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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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This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-CRK Davy Crockett National Forest. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-CRK Davy Crockett National Forest produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - Shortleaf pine, mature
This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site AR-Bal Balcarce BA. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site AR-Bal Balcarce BA produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - The study was carried out in a 19-ha rainfed soybean plot at the Unidad Integrada Balcarce, located southeast of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The site is located in an environment of gentle hills at 130 m.a.s.l. Its soil was classified as a typical Argiudoll, with a loamy clayey texture up to 0.30 m and between 0.80 to 1.10 m depth, and a clayey texture between 0.30 and 0.80 m depth. The slope was 1:50 and oriented NE to SW. A caliche layer was found at 1 to 1.2 m depth thus the water table was considered beneath that level. The soybean variety used was DM 3810, Maturity Group III with an indeterminate growing habit. It was sown on November 21, 2012, and emerged on December 1. The crop archive had a maximum height of 0.75 m.
This is the AmeriFlux version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NC5 NC Butner Farm. Site Description - The US-NC5 flux tower is located within an 80-year-old mixed pine-hardwood forest at the Umstead Research Farm in Butner, North Carolina. The northern section of this 20-hectare Fall Lake Watershed of the Neuse River Basin in the Piedmont of North Carolina, USA. The Northern portion is currently a managed cattle farm, which is slated for expansion—necessitating forest clearing in the flux site. To establish a reference baseline, a year-long, all-season eddy covariance flux monitoring campaign will be conducted from April 2025 to March 2026. This effort aims to capture the carbon flux dynamics of the mature forest ecosystem prior to a planned land-use conversion. The site will be transitioned into a silvopasture, maintained through prescribed burning and cattle grazing to promote an open-canopy watershed structure. Flux measurements will continue after the conversion.
This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site BR-Sa1 Santarem-Km67-Primary Forest. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site BR-Sa1 Santarem-Km67-Primary Forest produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - The LBA Tapajos KM67 Mature Forest site is a closed-canopy terra firme (upland) forest, located in the FLONA Tapajos, or National Forest, a 450,000 ha government conservation unit in the Brazilian Amazon. Bounded by the Tapajos River in the west and highway BR-163 to the east, the tower is located on a flat plateau (or planalto) that extends up to 40 km to the north, south, and east. The forest at the tower site is classified as primary or "old-growth"" predominantly by its uneven age distribution, emergent trees, numerous epiphytes and abundant large logs. In January 2006 and again in November 2023, falling trees hit the tower guy wires destroying the tower and halting measurements. In each case, the tower was restored and measurements resumed, first in August of 2008 (enabled by a Partnership for International Research and Education, or PIRE, grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation) and again in June 2024.
This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Cwt Coweeta. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-Cwt Coweeta produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - Mature, secondary, deciduous-dominated forest. Located in southern Appalachian mountains, cove location, near base of forested catchment. Proximity close to USFS Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory offices. Forest harvesting until early 1930s, unmanaged since.
This is the AmeriFlux Management Project (AMP) created FLUXNET-1F version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NC5 NC Butner Farm. This is the FLUXNET version of the carbon flux data for the site US-NC5 NC Butner Farm produced by applying the standard ONEFlux (1F) software. Site Description - The US-NC5 flux tower is located within an 80-year-old mixed pine-hardwood forest at the Umstead Research Farm in Butner, North Carolina. The northern section of this 20-hectare Fall Lake Watershed of the Neuse River Basin in the Piedmont of North Carolina, USA. The Northern portion is currently a managed cattle farm, which is slated for expansion—necessitating forest clearing in the flux site. To establish a reference baseline, a year-long, all-season eddy covariance flux monitoring campaign will be conducted from April 2025 to March 2026. This effort aims to capture the carbon flux dynamics of the mature forest ecosystem prior to a planned land-use conversion. The site will be transitioned into a silvopasture, maintained through prescribed burning and cattle grazing to promote an open-canopy watershed structure. Flux measurements will continue after the conversion.
This data is related to the paper entitled "Techno-economic analysis of sugarcane bagasse and straw conversion into cellulosic ethanol via consolidated bioprocessing". That features the evaluation of sugarcane bagasse and straw conversion to ethanol at stand-alone facilities generating electricity from residues. The following scenarios were evaluated: Conventional, featuring hydrothermal pretreatment, fungal cellulase, and yeast fermentation (current commercial standard); Mid-term consolidated bioprocessing (CBP), relying on bagasse solubilization without pretreatment or cotreatment; and Mature CBP, incorporating cotreatment but no pretreatment and considering significant technological advance of the CBP. Available here are the spreadsheets used for Material and Energy balance calculation, Capital and Operational costs estimation and Cash flow analysis. Also available are the description and python code used for Monte Carlo analysis of the ethanol and capital investment variations. This data can be used as a source to implement other techno-economic analysis in the biorefinary context.
Data-intensive research in seismology is experiencing a recent boom, driven in part by large volumes of available data and advances in the growing field of data science. However, there are significant barriers to processing large data volumes, such as long retrieval times from data repositories, complex data management, and limited computational resources. New tools and platforms have reduced the barriers to entry for scientific cluster computing, including the maturation of the commercial cloud as an accessible instrument for research. Here, we build a customized research cluster in the cloud to test a new workflow for large-scale seismic analysis, in which data are processed as a stream (retrieved on-the-fly and acted upon without storing), with data from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology Data Management Center. We use this workflow to deploy a spectral peak detection algorithm over 5.6 TB of compressed continuous seismic data from 2074 stations of the USArray Transportable Array EarthScope network. Using a 50-node cluster in the cloud, we completed the noise survey in 80 hr, with an average data throughput of 1.7 GB per minute. By varying cluster sizes, we find the scaling of our analysis to be sublinear, due to a combination of algorithmic limitations and data center response times. The cloud-based streaming workflow represents an order-of-magnitude increase in acquisition and processing speed compared to a traditional download-store-process workflow, and offers the additional benefits of employing a flexible, accessible, and widely used computing architecture. It is limited, however, due to its reliance on Internet transfer speeds and data center service capacity, and may not work well for repeated analyses or those for which even higher data throughputs are needed. These research applications will require a new class of cloud-native approaches in which both data and analysis are in the cloud.
The Carbon Storage Planning Framework dashboard (beta version) provides easy access to explore, query, and evaluate multiple data layers to support and accelerate carbon storage resource and feasibility assessments and planning efforts. The interactive dashboard currently contains a range of authoritative datasets associated with geologic, technical, social, and environmental factors. The data sets can be filtered geographically for an area of interest to update statistics and charts within the dashboard. Terms of Use: NETL is sharing this beta/prototype tool with the request that users will provide feedback to NETL about the function and content of the dashboard, alerting NETL to any bugs or providing suggestions for additional resources to help mature the platform.
The International Offshore Geologic Carbon Storage Story Map provides an overview of offshore geologic carbon storage (GCS) project maturity on a global scale. This story map reviews the history of CO2 storage in offshore sedimentary basins, basic geologic requirements, project timelines and lessons learned through defined project stage progression, areas previously studied for potential future domestic offshore GCS development, and regulatory considerations within different global regions. This resource is a distillation of information collected and recorded in the Offshore Geologic Carbon Storage Inventory Version 1.0 (https://edx.netl.doe.gov/dataset/offshore-gcs-data-inventory).
The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is being designed for construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Activities have been focused on beam-beam simulations, polarization studies, and beam dynamics, as well as on maturing the layout and lattice design of the constituent accelerators and the interaction region. The latest design advances will be presented.
Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) is currently investigating the feasibility of upgrading its maximum operating energy using Fixed-Field Alternating-gradient (FFA) recirculating arcs to increase the total number of recirculations of the beam through the pair of LINACs. These FFA arcs will be composed of permanent magnets, with small Panofsky-style multipole correctors. In order to control the beam parameters through these FFA arcs, horizontal splitters must be used. The geometrical and physical constraints, as well as the beam matching requirements are very restrictive, complicating the design. This work will show the current status of the most mature design, which includes matching solutions, as well as options for extraction of the beam.
The future electron-ion collider (EIC) aims at an electron-proton luminosity of 10³³ to 10³⁴ cm⁻² sec⁻¹ and a center-of-mass energy range from 20 to 140 GeV. The eRHIC design has been continuously evolving over a couple of years and has reached a considerable level of maturity. The concept is generally conservative with very few risk items which are mitigated in various ways.
Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) is currently investigating the feasibility of upgrading its maximum operating energy using Fixed-Field Alternating-gradient (FFA) recirculating arcs to increase the total number of recirculations the beam through the pair of LINACs. These FFA arcs will be composed of permanent magnets, with small Panofsky-style multipole correctors. Horizontal splitters are needed to control the beam parameters through these FFA arcs. The geometrical and physical constraints, as well as the beam matching requirements are very restrictive, complicating the design. This work will show the current status of the most mature design, which includes matching solutions, as well as options for extraction of the beam.
Bulk Nb for TESLA shaped SRF cavities is a mature technology, with high gradient (>35 MV/m) and high Q cavities (>1010, ~2K) routinely fabricated. Significant advances are in order to push Q?s to 1011 (~2K), and involve modifications to the sub-surface Nb layers by impurity doping (N, O). In order to achieve the lowest surface resistance any trapped flux needs to be expelled for cavities to reach high Q?s. There is clear evidence that cavities fabricated from polycrystalline sheets meeting current specifications require higher temperatures beyond 800oC leads to better flux expulsion, and hence improves Q. Recently, cavities fabricated with a non-traditional Nb sheet with initial cold work due to cold rolling expelled flux better after 800°C/3h heat treatment than cavities fabricated using fine-grain polycrystalline Nb sheets. Here, we analyze the microstructure development in Nb from the vendor supplied cold work non-annealed sheet that was fabricated into an SRF cavity as a function of heat treatment building upon the methodology development to analyze microstructure being developed by the FSU-MSU-UT-Austin- JLAB collaboration. The results indicate correlation between full recrystallization and better flux expulsion.
As Internet of Things devices and cloud-based platforms become more mature, Energy Management and Information Systems (EMIS) are increasingly gaining momentum in the building industry. In large commercial buildings, Fault-Detection and Diagnostic (FDD) and energy information systems (EIS) are now established technologies with tens of providers and thousands of deployment sites across North America. The new frontier for the EMIS technology is now represented by control systems that use advanced system optimization (ASO) methods to improve the operations of the HVAC system. Given the complexity of the integration of such systems with the existing building automation systems (BAS) and the higher risk involved with direct control of the HVAC, these systems are still emerging in the market. This paper presents the results of a project in which a start-up company partnered with a research institution to develop a cloud-based software EMIS solution and deployed it in a university campus in California. The software system included advanced sensing, data acquisition, storage and advanced control and analytics applications developed on top of the native BAS. The new platform controls ten buildings on the campus and the FDD and the ASO applications deployed on this platform were able to generate energy savings of up to 35% and 25% in certain buildings for each functionality respectively. Where the platform did not save energy, it improved building service (air quality). Lessons learned include the importance of collaborating with and training the building operators and evaluating whether the legacy system can work reliably with the new technology.
Model Predictive Control (MPC) has demonstrated significant potential for optimizing building operations and enabling demand flexibility. However, the widespread adoption of MPC is hindered by complex manual configuration and commissioning processes that must be conducted by control experts working alongside building operators. These challenges drive up costs and reduce scalability, particularly when technical human resources and building automation systems are limited, such as in small and medium commercial buildings (SMCBs). This paper demonstrates how semantic standards, specifically ASHRAE 223P, can accelerate the adoption of MPC applications for load flexibility in SMCBs. The authors present a replicable control framework, titled “HP-FLEX” that leverages a building’s semantic model to bootstrap the required data configuration for an MPC controller developed for optimizing heat pump systems as flexible grid resources. The semantic model helps streamline the deployment workflow, particularly for site setup, data/control commissioning, and model setup. This integration enhances portability, transferability, and scalability of the HP-FLEX MPC, which has been developed to support MPC-based supervisory HVAC controllers in SMCBs. Additionally, the paper details the required building and thermostat metadata information to enable the HP-FLEX MPC based on field demonstrations. The new workflow was tested in a small commercial building located in California, U.S., and demonstrated a load shifting performance of 9% based on a dynamic pricing signal that varies by the hour. This work provides a practical pathway for transitioning sophisticated building applications from custom to standardized semantic representations, supporting the broader adoption of advanced control strategies like MPC. The framework also establishes a foundation for evolving metadata requirements as applications mature while maintaining compatibility with industry standards.
While every tight oil play is unique, there are lessons that can be transferred from one play to another to improve the efficiency and pace of production operations and development. These improvements may not fit precisely in every basin or play but generally hold to themes that can be tested against and built upon. Themes such as the quantity of proppant, longer lateral length, or the number of stages can be directly tied to increased productivity. However, there are diminishing returns on these investment activities for which each operator, within a given play, will be required to identify and mitigate against. This is especially true as the industry steps in and begins developing new tight oil plays. In their nascent stages, these plays may have limited well penetrations and, as a result, limited geological and performance data from which to extrapolate. Pulling together an understanding of where the industry currently resides in terms of how to exploit these resources can provide a boost in terms of working towards greatly improved well completions. In 2019, the US EIA estimated that nearly 8 million barrels of oil per day were produced from tight oil reservoirs in the United States (US EIA, 2020). This represents over 60% of the domestic crude production, originating from multiple reservoirs in the Permian Basin (TX) as well as the Bakken (MT, ND), Eagle Ford (TX), Niobrara (CO, WY), and Anadarko Basin (OK) formations, among others. As such, there are 1,000s of wells across these numerous tight oil plays that can relate an informative story. To build this story, the interplay of geology, well spacing, lateral length, and stimulation, all critical to economic success, will be explored. This paper proposes to look back at these mature tight oil (and gas) basins and bring forth an understanding of what lessons can be applied to the emerging Powder River Basin tight oil reservoirs (Mowry and the Turner/Frontier). The authors will delve into the four broad topics of geology, well spacing, lateral length, and stimulation, highlighting case studies to demonstrate those lessons from established tight oil plays that will underpin planned activities at a Field Laboratory Test Site in the southern Powder River Basin.