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DOE OSTI2021

Cyclic bend over sheave performance of a steel tension member belt for wave energy conversion

Rotary power take-offs (PTOs) promise many benefits for commercial wave energy converters (WECs), including longer power strokes/reduced end-stop concerns, deployment advantages, and controllability. However, these winch-type PTOs can impose millions of bending cycles on the belt or rope element every year, which may lead to a failure mode known as Cyclic Bend Over Sheave, or “CBOS”. Synthetic rope, though attractive due to its high strength, low elongation, and durability, suffers from comparatively poor CBOS performance and struggles to reach a million load cycles without failing. Using belts instead of ropes for winching elements should improve CBOS performance due to having a smaller thickness that undergoes bending. Unfortunately, belts have their own host of problems. Maintaining even tension across the width of a belt subject to twist or fleet angles is a challenge, especially for WECs which can move in all 6 degrees of freedom in the ocean. This study sought to quantify the CBOS performance of a belt constructed of steel tension members in a polyurethane matrix containing longitudinal profiles. Belt samples were tested to failure or up to two million bend-unbend cycles and subject to a range of fleet angles. This paper summarizes the utilized testing methodology and the resulting belt performance.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗

DOE OSTI2023

Representing the Future Role of Hydropower and Pumped Storage Hydropower (PSH) in Electricity Planning Tools

Existing tools for long-term electric sector planning struggle to represent hydropower's nuanced site-specific technical and operating characteristics, which depend on technical specifications as well as water management practices and regulations. As a result, long-term planning models and tools insufficiently characterize hydropower value and incentives, and they cannot fully represent the role hydropower can play in a future electricity system that could include a high penetration of variable wind and solar generation, battery storage, and other low-carbon technologies. This presentation demonstrates the culmination of a multi-year effort to enhance hydropower representations in electricity planning models at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), as part of the U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE) HydroWIRES Initiative. New modeling techniques are demonstrated using the NREL Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS), an open-access electric sector capacity expansion model used extensively in a wide range of technology deployment and integration analysis, including the 2016 USDOE Hydropower Vision. ReEDS uses a least-cost optimization approach to understand investment and operation of electricity generation, storage, and transmission technologies under future scenarios of electricity technology innovation, demand, policy, and other sectoral drivers. ReEDS was modified to better represent value and opportunities for both pumped storage hydropower (PSH) and hydropower systems without pumping. We incorporated a new national closed-loop PSH resource and cost assessment to explore new PSH deployment opportunities and added plant-level data to better represent the existing PSH fleet. New upgrade pathways enable opportunities for enhanced hydropower flexibility by adding pumps, upgrading dispatchability, increasing capacity, or increasing energy availability. The model was also modified to better represent the value of long-duration energy storage beyond diurnal time scales, allowing both hydropower and PSH to better balance energy supply and demand variations in high-renewable systems. These new features are demonstrated under reference and high-renewable futures and a range of sensitivity scenarios to understand which hydropower and PSH deployment and upgrade opportunities are the most attractive. These scenarios indicate potential for new closed-loop PSH deployment and for hydropower flexibility improvements to have important impacts on long-term electricity system emissions and economic outcomes. Increasing flexibility of the existing hydropower fleet can reduce the need to invest in new flexible grid technologies and help achieve decarbonization goals. Systems with sufficient energy storage could also be valuable for balancing seasonal differences in renewable energy availability, particularly from solar energy. The methods developed for ReEDS and subsequent scenario results reveal important considerations for future hydropower and grid system planning, and all data and code is freely available in a public code repository for use throughout the hydropower industry.

capacity expansion↗

DOE OSTI2023

Spatio-Temporal Denoising Graph Autoencoders with Data Augmentation for Missing Photovoltaic Data Imputation

The integration of the global Photovoltaic (PV) market with real time data-loggers has enabled large scale PV data analytical pipelines for power forecasting and long-term reliability assessment of PV fleets. Nevertheless, the performance of PV data analysis heavily depends on the quality of PV timeseries data. This paper proposes a novel Spatio-Temporal Denoising Graph Autoencoder (STD-GAE) framework to impute missing PV Power Data. STDGAE exploits temporal correlation, spatial coherence, and value dependencies from domain knowledge to recover missing data. It is empowered by two modules. (1) To cope with sparse yet various scenarios of missing data, STD-GAE incorporates a domain-knowledge aware data augmentation module that creates plausible variations of missing data patterns. This generalizes STD-GAE to robust imputation over different seasons and environment. (2) STD-GAE nontrivially integrates spatiotemporal graph convolution layers (to recover local missing data by observed “neighboring” PV plants) and denoising autoencoder (to recover corrupted data from augmented counterpart) to improve the accuracy of imputation accuracy at PV fleet level. We have evaluated our proposed model on two realworld PV datasets. Experimental results show that STD-GAE can achieve a gain of 43.14% in imputation accuracy and remains less sensitive to missing rate, different seasons, and missing scenarios, compared with state-of-the-art data imputation methods such as MIDA and LRTC-TNN.

Fan, Yangxin↗

DOE OSTI2023

Spatio-temporal and weather characterization of road loads of electrified heavy-duty commercial vehicles across U.S. interstate roads

Adoption of battery electric vehicles (BEV) in heavy duty (HD) commercial freight transportation is difficult due to technological and economic hurdles. Beyond safety and compliance, fleet and operational logistics necessitate both high uptime and parity with diesel system productivity/Total Cost of Ownership to support widespread deployment of electric powertrains. However, relatively high energy storage costs, along with the higher weight of BEV systems, limit the viability of HD commercial freight transport to shorter-range applications where smaller batteries will serve for mission energy requirements (single operational shift). Knowing the energy consumption and operating variations of these commercial vehicle systems is crucial for effectively sizing the energy storage systems. This paper is the first in a series of studies to understand the regional specific operating design domain variations of commercial Class 8 HD trucks and the associated impact to their energy requirements. In particular, the local weather conditions are shown to influence the total vehicle energy usage. Further, the impact of temperature, pressure, and humidity changes are shown to impact the local air density. This is needed to calculate aerodynamic drag on vehicles and has been found to play a significant role in the overall performance of a vehicle. Although the methodology of calculating air density varies only slightly throughout the literature, the application to transportation has still been limited. This study provides a means by which air density can be estimated for the contiguous U.S. using the NOAA MADIS dataset. These air density estimates were then used to determine vehicle performance in varying regions of the country to highlight the importance of consideration of weather variables when monitoring vehicle performance, but also to provide recommendations based on these locales upon fleet conversion to BEVs.

Moore, Amy↗

DOE OSTI2023

Report on the Creation and Progress of the Hydrogen Regulatory Research Review Group

The current U.S. nuclear generation fleet is increasingly recognized by governmental, scientific, public policy, and industrial communities as having a strategic role in support of the ongoing national transition to a clean energy future. Federal incentives and actions are aligning to expand the role of nuclear power as a viable and more flexible contributor to the evolving national clean energy mix through programs and initiatives such as nuclear power loan guarantees; the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) clean nuclear electrical, steam, and hydrogen incentives; the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, also referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act or BIL); and near term Department of Energy (DOE) funding opportunities related to nuclear based hydrogen hubs and nuclear integrated hydrogen demonstration projects. . Additionally, leveraging clean nuclear electricity and steam is being explored by industries desiring to transition away from carbon-intensive energy sources. Even with all these emerging enablers, notable barriers remain for the widespread adoption of these opportunities within the U.S. nuclear fleet, including the following: • Assurance of the markets for alternate products needed to support decision-making for large capital modification investments • Electric utility mindset and business history centered solely on producing electricity • Design change complexity and regulatory uncertainty associated with plant modifications needed to support alternate product streams The DOE Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Flexible Plant Operations and Generation (FPOG) Pathway is developing options to help U.S. nuclear power plants (NPP) in all these areas to enable NPPs designed for steady baseload operation to integrate with intermittent wind and solar capacity to assure reliable clean energy for the nation. Current and near-term laboratory research is focusing on the technical, regulatory, safety, demonstration, and economic elements in support of improving nuclear plant flexibility through hybrid production of electricity and other non-electric products such as hydrogen and energy arbitrage.

42 ENGINEERING↗

DOE OSTI2023

De-Risking Large-Scale PV Systems Through Data Analytics

Large-scale photovoltaic system performance analysis is being conducted within the US Department of Energy's-sponsored PV Fleet Performance Data Initiative. This collaboration with commercial PV system owners collects and evaluates PV field performance data, and provides reports on aggregated results. Drawing on over 2200 sites across the US and over 24,000 separate PV inverters we have collected in excess of 8.3 gigawatts (GW) of performance data, representing 6-7% of the entire US installed PV capacity. A mixture of utility-scale and large commercial systems are represented, averaging 4.1 megawatts (MW) in size and 5 years in age. Initial results show average system degradation rates at -0.75% / year, which is slightly higher than historically reported module-level values of -0.5%/year. We also found that the availability of systems averaged 97.7%, which is lower than the typical 99% uptime assumed by many project economic forecasts. Given these results, we compared monthly performance with expected production values, based on satellite weather data and a simple PVWatts performance model. We found that systems were performing within 10% of monthly expectation over 90% of the time, with a fleet average vs expected monthly value of 0.994. We also evaluated the impact of extreme weather events on system performance, and found a range of short-term and longer-term performance effects ranging from grid outage, system downtime, module damage and accelerated long-term degradation rate.

analysis↗

DOE OSTI2023

Assessing the Potential for Improved Lubricants to Reduce Wind O&M Costs

Lubrication is a key aspect of maintaining a wind turbine in operational condition. In this study, we quantify the potential for increasing energy production and reducing maintenance costs across the current and future U.S. fleet of wind turbines as a result of improvements in lubrication performance. The modeled improvements reduce the median levelized cost of energy by 1-2% across the U.S. fleet. Extending the lubricant replacement interval has a larger impact on total cost and energy production than reducing lubricant cost.

ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION,↗

DOE OSTI2013

Savannah River Site Eastern Transportation Hub: A Concept For a DOE Eastern Packaging, Staging and Maintenance Center - 13143

The Department of Energy (DOE) is working to de-inventory sites and consolidate hazardous materials for processing and disposal. The DOE administers a wide range of certified shipping packages for the transport of hazardous materials to include Special Nuclear Material (SNM), radioactive materials, sealed sources and radioactive wastes. A critical element to successful and safe transportation of these materials is the availability of certified shipping packages. There are over seven thousand certified packagings (i.e., Type B/Type AF) utilized within the DOE for current missions. The synergistic effects of consolidated maintenance, refurbishment, testing, certification, and costing of these services would allow for efficient management of the packagings inventory and to support anticipated future in-commerce shipping needs. The Savannah River Site (SRS) receives and ships radioactive materials (including SNM) and waste on a regular basis for critical missions such as consolidated storage, stabilization, purification, or disposition using H-Canyon and HB-Line. The Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) has the technical capability and equipment for all aspects of packaging management. SRS has the only active material processing facility in the DOE complex and is one of the sites of choice for nuclear material consolidation. SRS is a logical location to perform maintenance and periodic testing of the DOE fleet of certified packagings. This initiative envisions a DOE Eastern Packaging Staging and Maintenance Center (PSMC) at the SRS and a western hub at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS), an active DOE Regional Disposal Site. The PSMC's would be the first place DOE would go to meet their radioactive packaging needs and the primary locations projects would go to disposition excess packaging for beneficial reuse. These two hubs would provide the centralized management of a packaging fleet rather than the current approach to design, procure, maintain and dispose of packagings on a project-by-project basis. This initiative provides significant savings in packaging costs and acceleration of project schedules. In addition to certified packaging, the PSMC would be well suited for select designs of 7A Type A packaging and Industrial Packaging. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

DOE OSTI2013

Evaluation of fuel cycle scenarios on MOX fuel recycling in PWRs and SFRs

Prospects on advanced fuel cycle scenario are considered for achieving a progressive integration of Sodium Fast Reactor (SFR) technology within the current French Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) nuclear fleet, in a view to benefit from fissile material multi-recycling capability. A step by step process is envisioned, and emphasis is put on its potential implementation through the nuclear mass inventory calculations with the COSAC code. The overall time scale is not optimized. The first step, already implemented in several countries, the plutonium coming from the reprocessing of used Light Water Reactor (LWR) fuels is recycled into a small number of LWRs. The second step is the progressive introduction of the first SFRs, in parallel with the continuation of step 1. This second step lets to prepare the optimized multi recycling of MOX fuel which is considered in step 3. Step 3 is characterized by the introduction of a greater number of SFR and MOX management between EPR reactors and SFRs. In the final step 4, all the fleet is formed with SFRs. This study assesses the viability of each step of the overall scenario. The switch from one step to the other one could result from different constrains related to issues such as resources, waste, experience feedback, public acceptance, country policy, etc.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2013

An economic analysis of a light and heavy water moderated reactor synergy: burning americium using recycled uranium

An economic analysis is presented for a proposed synergistic system between 2 nuclear utilities, one operating light water reactors (LWR) and another running a fleet of heavy water moderated reactors (HWR). Americium is partitioned from LWR spent nuclear fuel (SNF) to be transmuted in HWRs, with a consequent averted disposal cost to the LWR operator. In return, reprocessed uranium (RU) is supplied to the HWRs in sufficient quantities to support their operation both as power generators and americium burners. Two simplifying assumptions have been made. First, the economic value of RU is a linear function of the cost of fresh natural uranium (NU), and secondly, plutonium recycling for a third utility running a mixed oxide (MOX) fuelled reactor fleet has been already taking place, so that the extra cost of americium recycling is manageable. We conclude that, in order for this scenario to be economically attractive to the LWR operator, the averted disposal cost due to partitioning americium from LWR spent fuel must exceed 214 dollars per kg, comparable to estimates of the permanent disposal cost of the high level waste (HLW) from reprocessing spent LWR fuel. (authors)

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2013

New developments and prospects on COSI, the simulation software for fuel cycle analysis

COSI, software developed by the Nuclear Energy Direction of the CEA, is a code simulating a pool of nuclear power plants with its associated fuel cycle facilities. This code has been designed to study various short, medium and long term options for the introduction of various types of nuclear reactors and for the use of associated nuclear materials. In the frame of the French Act for waste management, scenario studies are carried out with COSI, to compare different options of evolution of the French reactor fleet and options of partitioning and transmutation of plutonium and minor actinides. Those studies aim in particular at evaluating the sustainability of Sodium cooled Fast Reactors (SFR) deployment and the possibility to transmute minor actinides. The COSI6 version is a completely renewed software released in 2006. COSI6 is now coupled with the last version of CESAR (CESAR5.3 based on JEFF3.1.1 nuclear data) allowing the calculations on irradiated fuel with 200 fission products and 100 heavy nuclides. A new release is planned in 2013, including in particular the coupling with a recommended database of reactors. An exercise of validation of COSI6, carried out on the French PWR historic nuclear fleet, has been performed. During this exercise quantities like cumulative natural uranium consumption, or cumulative depleted uranium, or UOX/MOX spent fuel storage, or stocks of reprocessed uranium, or plutonium content in fresh MOX fuel, or the annual production of high level waste, have been computed by COSI6 and compared to industrial data. The results have allowed us to validate the essential phases of the fuel cycle computation, and reinforces the credibility of the results provided by the code.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2016

GNF fuel and channel performance: 2016 update

GNF2 is an advanced 10*10 BWR fuel design that was initially introduced in reload quantities in 2008. It has now replaced GE14 as the fuel design with the largest number of bundles in the operating fleet. Utilities are reaping the benefits of improved nuclear and thermal performance as well as high reliability. Transition to GNF2 fuel in the fleet is nearly complete with only three plants continuing to receive GE14 fuel in 2016. GNF2 reload bundles are now being discharged, and inspections have been completed on GNF2 bundles operated to over 61 GWd/MT and over 7.5 years. For both GE14 and GNF2, 2015 was a challenging year in terms of fuel reliability, with an increase in debris-related failures. The failures are concentrated in pumped-forward drain plants (that have long showed increased susceptibility to debris issues), plants with histories of recurrent debris failures, and in some cases in plants that had component failures or unusual or extensive maintenance or modifications. There have been no failures from causes other than debris. In GNF2, there are no failures due to manufacturing, PCI-type, dryout, or any form related to crud or corrosion. Operating experience in 2015 (and over the past decade) is discussed in terms of Failed Fuel Management, or operation with fuel failures in the core, and channel - control blade interference. (authors)

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗

DOE OSTI2017

Cybersecurity Vulnerability Assessment Methodologies for Nuclear Power Plants

As any mechanical system ages, broken or outdated parts must be replaced; nuclear power plants (NPPs) are no different. The average age of a NPP in the United States' aging fleet of commercial reactors is 35 years, with many of these plants operating under extensions of their original licenses. These plants, originally designed in the 1960's and 1970's, are controlled by analog instrumentation and control (I and C) systems, and have since been upgraded (to varying degrees) to hybrid analog-digital systems. As these NPPs are upgraded to continue operating and to meet more stringent safety requirements imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the implementation of digital systems to monitor and run the power plant introduces new vulnerabilities that must be addressed. The main objectives of a vulnerability assessment (VA) are to identify, quantify, and prioritize all of the susceptibilities inherent in a system. This allows for all weaknesses to be analyzed, and for the most serious concerns to be addressed first. Traditional VA methodologies deal with the analysis of physical systems associated with the NPP; with the introduction of digital control systems and computer networks, these methodologies must be expanded to include these fundamentally different systems and vulnerability concerns. Digital systems have been used in NPPs since the 1980's, but only for non-safety control systems; attacks on these systems were not deemed consequential, and no dedicated VA methodology was required. However, 'all new NPPs are being designed with integrated digital instrumentation and control systems as the backbone of protection, controls, alarms, and display and monitoring'. This gives rise to new vulnerabilities such as disrupted data displays, the suppression of critical alarms, or unauthorized access to secure systems from connected networks. The NRC released formal cybersecurity regulations in March 2009 (10 CFR 73.54), as well as a guide for the program in January 2010 (RG 5.71). However, the regulations and guide provide limited insight on how to identify these vulnerabilities; the focus is on remediating them once found. Hence, there is a need for a comprehensive, systematic methodology to conduct a VA on digital computer and communications and network systems. In this paper, we review traditional VA methodologies and discuss relevant cases. Then we discuss challenges to vulnerabilities within the context of modernization of the fleet and what needs to be done to address this issue.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

DOE OSTI2023

DEMONSTRATION OF A MULTI-STAGE TESTING AND EVALUATION APPROACH FOR A SAFETY-RELATED DIGITAL UPGRADE AT A NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

There is an imminent need for existing United States nuclear power plants to reduce their operating and maintenance costs to remain economically viable. Digital technology provides significant opportunity for the existing nuclear power plant fleet to transform that way in which work is accomplished to reduce costs and allow the fleet to remain economically competitive. However, a careful understanding of the human-technology integration is needed to ensure the continued safe and reliable operation of these existing plants with new digital capabilities. This work presents interim findings in applying human factors engineering to a safety-significant digital upgrade for a United States nuclear power plant, following the new Alternative Review Process in the recently revised Digital Instrumentation and Control Interim Staff Guidance Licensing Process, Revision 2. The interim results described in this work provides an industry perspective, based on ongoing work, to recent work published from Vazquez, Green, and Desaulniers (2022).

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2024

Sustainable Public Transport: Providing Responsive, On-Demand Service with Clean Energy

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) uses the Mobility Energy Productivity (MEP) as a metric and a lens to guide applied research into high performance public mobility. In the current initiative to abate global warming, the US needs not only zero-emission vehicles in the transit fleet (such as buses and shuttles) but also time- and cost-effective services to connect people with goods, services and employment toward a high-quality of life. Our current transportation system is overly dependent on personally-owned automobiles for high quality mobility, with public modes being less viable in many areas. Simply electrifying the drivetrains of existing public transit modes will fail to improve the quality of mobility for those that do not have access to private automobiles. The slow rebound by transit from the pandemic reveals the need to reinvent public transit service. Using the MEP lens, NREL researchers have tracked various novel developments in the public mobility space, with the confluence of shared, on-demand transit (ODT) services using light duty vehicles emerging as a key enabler of high-efficiency public mobility. Deployments such as those in Arlington, TX, Dallas, TX, Fort Erie, ON, and Innisfil, ON showcase the use of fleets of light-duty vehicles as the basis for community circulation and first/last mile to intra-regional transit. ODT services have demonstrated improvements in being more time efficient for riders, more energy efficient in operation (even before the introduction of fully electric vehicles), as well as being cost effective. It appears that aspects of the long-awaited promise of Personal Rapid Transit from the 1970s are beginning to be realized through ODT deployments, leveraging transportation network company (TNC) logistics, popularized by Uber and Lyft, but applied to public mobility. Currently, manually driven ODT operations are already cost competitive with traditional transit systems on a cost per ride basis, and full automation promises to reduce costs by 50% while providing additional safety and verified customer service. Connecting these ODT systems with efficient and effective intra-regional backbone transit service is the next step, with transit agencies like DART providing early results. This discussion will walk through the evidence for this postulated outcome and show results from a series of case-studies.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗

DOE OSTI2024

Quantifying Error in Photovoltaic Installation Metadata: Preprint

In this research, we quantify the level of metadata error for a fleet of 2860 photovoltaic (PV) systems, using metadata values provided by fleet owners. Using satellite imagery and time series analysis techniques available in open-source Python packages Panel-Segmentation and PVAnalytics, respectively, we evaluate the accuracy of PV system metadata such as location, azimuth, tilt, and mounting configuration (fixed tilt vs. tracking). We find that approximately 75% of provided latitude-longitude coordinates are within 190 meters of the actual solar installation. We were unable to link 7.8% of latitude-longitude coordinates to any solar installation via satellite imagery analysis. We evaluate the level of error in owner-provided mounting configuration (fixed tilt vs. single-axis tracking), finding only 8 systems with an incorrect mounting configuration. When evaluating azimuth and tilt parameters, we find that approximately 64% of the data is correct, with data for 860 systems (approximately 30%) not provided by system owners. To illustrate the importance of having correct solar metadata, we evaluate how incorrect metadata affects solar performance estimates by modeling system AC energy output at ground-truth vs. incorrect latitude-longitude coordinates, mounting configurations, and azimuth-tilt configurations. Energy output estimates can vary significantly if incorrect metadata parameters are used, with incorrect mounting configuration leading to the largest discrepancy with over 20% variation in expected energy output.

azimuth↗

DOE OSTI2024

Safe Operations at Roadway Junctions: Intelligent Roadway Infrastructure as Functional Interlocking

Automated vehicle (AV) technology is quickly maturing, and the corresponding infrastructure systems that evaluate traffic and communicate to vehicles requires sophisticated sensing and perception technologies, referred to as intelligent roadway infrastructure (IRI), to complement emerging AV capabilities. IRI provides signals to vehicles, indicating right-of-way for vehicles and communicating to approaching AVs that no other vehicle is failing to yield. This capability, denoted as safety-affirmative signaling, provides a green light or a green arrow as appropriate and affirms through communication links to connected vehicles when it is safe to proceed. About 36% of collisions occur at intersections, with most occurring upon left turns (22.2%) or crossing over (12.6%), and only a small percentage (1.2%) while turning right at an intersection. Of all intersection crashes about half (52.5%) of those vehicles were traveling through a signalized intersection 2. Safety-affirmative signaling would guarantee safety of AV fleet vehicles, by providing the interlocking principle, a term from automated train control that only allows progression through a railway intersection after affirming no opportunity for a crash exists. IRI through safety-affirmative signaling would bring performance and safety to complex roadway intersections where AV transit fleet service is most needed, as well as safety benefits to traditional, non-automated vehicles and vulnerable road users. The implementation of IRI has functional, programmatic, and technical challenges. Research work performed at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in an integrative approach encapsulating these themes, and termed infrastructure perception and control (IPC) is motivated by improved performance (travel time), improved safety (reduced collisions), and improved energy efficiency (less fuel burned and minimized production of greenhouse gases). IPC is intended not only for roadway and intersection applications but also in extension to inform complementary buildings and grid systems to enable better co-management, as vehicles and their charging needs become increasingly integrated into the built environment. The NREL IPC project presents an open-source framework, architecture, and supporting technology to implement IRI, addressing critical issues such as fusion of data, reliability, standardization of data interfaces, and confidence of detection. The framework is informed by previous experience in U.S. Department of Defense research technology, specifically in the use of radar to detect, identify, and track aerial threats. These principles combined with multi-sensor fusion provides for a complete digital twin with known and measurable confidence and accuracy from which safety-affirmative signaling can be developed and deployed.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,MATHEMATICS AND COMPUT↗

DOE OSTI2024

Assessment of Cloud-based Applications for Enabling a Scalable Riskinformed Predictive Maintenance Strategy

The current light-water reactor fleet uses time-based maintenance strategies to achieve high-capacity factors. But to make nuclear more competitive in the energy market, these reactors could utilize emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing technologies to achieve a cost-effective, predictive-maintenance strategy. This paper presents discussion and results on the application of cloud computing in the nuclear industry. The technical viability of cloud computing was analyzed using data from a boiling-water reactor’s safety relief valve. The models were hosted on three different systems: a local personal computer, Idaho National Laboratory’s high-performance computer system, and Microsoft Azure. The data were loaded and processed, and two types of models were trained in an A/B fashion. Based on the speed at which these actions were completed, it was determined that cloud computing affords adequate computing resources. Additionally, the computing power can scale with the demanded load. To enable cloud computing in the existing fleet, additional sensors, networks, and other requirements must be implemented to ensure a smooth transition from current maintenance strategies. However, the benefit is that the plants no longer need to manage their own servers, software, cybersecurity, and information technology support staff for in-house data analytics purpose. Many of these features can be offloaded to the cloud provider for a potential cost savings. Demonstrating how AI can improve the maintenance and operation of non-safety-related systems seems the likely path forward for implementing AI and cloud computing resources inside nuclear power plants.

azure↗