filament was acquired and the mechanical properties were tested for use in this application. The design space of embedded printed strain gauges was explored with multiple configurations printed and tested for performance. The testing resulted in finding that commercially available filament materials were unable to meet the performance requirements. Finally, an extensive literature survey was performed on advanced manufacturing techniques and novel high strain conductive materials to manufacture strain gauges that can be embedded in to the AM ATD. Humanetics have taken the literature survey and have reached out to material suppliers such as Techmer to provide custom blends of materials for testing. Humanetics will continue to build off of the research that was performed and test custom materials for use in AM ATDs.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

Illustration of Neutronic Decoupling in Fresh Fuel Storage Environments [Slides]

Operations beyond static storage of fuel assemblies occur in SFPs (moving around the pool, inspection, etc.). These assemblies are assumed suitably distanced at 30 cm. When assemblies are separated by enough water, the neutrons from one cannot cause fission in another, which results in neutronic decoupling. This assumption was investigated for PWR and BWR assemblies as part of ORNL-TM/2021/2330.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2021

Cumulative χ 2 Metric for VALID for ENDF/B-VII.1 and ENDF/B-VIII.0 in SCALE 6.3b9 [Slides]

Quantifying the performance of a new evaluation is difficult and doing so for a new library is significantly more challenging. Cumulative χ 2 metric is an established approach to comparing distributions. In this case, C/E results from different libraries. Andrei Trkov and Roberto Capote have published cumulative χ 2 results for ENDF/B-VIII.0. Cumulative χ 2 metric was recently calculated for VALID library maintained at ORNL.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Resolved Resonance Region Evaluation of n+ 140,142 Ce [Slides]

ORNL has completed new resolved resonance region (RRR) evaluations for 140,142 Ce, which were carried out using Reich-Moore formalism instead of MLBW. Lack of integral measurements makes validation difficult, but difference from Kadonis values suggest more investigation of capture cross section are warranted. The complete file (with updated File2 & File32) was submitted to NNDC repository for inclusion in next release of ENDF. Sponsor report and journal publication are in progress.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

New High-Strength Ni-based Alloys for High Temperature Service in Liquid Fluoride Salt Environments

The ever-increasing demand for higher system thermal efficiency necessitates the operation of power generation cycles and heat conversion systems for chemical processes at progressively higher temperatures. As the system operating temperature increases, fewer and fewer materials are available with the required mechanical properties and environmental compatibility. This dearth of materials is particularly acute in structural applications at temperatures above 700°C in liquid Fluoride Salt Cooled High-Temperature Reactors (FHRs) and Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) systems where liquid fluoride and/or liquid chloride salts are used for their high thermal capacity and low thermal conductivity to store and transport heat. It has been shown that fluorides and chlorides can degrade the properties of the material used for storage and transport due to corrosive effects thus affecting the performance and lifetime characteristics. Thus, materials used for storage and transport for fluoride/chloride-salt must at the minimum have good compatibility with the salt by exhibiting low corrosion rates at the required temperatures. In addition, since many of the components will be subject to stresses in service, they need to have sufficient strength to resist plastic deformation, and the resistance to time dependent creep deformation at these temperatures, and stress levels. Achieving the combination of these properties required for higher temperatures is particularly challenging considering traditionally, the expected lifetime of some of the components used in these systems are from 30 years (CSP) to 80 years (FHRs). Although 316 stainless steel and associated redox corrosion reduction techniques are being considered for use in the first generational systems, use of 316SS is limited to operating temperatures up to ~ 650°C, thereby resulting in lower reactor efficiencies. Hastelloy ® N, developed at ORNL in the 1950s-60s for molten salt service is currently the leading candidate FHR structural alloy but has inadequate creep properties at high temperatures. Using a computationally-guided approach, Oak Ridge National Laboratory had developed new high strength alloys strengthened by γ’ precipitates (about 2X the strength of Hastelloy ® N) in small laboratory-scale heats that show good resistance to corrosion by fluorides and improved creep rupture life at temperatures up to 850°C (U.S. Patent Application No. 13/833,357 entitled “High Strength Alloys for High Temperature Service in Liquid-Salt Cooled Energy Systems”- granted U. S. Patent No. 9,540,714).

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2022

IRSN Work in Support of NCSP: FY2021 and Plan for Future [Slides]

IRSN and NCSP collaboration has been very fruitful. Despite challenges presented by COVID-19, work has been performed regularly and successfully by video conference. This includes monthly basis meeting with LLNL and LANL and specifics meetings with ORNL and SNL when needed. After two years without any IRSN participation to experiments, ISRN is looking forward to fully participating in the three proposed integral experiments scheduled in 2022. IRSN is working on several new projects including TEX-MOX and TEX-low temperatures.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Discontinuous Aligned Carbon Fiber Intermediates for Automotive and Related Applications

This work focused on preferentially aligning discontinuous carbon fibers in wet-laid or air-laid processes. It is well known that aligned fibers provides higher directional strength and stiffness. Discontinuous fibers further allow higher degree of draw and formability as the gaps in the fibers allow for higher material movement. The current processes are limited in their ability to align carbon fibers during processing. The aligned fibers have several benefits - (a) in applications where chopped fibers can replace continuous fibers for targeted strength and stiffness metrics, but at a substantially reduced cost; (b) they can tolerate deeper draws than continuous fiber composites in thermo-stamping and compression molding processes; (c) they can be tailored for pultrusion and unidirectional applications. Although pultrusion is primarily a process that adopts continuous fibers, stitch bonded entangled discontinuous fibers can provide unique intermediates. This is analogous to natural coir fibers which get aligned and entangled to produce ropes/rods for example, (d) they can be processed in cross-ply and multi-directional formats, like composite laminates. In this work Neenah Paper partnered with IACMI, UT and ORNL to evaluate structure-process-property relationships with Zoltek carbon fiber. A few process parameters such as machine speed, weight basis, fiber length, effect of fiber sizing, direction of mat lay-up etc. were investigated. The produced mats were converted to thermoplastic composite laminates using polyamide 6 (PA6, nylon) resin. The specific objective of this project is to produce a wet-laid nonwoven carbon fiber mat with a high degree of unidirectional fiber alignment, using discontinuous carbon fibers. The report provides details about the processing, characterization, and lower-upper bound properties.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

Safety Testing of AGR-5/6/7 Compacts 2-2-2 and 2-2-4

Compacts 2-2-2 and 2-2-4 from the Advanced Gas Reactor (AGR) Fuel Development and Qualification Program’s final irradiation campaign (AGR-5/6/7) were each separately subjected to a thermal soak at 1600°C for 300 h under flowing helium to simulated conditions experienced during a postulated high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) depressurization conduction cooldown event. The safety testing of the fuel compacts’ performance under accident conditions was conducted in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Core Conduction Cooldown Test Facility (CCCTF), which utilizes a stand-alone hot cell at the Irradiated Fuels Examination Laboratory (IFEL). The CCCTF heats fuel to temperatures up to 1900°C in a non-oxidizing environment while continuously monitoring the sweep gas for radioactive 85 Kr to detect release levels associated with hermetic failure of the tristructural-isotropic (TRISO) coating surrounding each fuel kernel. In addition, certain metallic radionuclides that escape the fuel compact are collected on deposition cups that are periodically exchanged with a new cup to obtain information on the overall retention behavior of the TRISO coating layers. Because cesium can diffuse through intact pyrocarbon layers, abnormal degradation of the silicon carbide (SiC) layer in the absence of holistic TRISO coating failure is indicated by release of 134 Cs at levels equivalent to an individual particle inventory in the absence of significant 85 Kr release (Hunn et al. 2014). Additional description of the CCCTF system is provided in Appendix A.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2022

MPACT Verification and Validation Manual (V.4.3)

As the VERA SQA plan requires, it is the responsibility of the University of Michigan (UM) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), as co-owners of MPACT, to ensure that verification and validation activities are performed and documented in a V&V manual with supporting publications and CASL technical reports which can be provided for reference and distribution within VERA. This document provides the current revision of the MPACT verification and validation (V&V) manual and describes the current state of MPACT V&V and updates the plans for future MPACT V&V activities. The following sections provide an overview of the V&V process used in MPACT, as well as a summary of the status of each component of V&V in the code.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2022

CRADA Number NFE-18-07325 with TCPoly, Inc. (CRADA Final Report)

TCPoly is commercializing high performance composite materials for the 3D printing industry and the company focus is manufacturing high thermal conductivity plastics for 3D printing of heat exchangers, electronic cooling devices, and mold tooling. Through the Innovation Crossroads Program, I was able to collaborate with ORNL researchers to expand the company’s technology offering and revamp the company’s business model and focus.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

CRADA Number NFE-18-07313 with Nth Cycle, Inc. (CRADA Final Report)

Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) NFE-18-07313 between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Nth Cycle Inc. focused on developing a technology for sustainable recycling of rare earth and specialty metals (e.g., Y, Co, Li; RESE), as well as bulk and precious metals from industrial manufacturing and waste streams through the use of electrochemical carbon nanotube-enabled filters. The project outcome was expected to be a stronger mechanistic understanding of the electrochemical recovery of metals from real manufacturing process streams and e-waste streams, and the development of an optimized high-throughput pilot-scale device ready for commercialization. Testing, design, and development of a v1 prototype to prove the technology was unsuccessful (we were not able to reach the go/no-go outlined in Objective 1) and we were unable to continue our redesign due to COVID-19 lockdown and no access to lab from March 2020 – until our graduation from the program.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulations to Predict Oxidation in Heat Recovery Steam Generator Tubes

Heat Recovery Steam Generators (HRSGs) are widely used across United States in combined cycle power plants to recover waste heat from the gas turbine (GT). HRSGs are used either to generate electricity or to produce process steam for industrial applications. The primary components of HRSG consists of a duct and a heat exchanger (HX). It is known across the power industry that the high temperature oxidation and ensuing exfoliation problem is a major cause for the damage of HX materials of HRSG. Alloys and/or coatings that can prevent or mitigate oxidation are very expensive, therefore they must be used or applied on the select regions of the HX tubes where the tendency of oxide formation is the highest. The main goal of this project is to identify such regions through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. Therefore, in this work, we developed a CFD framework using commercial code StarCCM+ for the prediction of the fluid flow and heat transfer in a HRSG and associated oxidation inside the tubes of the HX. The developed CFD framework was verified and validated with experimental data before deployment. We also developed an innovative method to model the effect of the fins on the heat transfer and the pressure drop using a porous media model (PMM) approach to keep the mesh size within reasonable limits. After validation, we performed high-fidelity CFD simulations of a real-scale HRSG using the PMM, with High Performance Computing (HPC) resources of ORNL. From the simulation results, we acquired oxide thickness maps for all the tubes of the select HX sections of HRSG prone to oxidation. These oxide maps can inform regions of the HX tubes that requires oxide-resistant coatings, thereby guiding engineers for cost-efficient manufacturing of the HX that can combat oxidation in HRSGs.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗