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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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Jim Bishop, senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and professor at UC Berkeley, is leading a project to deploy robotic floats that provide data on how microorganisms sequester carbon in the ocean. He recently led a research team on a 10-day voyage, funded by the National Science Foundation, to put the Carbon Flux Explorers to the test.
Major exascale computing reports indicate a number of software challenges to meet the dramatic change of system architectures in near future. While several-orders-of-magnitude increase in parallelism is the most commonly cited of those, hurdles also include performance heterogeneity of compute nodes across the system, increased imbalance between computational capacity and I/O capabilities, frequent system interrupts, and complex hardware architectures. Asynchronous task-parallel programming models show a great promise in addressing these issues, but are not yet fully understood nor developed su ciently for computational science and engineering application codes. We address these knowledge gaps through quantitative and qualitative exploration of leading candidate solutions in the context of engineering applications at Sandia. In this poster, we evaluate MiniAero code ported to three leading candidate programming models (Charm++, Legion and UINTAH) to examine the feasibility of these models that permits insertion of new programming model elements into an existing code base.
The Federal Aviation Administration promotes the development of an aviation biofuel market, and has pursued a goal of 1 billion gallons of production annually by 2018. Although this goal is unlikely to be met, this analysis applies the Biomass Scenario Model to explore conditions affecting market growth, and identifies policy incentive and oil price conditions under which this level of production might occur, and by what year. Numerous combinations of conditions that are more favorable than current conditions can reach the goal before 2030.
Over the last few years, significant attention has been paid to both encourage application and provide domestic and international guidance for designing in safeguards and security in new facilities.1,2,3 However, once a facility is operational, safeguards, security, and safety often operate as separate entities that support facility operations. This separation is potentially a serious weakness should insider or outsider threats become a reality.Situations may arise where safeguards detects a possible loss of material in a facility. Will they notify security so they can, for example, check perimeter doors for tampering? Not doing so might give the advantage to an insider who has already, or is about to, move nuclear material outside the facility building. If outsiders break into a facility, the availability of any information to coordinate the facility’s response through segregated alarm stations or a failure to include all available radiation sensors, such as safety’s criticality monitors can give the advantage to the adversary who might know to disable camera systems, but would most likely be unaware of other highly relevant sensors in a nuclear facility.This paper will briefly explore operational safeguards, safety, and security by design (3S) at a high level for domestic and State facilities, identify possible weaknesses, and propose future administrative and technical methods, to strengthen the facility system’s response to threats.
This report, by Morgan Bazilian and Jacquelyn Pless, examines ways that Energy+ could make a large impact in providing energy access to the poor, focusing on four promising models. While there remains a focus on a technology (PV), and a region (SSA) in this report, the models the authors explore are amenable to other specifications as well. Thus, the models presented provide an opportunity for stakeholders and the international community to collaborate and leverage capacities, resources, and networks. Of course, these models are only a few of the very wide range of possible mechanisms. They also are somewhat focused on engaging the private sector. The report does not provide a full context for the complex landscape of energy access and energy poverty. Rather, the paper is focused around the specifics of the interventions. It remains the case that the fundamental building blocks of capacity building, good governance and planning, and the ability to find funding for 'upfront' due diligence and analysis remain critical. Those items are, however, largely outside the scope of this short report.
In 2016, the Office of International Nuclear Safeguards at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) within the Department of Energy (DOE) commissioned the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to explore the potential implications of the digital currency bitcoin and its underlying technologies on the safeguards system. The authors found that one category of technologies referred to as Shared Ledger Technology (SLT) offers a spectrum of benefits to the safeguards system. While further research is needed to validate assumptions and findings in the paper, preliminary analysis suggests that both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Member States can use SLT to promote efficient, effective, accurate, and timely reporting, and increase transparency in the safeguards system without sacrificing confidentiality of safeguards data. This increased transparency and involvement of Member States in certain safeguards transactions could lead to increased trust and cooperation among States and the public, which generates a number of benefits. This paper describes these benefits and the analytical framework for assessing SLT applications for specific safeguards problems. The paper will also describe other national security areas where SLT could provide benefits.
The RE Data Explorer, developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, is an innovative web-based analysis tool that utilizes geospatial and spatiotemporal renewable energy data to visualize, execute, and support analysis of renewable energy potential under various user-defined scenarios. This analysis can inform high-level prospecting, integrated planning, and policy making to enable low emission development.
Modern cyber security operations collect an enormous amount of logging and alerting data. While analysts have the ability to query and compute simple statistics and plots from their data, current analytical tools are too simple to admit deep understanding. To detect advanced and novel attacks, analysts turn to manual investigations. While commonplace, current investigations are time-consuming, intuition-based, and proving insufficient. Our hypothesis is that arming the analyst with easy-to-use data science tools will increase their work efficiency, provide them with the ability to resolve hypotheses with scientific inquiry of their data, and support their decisions with evidence over intuition. To this end, we present our work to build IDEAS (Interactive Data Exploration and Analysis System). We present three real-world use-cases that drive the system design from the algorithmic capabilities to the user interface. Finally, a modular and scalable software architecture is discussed along with plans for our pilot deployment with a security operation command.
(Abridged) The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) is an end-to-end science platform for the design, execution and scientific exploitation of spectroscopic surveys. It will unveil the composition and dynamics of the faint Universe and impact nearly every field of astrophysics across all spatial scales, from individual stars to the largest scale structures in the Universe. Major pillars in the science program for MSE include (i) the ultimate Gaia follow-up facility for understanding the chemistry and dynamics of the distant Milky Way, including the outer disk and faint stellar halo at high spectral resolution (ii) galaxy formation and evolution at cosmic noon, via the type of revolutionary surveys that have occurred in the nearby Universe, but now conducted at the peak of the star formation history of the Universe (iii) derivation of the mass of the neutrino and insights into inflationary physics through a cosmological redshift survey that probes a large volume of the Universe with a high galaxy density. MSE is positioned to become a critical hub in the emerging international network of front-line astronomical facilities, with scientific capabilities that naturally complement and extend the scientific power of Gaia, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the Square Kilometer Array, Euclid, WFIRST, the 30m telescopes and many more.
Over the course of this three-year grant, the Council on Competitiveness (Council) hosted six meetings of its Advanced Computing Roundtable made up of experts from a broad cross section of advanced computing users and manufacturers, and four Advanced Computing for Competitiveness Regional Forums to explore issues related to advanced computing in regions, states and localities. More than two hundred experts, stakeholders and policymakers from the federal and state levels participated in this work and provided their time and expertise to help define the opportunity in advanced computing and the barriers to it reaching its full potential as a game-changing competitive advantage for the United States economy and national security. Building on the insights of the Council’s Advanced Computing Roundtable and findings and recommendations from the four U.S. Department of Energy-supported Forums, the Council has identified several broad policy objectives for the United States related to advanced computing leadership and implementation. The United States must: Compete at the high end of advanced computing. Continue investing to be a technology leader as the world moves toward exascale computing, including in hardware, software and applications. America also must lead in strategic areas like extending Moore’s Law and quantum computing. Improve the ability of HPC-using firms to leverage advanced computing. The Council recommends steps to improve computational skills, increase industry partnerships with laboratories and academia, and expand and strengthen software partnerships. Regulatory agencies also should accelerate efforts to use modeling and simulation within the regulatory process. Expand the number of HPC-using companies in America. Too few firms are able to leverage advanced computing to innovate and compete. Federal, state and local economic development efforts should be utilized to lower barriers and teach small and medium-sized firms, particularly manufacturers, to use advanced modeling, simulation and analytics. Coordinate federal action. Federal agencies should continue to act in a coordinated fashion on advanced computing challenges through the Joint Program Office for Strategic Computing. Leverage HPC to compete in strategic technologies and applications. Leadership in advanced computing is tightly linked to leadership in artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, cybersecurity, additive manufacturing and other emerging technologies. Public and private sector leaders should collaborate on research and partnership efforts that ensure world-class computing environments for strategic technology leadership.
We discuss how astrophysical observations with the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE), a high-multiplexity (about 4300 fibers), wide field-of-view (1.5 square degree), large telescope aperture (11.25 m) facility, can probe the particle nature of dark matter. MSE will conduct a suite of surveys that will provide critical input for determinations of the mass function, phase-space distribution, and internal density profiles of dark matter halos across all mass scales. N-body and hydrodynamical simulations of cold, warm, fuzzy and self-interacting dark matter suggest that non-trivial dynamics in the dark sector could have left an imprint on structure formation. Analysed within these frameworks, the extensive and unprecedented datasets produced by MSE will be used to search for deviations away from cold and collisionless dark matter model. MSE will provide an improved estimate of the local density of dark matter, critical for direct detection experiments, and will improve estimates of the J-factor for indirect searches through self-annihilation or decay into Standard Model particles. MSE will determine the impact of low mass substructures on the dynamics of Milky Way stellar streams in velocity space, and will allow for estimates of the density profiles of the dark matter halos of Milky Way dwarf galaxies using more than an order of magnitude more tracers. In the low redshift Universe, MSE will provide critical redshifts to pin down the luminosity functions of vast numbers of satellite systems, and MSE will be an essential component of future strong lensing measurements to constrain the halo mass function. Across nearly all mass scales, the improvements offered by MSE, in comparison to other facilities, are such that the relevant analyses are limited by systematics rather than statistics.
Cellulose is the most abundant biopolymer on the planet, with significant potential as a feedstock for bioderived products. In nature, fungi and bacteria secrete cellulases to hydrolyze cellulose into smaller carbohydrates for incorporation into their own metabolic processes. For effective biomass utilization at industrial scale, these cellulases are coupled together to produce a clean sugar stream. One such cellulase is Cel7A from Trichoderma reesei, which is used extensively in biotechnological applications. However, dissociation of Cel7A from a bound cellulose strand is rate-limiting, reducing catalytic efficiency and yields within industrial applications. To explore this unknown dissociation mechanism and devise potential enzyme engineering strategies to mitigate slow dissociation, we conduct Hamiltonian replica exchange molecular dynamics simulations. Two postulated dissociation mechanisms were tested ('dethreading' of the bound cellulose strand from the binding tunnel and 'clamshell'-like opening of the binding tunnel and recrystallization of the bound cellulose). For each mechanism, free energy profiles were determined together with estimated diffusion coefficients. The kinetics for both mechanisms were then estimated and compared against experimentally measured dissociation rates, which suggest that the dethreading mechanism ought to be preferred. These findings are further supported by dissociation rates measured on engineered mutants incapable of undergoing the clamshell mechanism.
The NETL Grid Mix Explorer allows users to browse regional electricity grid mixes and resulting generation and consumption life cycle inventory and impact data, as well as configure customized mixes of technologies and results. Data is aggregated to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Market Regions (10) or Balancing Authority Area (BA) region (68). This generation mix represents the amount of electricity produced by each power plant type in that region. Note that this can be different than the mix that the region actually uses for electricity (consumption mix). The consumption mix includes the net imports from the various BAs into the selected region. Finally, the tool provides a comparison of the generation and consumption mixes of each of the subregions. As noted above, there can be a significant differences between the two, and the consumption mix is a more accurate reflection of the electricity actually being consumed in an area.
In this chapter, we explore the mechanisms driving efficient thermochemical deconstruction and fractionation of lignocellulosic biomass in cosolvent mixtures for the production of biofuels and bioproducts. New approaches that combine molecular dynamics simulations with experimental characterization highlight the important role of cosolvents and their influence on molecular processes relevant to overcoming the natural recalcitrance of lignocellulose. From localized phase behavior on cellulose fibers to changes in lignin conformation, insights into cosolvent effects on biomass deconstruction involve understanding complex interactions between the solvent–solvent, solvent–substrate, and solvent–catalyst. Recently coordinated research efforts at multiple scales using computational tools, nano-scale imaging, and kinetic models have significantly advanced identification of high-performance cosolvents, shedding light on the mechanisms behind solvent-biomass interactions. Specifically, multifunctional cosolvents have been employed in leading biomass “solvolysis” technologies that favorably coordinate with dilute acids to solubilize and depolymerize all three primary biomass fractions of biomass: cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. As a result, recent work in studying solvent effects of multifunctional cosolvents has led to a paradigm shift toward the use of first principles to design biomass deconstruction techniques with the aim of maximizing total carbon utilization in biomass. The synergistic pairing of cosolvents with biomass deconstruction will lead scientists and engineers to overcome key technical and economic barriers of biomass processing, enabling a successful transition of the current energy landscape toward a future bioeconomy based on biomass as an alternative to petroleum.
The 2013 – 2019 United States (U.S.)-United Kingdom (U.K.) PMAC project explored technological and procedural options to maximize Host and Inspector confidence for boundary control in a hypothetical arms control treaty.
Abstract: The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program has the primary mission of sustaining operation of the existing commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs) through a multi-pathway approach in conducting research and development (R&D). In this effort, the role of human factors engineering (HFE) has been an integral in ensuring new digital upgrades that are part of the overall main control room modernization strategy for various U.S. NPPs optimize human-system performance and do not introduce new human failure modes. In this process, testing and evaluation of concept (i.e., prototype) human machine interfaces (HMIs) are done in operator-in-the-loop studies at various stages of the HFE modification process, such as during design and verification and validation (V&V) [1]. During these studies, licensed operators go through select scenarios using a testbed, such as a full-scale simulator or at a NPP’s training simulator, to identify potential usability issues and provide general design feedback regarding the new digital HMIs. Human-system performance is measured and evaluated through a range of objective and self-report measures that capture aspects of plant performance, task performance, workload, situation awareness, and anthropometric and ergonomic concerns [2]. The use of post-scenario questionnaires is an acceptable method for gathering measures of workload and situation awareness. To this end, the NASA-Task Load Index (TLX) [e.g., 3, 4, & 5] and Situation Awareness Rating Technique (SART) [e.g., 6 & 7] are common standardized questionnaires used for evaluating workload and situation awareness, respectively. When combined, these questionnaires consist of a total of 15 questions, each using a different rating scale. Debriefs are also done through interviews with operators to gather design insight after each scenario. Since operator- and training simulator-time is limited, a concern during this post-scenario period of operator-in-the-loop studies is the limited time available to run scenarios, administer post-scenario questionnaires, and debrief within the allotted simulator time. To address this potential problem, this paper explores the psychometric characteristics of NASA-TLX, SART, and a common one-question post-scenario usability questionnaire (i.e., the single ease question – SEQ [8]) in effort to inform future development of a condensed questionnaire that captures aspects of workload and situation awareness. This exploratory work uses data from four different operator-in-the-loop studies completed under prior LWRS operator-in-the-loop studies. Findings from this paper should support future development of a consolidated questionnaire that may be used in operator-in-the-loop studies, when time is compressed, that conforms to the HFE scientific and regulatory requirements set for NPP control room modernization.
This presentation, part of the JISEA 10th Annual (Virtual) Meeting, explores the next generation of low-carbon technologies for deployment on contaminated lands.
In recent years, solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have popped up on bodies of water in more than a dozen countries around the world. Although U.S. adoption of floating solar PV, or “floatovoltaics,” has been limited, reservoir operations, water treatment facilities, residential communities, and other institutions are increasingly exploring the potential benefits of siting PV systems on man-made bodies of water. Along with helping reduce evaporation rates and algae growth, water-based siting of solar PV can lower system operating temperatures and reduce the costs of solar energy generation. In this video, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researcher Alex Aznar highlights NREL’s ground-breaking assessment of floating solar PV’s potential to contribute significantly to the U.S. electric sector of the future.