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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 991 records · Page 55

Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning for Decentralized VVO of BTM DERs

The future of grid control requires a hybrid approach combining centralized and decentralized methods to fully utilize the potential of smart edge devices with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. This paper aims to develop and evaluate a federated deep reinforcement learning (FDRL) framework for decentralized adaptive volt-var optimization (VVO) of behind-the-meter (BTM) distributed energy resources (DERs). First, this paper models a single deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent using the Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework for decentralized adaptive VVO of BTM DERs. Two DRL algorithms, soft actor-critic (SAC) and twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3), are compared for their effectiveness in optimizing VVO. Results show that TD3 outperforms SAC, achieving a 71.3% improvement in mean reward. Finally, the DRL agent is deployed within the FDRL framework, using the Flower platform, to enhance learning, provide adaptive control, and ensure data privacy for BTM DERs.

Ravi, Abhijith↗

Next-generation geospatial-temporal information technologies for disaster management

Traditional geographic information systems (GIS) have been disrupted by the emergence of Big Data in the form of geo-coded raster, vector, and time-series Internet-of-Things data. This article discusses the application of new scalable technologies that go far beyond relational databases and file-based storage on spinning disk or tape to incorporate both storage and processing data in the same platform. The roles of the Apache Hadoop Distributed File Systems and NoSQL key-value stores such as the Apache Hbase are discussed, along with indexing schemes that optimally support geospatial-temporal use. Here, we highlight how this new approach can rapidly search multiple GIS data layers to obtain insights in the context of early warning, impact evaluation, response, and recovery to earthquake and wildfire disasters.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Independent Metadata Update VOL Connector for HDF5 (IMM VOL) v0.1

We have built a new framework that enables independent metadata updates within HDF5 files. Our framework includes the following components: an overlay network that's optimized for 1-to-All and All-to-All communication; root-less/server-less Bcast and AllReduce operations for reduced synchronization; a distributed consensus-making platform; an execution order keeping system, and a progress engine for generic threadless concurrence handling.

Li, Tonglin↗

STTR Phase I: Low-Cost, High-Accuracy, Whole-Building Carbon Dioxide Monitoring for Demand Control Ventilation

This STTR Phase I project assessed the feasibility of a new CO 2 sensing system optimized for low-cost, high-accuracy, whole-building monitoring for use in demand control ventilation. The focus was on the development of a wireless networking platform and associated firmware to provide signal conditioning and conversion, fault- and disruptiontolerant networking, and multi-hop routing at building scales to avoid wiring costs. Early exploration of a bridge (or “gateway”) to direct digital control services was also explored. Results of the project contributed to an improved understanding of a new electrochemical sensor for monitoring indoor CO 2 concentrations, as well as the electronics and networking infrastructure required to deploy those sensors at building scales. New knowledge was acquired concerning the sensor’s accuracy, environmental response, and failure modes, and the acquisition electronics required to achieve accuracy over a wide range of CO 2 concentrations. The project demonstrated that the new sensor offers repeatable correspondence with commercial optical sensors, with supporting electronics that offer gain accuracy within 0.5%, and acquisition accuracy within 1.5% across three orders of magnitude variation in generated current. Considering production, installation, and maintenance costs, the technology presents a foundation for achieving whole-building CO 2 sensing at a price point below $0.066 / sq-ft – meeting economic feasibility criteria established by the Department of Energy. The technology developed under this award addresses obstacles on the critical path to enabling whole-building CO 2 sensing and demand control ventilation in commercial retrofits, small commercial buildings, residential complexes, and other highpotential structures that have been slow to adopt these technologies. It presents an opportunity to significantly reduce energy use throughout the United States.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

IDAES-PSE Software Tools for Optimizing Energy Systems and Market Interactions

Modern power grids coordinate electricity production and consumption via multi-scale wholesale energy markets. Historically, levelized cost metrics were the de facto standard for techno-eco-nomic analyses of energy systems and comparison of technology options. However, these metrics neglect the complexity of energy infrastructure including the time-varying value of electricity. An emerging alternative is multi-period optimization, which considers the locational marginal price of electricity as input data (parameters). In this work, we present a general interface for multi-period optimization with time-varying energy prices to facilitate rapid analysis and comparison of potential energy systems models. The PriceTakerModel class is written in the IDAES-PSE platform and allows users to generate a multi-period, price-taker model instance, as well as automatically generate common operational constraints for their model, such as start-up and shutdown. We show this interface successfully generates multi-period price-taker models, facilitates model discrimination, and aids in analyzing various technologies for deployment in unique energy markets.

Laky, Daniel↗

Estimating the Inertia Matrix of a Spacecraft

A paper presents a method of utilizing some flight data, aboard a spacecraft that includes reaction wheels for attitude control, to estimate the inertia matrix of the spacecraft. The required data are digitized samples of (1) the spacecraft attitude in an inertial reference frame as measured, for example, by use of a star tracker and (2) speeds of rotation of the reaction wheels, the moments of inertia of which are deemed to be known. Starting from the classical equations for conservation of angular momentum of a rigid body, the inertia-matrix-estimation problem is formulated as a constrained least-squares minimization problem with explicit bounds on the inertia matrix incorporated as linear matrix inequalities. The explicit bounds reflect physical bounds on the inertia matrix and reduce the volume of data that must be processed to obtain a solution. The resulting minimization problem is a semidefinite optimization problem that can be solved efficiently, with guaranteed convergence to the global optimum, by use of readily available algorithms. In a test case involving a model attitude platform rotating on an air bearing, it is shown that, relative to a prior method, the present method produces better estimates from few data.

Acikmese, Behcet↗

An autonomous laboratory for the accelerated synthesis of novel materials

To close the gap between the rates of computational screening and experimental realization of novel materials, we introduce the A-Lab, an autonomous laboratory for the solid-state synthesis of inorganic powders. This platform uses computations, historical data from the literature, machine learning (ML) and active learning to plan and interpret the outcomes of experiments performed using robotics. Over 17 days of continuous operation, the A-Lab realized 41 novel compounds from a set of 58 targets including a variety of oxides and phosphates that were identified using large-scale ab initio phase-stability data from the Materials Project and Google DeepMind. Synthesis recipes were proposed by natural-language models trained on the literature and optimized using an active-learning approach grounded in thermodynamics. Analysis of the failed syntheses provides direct and actionable suggestions to improve current techniques for materials screening and synthesis design. The high success rate demonstrates the effectiveness of artificial-intelligence-driven platforms for autonomous materials discovery and motivates further integration of computations, historical knowledge and robotics.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Implementation of McMurchie–Davidson Algorithm for Gaussian AO Integrals Suited for SIMD Processors

We report an implementation of the McMurchie− Davidson evaluation scheme for 1- and 2-particle Gaussian AO integrals designed for processors with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instruction sets. Like in our recent MD implementation for graphical processing units (GPUs) [Asadchev, A.; Valeev, E. F.. J. Chem. Phys. 2024, 160, 244109.], variable-sized batches of shellsets of integrals are evaluated at a time. By optimizing for the floating point instruction throughput rather than minimizing the number of operations, this approach achieves up to 50% of the theoretical hardware peak FP64 performance for many common SIMD-equipped platforms (AVX2, AVX512, NEON), which translates to speedups of up to 30 over the state-of-the-art one-shellset-at-a-time implementation of Obara−Saika-type schemes in Libint for a variety of primitive and contracted integrals. As with our previous work, we rely on the standard C++ programming language such as the std::simd standard library feature to be included in the 2026 ISO C++ standard without any explicit code generation to keep the code base small and portable. The implementation is part of the open source LibintX library freely available at https://github.com/ValeevGroup/libintx.

Basis sets↗

Cell Sage Re Mix HD

Cell Sage is a computational tool that allows science-based evaluation and exploration of battery life cycles over near limitless combination of aging conditions which helps battery end-users to optimize their investments.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Behavioral Health and Performance Operations and Research in Human Spaceflight

There are two distinct functions of the Behavioral Health and Performance (BHP) specialists at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), with a shared goal of promoting optimal performance during all mission phases, beginning with selection to the NASA Astronaut Corps through training for and completing a spaceflight mission. The BHP Operations team is active in areas such as selection, training, routine behavioral healthcare services, and work-rest schedule. The BHP Laboratory is engaged in research in space and analog platforms to address the risks and other challenges associated with future deep space missions. Their research focuses on topics that align with the NASA Human Research Program’s Human Factors Behavioral Performance Element goals. This panel will provide details of recent work by BHP Operations and the BHP Laboratory at NASA JSC, and will demonstrate their shared goals, and contributions toward, optimizing performance and maintaining the behavioral health and well-being of astronauts during all mission phases.In 2020-2021, NASA engaged another astronaut applicant screening process to identify its 23rd group of astronaut candidates. The BHP Operations team completed a significant amount of work to evaluate applicants and provide valuable input to the Astronaut Selection Board and the Aerospace Medical Board. One presentation will provide an overview of the work completed by BHP; and one presentation will discuss a critical competency important for successful job performance of the astronauts – Team Orientation. The former will summarize aspects of BHP’s Select-in and Select-out process and provide lessons learned for future selection cycles; the latter will briefly discuss the competencies of BHP’s applicant screening work, with focus on the importance of Team Orientation and the challenges of its measure. A third presentation will provide an overview of BHP’s current fatigue management work with astronauts and mission-critical operators at JSC (e.g., flight directors, pilots), and provide a look at the direction these fatigue management services may take in future exploration missions. Two other presentations will focus on the research completed by the BHP Lab to measure in a standardized way the critical aspects of behavioral health and well-being. One of the presentations will provide an overview of the Exploration Measures being collected during all space and analog missions, and the importance these objective measures have for future research and operations. The final presentation will summarize analyses completed with these measures, as they have been harmonized across both ISS and Analog missions.

Gary Beven↗

Cooperative Routing for an Air–Ground Vehicle Team—Exact Algorithm, Transformation Method, and Heuristics

This paper considers a cooperative vehicle routing problem for an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission in the presence of communication constraints between the vehicles. The proposed framework uses a ground vehicle and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that travel cooperatively and visit a set of targets while satisfying the communication constraints. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program, and a branch-and-cut algorithm is developed to solve the problem to optimality. Furthermore, a transformation method and a heuristic are also developed for the problem. The effectiveness of all the algorithms is corroborated through extensive computational experiments on several randomly generated instances. Furthermore, this paper is motivated by an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission involving a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a ground vehicle, where the vehicles must coordinate their activity in the presence of communication constraints. The combination of a small UAV and a ground vehicle is an ideal platform for such missions, since small UAVs can fly at low altitudes and can avoid obstacles or threats that would be problematic for the ground vehicle alone. This paper addresses the coordinated routing problem involving these two vehicles and presents an algorithm to obtain an optimal solution for this problem, fast heuristics to obtain good feasible solutions, and also a transformation method to transform any instance of this cooperative vehicle routing problem to an instance of the one-in-a-set traveling salesman problem.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

Development of an Ion Mobility Spectrometry-Orbitrap Mass Spectrometer Platform

Complex samples benefit from multidimensional measurements where higher resolution enables more complete characterization of biological and environmental systems. To address this challenge, we developed a drift tube-based ion mobility spectrometry-Orbitrap mass spectrometer (IMS-Orbitrap MS) platform. To circumvent the time scale disparity between the fast IMS separation and the much slower Orbitrap MS acquisition, we utilized a dual gate and pseudorandom sequences to multiplexed injection of ions and allowing operation in signal averaging (SA), single multiplexing (SM) and double multiplexing (DM) IMS modes to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements. For the SM measurements, a previously developed algorithm was used to reconstruct the IMS data. A new algorithm was developed for the DM analyses involving a two-step process that first recovers the SM data and then decodes the SM data. The algorithm also performs multiple refining procedures in order to minimize demultiplexing artifacts. The new IMS-Orbitrap MS platform was demonstrated by the analysis of proteomic and petroleum samples, where the integration of IMS and high mass resolution proved essential for accurate assignment of molecular formulae.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Compact in situ probe for magnetotransport measurements of 2D materials under variable tensile strain

The recent development of freestanding oxide membranes has opened new opportunities for strain engineering of transition metal oxides beyond values accessible in bulk samples. While a number of studies have been performed with fixed strain, the ability to dynamically control the strain state during measurement would be greatly enabling. To this end, we present an in situ uniaxial strain probe optimized for transport measurements of tensile-strained 2D or quasi-2D materials down to 2 K. Utilizing a flexible polyimide substrate as the stress transfer medium, our platform simplifies the sample preparation process and allows precise alignment of strain fields relative to the crystalline axes. An in situ optical microscope monitors the macroscopic strain state operando and makes it possible to complete an entire magnetotransport study at cryogenic temperatures under continuous strain variations. We demonstrate the capabilities of the probe on a freestanding LaNiO 3 membrane, where we induce tensile strain up to 8% and observe a corresponding strong transport anisotropy. In view of the rapid developments in low-dimensional materials synthesis and the plethora of novel quantum phenomena they exhibit, this strain probe provides general instrumentation for examining and controlling these properties via strain.

2D materials↗

Lighting up yeast: overview of optogenetics in yeast and their applications to yeast biotechnology

Abstract Optogenetics is an empowering technology that uses light-responsive proteins to control biological processes. Because of its genetic tractability, abundance of genetic tools, and robust culturing conditions, Saccharomyces cerevisiae has served for many years as an ideal platform in which to study, develop, and apply a wide range of optogenetic systems. In many instances, yeast has been used as a steppingstone in which to characterize and optimize optogenetic tools to later be deployed in higher eukaryotes. More recently, however, optogenetic tools have been developed and deployed in yeast specifically for biotechnological applications, including in nonconventional yeasts. In this review, we summarize various optogenetic systems responding to different wavelengths of light that have been demonstrated in diverse yeast species. We then describe various applications of these optogenetic tools in yeast, particularly in metabolic engineering and recombinant protein production. Finally, we discuss emerging applications in yeast cybergenetics—the interfacing of yeast and computers for closed-loop controls of yeast bioprocesses—and the potential impact of optogenetics in other future biotechnological applications.

Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology↗

O3BNN-R: An Out-Of-Order Architecture for High-Performance and Regularized BNN Inference

Binarized Neural Networks (BNN) have drawn tremendous attention due to significantly reduced computational complexity and memory demand. They have especially shown great potential in cost- and power-restricted domains, such as IoT and smart edge-devices, where reaching a certain accuracy bar is often sufficient, and real-time is highly desired.In this work, we demonstrate that the highly-condensed BNN model can be shrunk significantly further by dynamically pruning irregular redundant edges. Based on two new observations on BNN-specific properties, an out-of-order (OoO) architecture – O3BNN-R, can curtail edge evaluation in cases where the binary output of a neuron can be determined early. Similar to Instruction-Level-Parallelism(ILP), these fine-grained, irregular, runtime pruning opportunities are traditionally presumed to be difficult to exploit. In order to increase the pruning opportunities, we also optimize the training process by adding 2 regularization items in the loss function (1) for pooling pruning and (2) for threshold pruning. We evaluate our design on an FPGA platform using three well-known networks, including VggNet-16, AlexNet for ImageNet, and a VGG-like network for Cifar-10.

Geng, Tong↗

LLNL/thicket

Thicket is a python-based toolkit for Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) of parallel performance data that enables performance optimization and understanding of applications’ performance on supercomputers. It bridges the performance tool gap between being able to consider only a single instance of a simulation run (e.g., single platform, single measurement tool, or single scale) and finding actionable insights in multi-dimensional, multi-scale, multi-architecture, and multi-tool performance datasets.

Brink, Stephanie Labasan↗

ASCR Workshop on In Situ Data Management: Enabling Scientific Discovery from Diverse Data Sources

In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science program in Advanced Scientific Computing Research, convened a workshop to identify priority research directions for in situ data management (ISDM). The workshop defined ISDM as the practices, capabilities, and procedures to control the organization of data and enable the coordination and communication among heterogeneous tasks, executing simultaneously in a high-performance computing system, cooperating toward a common objective. The workshop revealed two primary, interdependent motivations for processing and managing data in situ. The first motivation is that the in situ methodology enables scientific discovery from a broad range of data sources over a wide scale of computing platforms: leadership-class systems, clusters, clouds, workstations, and embedded devices at the edge. The successful development of ISDM capabilities will benefit real-time decision-making, design optimization, and data-driven scientific discovery. The second motivation is the need to decrease data volumes. ISDM can make critical contributions to managing large data volumes from computations and experiments to minimize data movement, save storage space, and boost resource efficiency, often while simultaneously increasing scientific precision. A fundamental finding of this workshop is that the methodologies used to manage data among a variety of tasks in situ can be used to facilitate scientific discovery from many different data sources—simulation, experiment, and sensors, for example—and that being able to do so at numerous computing scales will benefit real-time decision-making, design optimization, and data-driven scientific discovery across the Office of Science mission space. Applications wanting to use the in situ capabilities include those where data analysis feeds back to the simulation, decisions are made autonomously, big data or machine learning is among the tasks to be coordinated, and computations need to be completed in real time. The workshop identified six priority research directions that highlight the components and capabilities needed for ISDM to be successful for the wide variety of applications discussed: making ISDM capabilities more pervasive, controllable, composable, and transparent, with a focus on greater coordination with the software stack and a diversity of fundamentally new data algorithms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

ASCR Workshop on In Situ Data Management

In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science program in Advanced Scientific Computing Research, convened a workshop to identify priority research directions for in situ data management (ISDM). The workshop defined ISDM as the practices, capabilities, and procedures to control the organization of data and enable the coordination and communication among heterogeneous tasks, executing simultaneously in a high-performance computing system, cooperating toward a common objective. The workshop revealed two primary, interdependent motivations for processing and managing data in situ. The first motivation is that the in situ methodology enables scientific discovery from a broad range of data sources over a wide scale of computing platforms: leadership-class systems, clusters, clouds, workstations, and embedded devices at the edge. The successful development of ISDM capabilities will benefit real-time decision-making, design optimization, and data-driven scientific discovery. The second motivation is the need to decrease data volumes. ISDM can make critical contributions to managing large data volumes from computations and experiments to minimize data movement, save storage space, and boost resource efficiency, often while simultaneously increasing scientific precision.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗